I was at GoogleNext London in Nov. 2019.
And frankly I only wonder where they were all those years in Switzerland?

I met with many companies lately around Cloud Computing and it is interesting to witness that the path to cloud is a struggle for any company.

First there is Trust. Who can we trust… because it is clear that moving the most important data somewhere else than at home makes everyone feels bad. But putting all the financial assets into third party structure called banks or insurances is completely accepted nowadays.
Navigating the data categorization (confidentiality, value), the compliance (GDPR, Cloud Act, National laws), the cost, the complexity of a multi-cloud environment, etc.

And when you ask why did you chose AWS, Azure, Google? The answer is quite systematically: a) we had to go fast b) the local contact was present and performant.
No particular or specific assessment. And this is perhaps because they are all quite near to each other.
In a presentation, I learned that:

AWS = Lego
AZURE = Duplo and
Google = Knex :)))

I like the analogy.

Now of course, how do you go beyond this? There is a need for:
– Having a road map (Data, compliance, etc…)
– Trying

And then: revisit the way services are built and managed. How teams are working together? Do you DevOps or not? One point is clear, it won’t be possible to build all the public clouds services into the company’s private cloud. Why not continuing doing what is done in an excellent manner on-prem and use the public clouds for other services that are not available on the private cloud? And when you have a multi-cloud environment, thee is a need to optimize cross platform… avoid lock-in (Excellent Article about Lock-in here).

And Trust then? It cannot be declared, it has to be earned…
Google’s Anthos selling point here is interesting: The data belongs to the cloud. (Meaning that apparently no one can access data if not validated by the client…).

Oh and remember this post declaring the end of the cloud era!