> Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter.

No, established enterprises (both private and government) are, in the real world, important customers for cloud offerings like Azure, GCP, and AWS.

During a AWS demonstration at work. The Amazon guy specifically mentioned, AWS is a more lucrative option for large companies than small ones, simply because it was an easy one time way of culling large teams in big companies who were adding very little to nothing in return in value.

Hmm, not convinced about that.

My Boss is smart and he'd wonder what the business plan would be should say 5 years down the line you want to move away from the cloud for some reason.

You threw away decades of accumulated knowledge about the company and it's systems to save some money upfront.

He thinks on a longer scope than most bosses I've known though (largely because his family own the group so he doesn't have to answer to shareholders).

But if your business is to produce, say, cars, why would you want to maintain this knowledge in house. You certainly want to understand your systems, but do you really want to deal with physical datacentres, updating the underlying OS, replacing drives, etc. You kind of want it outsourced to specialists.

Yeah, that ought to be a great sales line.

I'd be wary about how the real world actually deals with that, but there is no lack of large companies jumping on short term costs cuts without looking at the risks.

From the point of view of upper management in a large enterprise, paying a third party with whom they have an SLA and someone to sue for infrastructure which may go down vs. paying their own staff to build and maintain the infrastructure that may go down often either isn't a difference in risk or, actually, the former seems to be better-managed risk. It's the same reason they often prefer to buy support contracts even for OSS rather than supporting it internally. Part of the analysis that probably gets overlooked from the outside is that employees aren't just a predictable cost they also are a risk.

> isn't a difference in risk

Really? People incentivised into looking for your best interests vs. a managed organization incentivised into dissolving your contract and gaining on average. I can't imagine anything that could create more different risks.

What people seem to do all the time is looking at an SLA and believing the real world must behave the way things are on paper; because there's a signature there. People do this even after being recently burned by the same partner. Some people have the same trust for in house staff, but the usual on high management is to have the exact opposite bias.

With the developed world being increasingly dependent on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, the next big fuck up is going to be interesting. We have seen multiple datacentres from the same cloud provider going offline simultaneously in the past. And it is safe to assume that hostile foreign state actors took notice of this critical dependency. Whether it is because of malice or mistakes, I can’t help thinking that this massive concentration is like a snowball increasing in size while it’s going down the slope.

Indeed. If/When another major conflict comes to the developed world, you better believe major cloud DCs will be pretty high up on the cyber and (if it comes to it) kinetic target lists. Never have so few facilities been relied upon for so much by so many.

It seems like my comment is being evaluated without proper context. Sure, some companies are moving some of their data into someone else's datacenter. Is that 50% of companies? Are they moving their core business data? Like when there's a network outage, they can't do business? When there's a partial data loss, they close their doors?

When we're talking about an entire ecosystem going away, the new one has to have almost 100% adoption. Windows desktop is going to exist for a really long time, especially when everyone else is giving up on desktops.

Those 2 statements are completely different issues.

And yes, companies are entirely moving their systems and data. Salesforce runs their sales team. Oracle and SAP runs their ERP and finance. And now AWS/Azure runs their IT infrastructure. They use email from Google or Microsoft, along with hundreds of other SaaS products used day to day by employees. New startups are even more invested and start using other vendors for every non-core activity from day one. This is what a strong global business ecosystem enables and is a massive advantage for everyone.

You have entirely missed the last 2 decades of this happening and at a rapidly accelerating pace. I'm not sure what you think "business critical functions" are but every company outsources at least some important components that could easily put them out of business if something goes wrong, whether that's cloud servers or payroll or manufacturing supply chains, etc. It's called risk analysis and yield management and is well understood by every successful team.

When it comes to "someone else's datacenter", I think you'd be surprised at just how few companies even own a datacenter, let alone their own racks. Even the major clouds lease their own space from actual datacenter builders and operators.

>Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter

You are incredibly unbelievably wrong here. I work for a vendor known for incredibly high prices and have knowledge of basically the entire infrastructure of every one of my clients, and nearly all of them have a massive cloud strategy that's in-place right now. I even have clients shipping their security and compliance logs to the cloud, or sending them from cloud to cloud.

Actually the more medium-sized businesses are the ones most hesitant to move to the cloud, because of the lack of cloud expertise on their teams. But even then... it's still a huge strategy. They're all consolidating physical datacenters and using Amazon or Azure or Google.

On the topic of cloud strategies and infrastructure, what are your thoughts on the Mulesoft acquisition? Does this foray into infrastructure software really make it that much easier for CRM to sell the rest of their SaaS stuff? Obviously a lot of CRM and potential CRM customers have hybrid models today, does this really help them dive two feet in with Salesforce for their pending 'digital transformation'?

Also, I don't want to get off topic but how does SIEM space fit into the infrastructure stack you see in the future? In security, what about the firewall vendors trying to become the central hub for managing the new security needs brought about by the cloud (CASB, endpoint, virtual firewalls, etc?). What about SaaS only Iidentity & access management solutions like OKta?--I hear they are a game changer, but is a cloud-only solution really the best positioned seller for something like this, especially considering the hybrid structure of most large orgs today (on-prem & off-prem/public cloud)?

I can’t talk too much about Salesforce and Mulesoft since I’ve never used them and don’t have many clients asking me about them.

When it comes to next-gen security appliances, I see them enhancing the SIEM, but not replacing it. Too many regulations require centralized log management, and organizations depend on a central alerting and monitoring platform. I do see these security platforms making the SIEM cheaper and dumber, though. Whether it’s a storage-based pricing like Splunk or an event Rate pricing like QRadar, licensing costs a lot. Which means it costs a lot to feed a bunch of dumb logs into a system that makes information out of dumb logs. As long as you already have a Palo Alto, you might as well feed the IDPS logs into your SIEM and forget the rest: it’s fewer logs, cheaper licensing, and less hardware needed on the SIEM. You already have the Palo doing the intelligence.

With regards to hybrid clouds that are popular today, you see a lot of SIEMs go to the cloud. You can ship logs cloud-to-cloud, which saves bandwidth backhauling it to the enterprise. It is a challenge for security logging to get data from there though. Oftentimes it costs extra to send logs, or can’t be done at all. Amazon wants you to use Cloudwatch. Microsoft wants you to use Security Center. It’s a pain to centralize it all. That’s going to have to change.

Thanks. Interesting....

To your last point: sounds like it should change, but not that it necessarily will. I can’t fathom the cloud providers would allow an independent third party come in and take this business from them, despite how much easier it would be for the customer.

I thought splunk was usage based pricing, not storage based? But yes, I have heard similar things on how quickly it can get expensive, sometimes without any warning when they get a bill 10x what they expected...

Thanks for your time.

I suppose time will tell... Many companies will never do this.

they can still take advantage of existing cloud technologies running on their own servers.

And guess what, the CTO and CFO and COO will very much care about licensing cost of each CPU running windows or sql server, vs FREE on Linux.

You're thinking about your own app servers. No one cares about the cost of Windows when you're running someone else's proprietary desktop software on it.

> No one cares about the cost of Windows when you're running someone else's proprietary desktop software on it

This is a small and shrinking corner of the market. Valuable. But still a corner.

It may be shrinking, but it isn't small.

> the CTO and CFO and COO will very much care about licensing cost of each CPU running windows or sql server, vs FREE on Linux

They haven't really up until now have they? MS licenses are not a big part of the IT budget compared to the people needed to run an in-house data center (typically staffed 24x7)

This is where Microsoft is going with Azure. Compared to other platforms, setting up a local instance of Azure is pretty painless and allows you to spin up resources locally that are identical to the Cloud.

Which is why Microsoft has on-prem and hybrid offerings for most of their products. Actually this is one place where they’re way ahead of AWS and GCE.

Same with SAP. They have a cloud offering (Hana Enterprise Cloud) which can connect to existing on-premise SAP deployments. That way, they can up-sell existing customers into the cloud and then slowly migrate them to even more subscriptions.

Disclaimer: I work at SAP, but not in the same division. And not in sales either, so take my word with a grain of salt. ;)

> Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter.

I guess the 5 years I spent at a massive tech company shutting down our datacenters didn't happen and all the recruiters offering me huge amounts of money to move their stuff into aws aren't real.

> Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter

[CITATION NEEDED]

This is very myopic. Establishes businesses are huge customers (both current customers and potential customers), for cloud providers.

"Established businesses aren't going to put their data in someone else's datacenter."

Established businesses do this all the time.