It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Super Cloud

Tuesday is podcast day here at TeleGeography. This time, we welcome William Collins, the Principal Cloud Architect at Alkira.

If the subject of this blog didn't totally give it away, today's episode is focused on the cloud. I asked William to talk us through the history of enterprise cloud and highlight a few of the more significant issues in enterprise cloud networking today. His answers might surprise you.

What I like so much about this conversation is that William has an interesting perspective coming from the enterprise side. (He even takes some time to tell us about Alkira and why he thinks it is the greatest company on the planet.) 

We get into his take on the history of enterprise cloud development and its impact on the network team. We also spend some time on the challenges and solutions related to multi-cloud.

And there is truth in advertising here. We even talk about supercloud—what it is and what the implications are. Grab your super suit and punch the play button below to hear the full discussion.

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Key Takeaways

The Evolution of Enterprise IT from Physical to Cloud

The conversation highlights a significant evolution in how enterprises manage their IT infrastructure, moving from exclusively physical data centers. This transition began with virtualization, which allowed for more efficient use of existing infrastructure.

The next major shift was to cloud, with enterprises now pursuing cloud migrations, digital transformation, and even data center exit strategies. This move, however, is complex; migrating diverse applications often requires profiling each one and making business decisions about whether to perform a simple "lift and shift," and "replatform" parts of the application, or completely "rearchitect" it, as the cost can sometimes outweigh the potential savings.

Multicloud is a Complex Reality Leading to the Concept of Supercloud

Almost all large multinational enterprises are using more than one infrastructure as a service partner, making multicloud a widespread fact, often happening organically through acquisitions rather than a planned strategy.

This presents challenges, as each cloud provider has different technical constructs and requires distinct skills for networking, security, and other functions. Managing this complexity traditionally meant hiring skilled individuals across all these distinct areas or piecing together various products.

The concept of "Supercloud" is introduced as a proactive strategy and an additional abstraction layer that sits atop all these distinct areas to provide a consistent, operationally sound experience.