Ten Things I Learned About the Cloud from Cisco Live

When I think about my old days at school, I remember my enthusiasm of learning new “cool” things such as thermodynamics, electronics devices and circuits and digital signal processing. Then, during my first 2 years working as an engineer, it was awesome to learn about ATM, Frame Relay, ISDN and the evolution to ADSL. Four years of engineering and +10 years working don’t compare to what I’ve learned during this past 3 days at Cisco Live online #CLUS. I’ll focus on one topic: The Cloud.

It is not “The Cloud,” it is a multicloud world composed of many providers and vendors of multiple solutions to specific use cases. According to IDC 84% of organizations will use multiple clouds.

It is not only public cloud that you need. It’s a strategy that needs your top management teams setting business goals and cloud being one enabler. Again, according to IDC 73% of organizations have a hybrid cloud strategy.

It’s a trend that has been around for some time now. It faced skepticism first and now it’s evolving very quickly being one of the most important disruptors in the IT Industry. We are just at the beginning.

It’s a solution but also an evolution to your current and future IT and business needs.

It requires new skillsets beyond the ones mentioned above.

Requires cultural changes to support old and new applications working with IT staff and Devops engineers (the order of appearance is pure coincidence).

Requires security beyond what is known. HW, SW & human behavior.

It can jeopardize your most precious asset: Information.

It will provide you a mean for your organization success, regardless of your Industry.

Requires high automation, visibility and manageability in your own infrastructure regardless of “The Cloud.”

These are my initial thoughts after watching some sessions at Cisco Live and taking some insights from a poll on Twitter.

It is not “The Cloud.” You need a holistic approach. If you want to learn more about how Cisco can help you in your journey, go here.