On Day Two of CloudEXPO, attendees gathered at the Santa Clara Convention Center to listen and engage during breakout sessions and on the exhibition floor. Overall, Tuesday’s sessions appear to offer guidance on a basic—but crucial—IT question for enterprise organizations: How does a business know what the right decisions, methods, and processes are when it comes to technology? The answers came from each speaker’s own insights, real-world examples, and a trusted methods for any stage of an IT journey.
Start with Your Best Use Case Scenario
Many experts will tell you that the first step to evolution is assessing your options and deciding which path to take. But how do you make such a crucial decision? Today’s speakers echoed a common theme: Evolutionary leaps in IT infrastructure—especially from physical machines to serverless systems—are made to increase productivity. However, to find the best solution, simply weighing the pros and cons is not enough research to provide adequate direction for a decision.
During his session, “Should You Go ‘Serverless’? The Pros and Cons,” speaker Amitabh Srivastava emphasized the benefits of studying real-world use cases as an ideal way for companies to understand how certain solutions can work for their unique needs. To do this, you must first identify the IT requirements necessary for core business functions, then begin researching solutions that meet those needs. By adding use case evaluations to your research, you can begin to discover more out-of-box solutions for other components of your IT needs, giving you greater ROI and higher efficiency once the tools are implemented. Use cases can provide more efficient and specific ways to reach business goals from the beginning, rather than basing decisions off general pros and cons. Asked directly what his own criteria is to make technology decisions, Srivastava stressed that it still depends on finding an aligned use case for each situation.
Follow the Use Case Map for a Smoother Migration
Once you’ve decided on a path, you must continue making evaluations to ensure a successful migration. With so many options on how to move—and so many ways a move can go wrong—companies cannot afford to take a guess on what will work best. For example, in his presentation, “The Role of Fast Data in Continuous Hybrid Cloud,” Steve Wilkes pointed out that data sometimes poses a challenge during migration—a hurdle that is often overlooked by organizations. When migrating data from a critical source application that cannot be stopped, for instance, it would be difficult to move the data in batches since the data is continuously being created.
“Typically, enterprise [business] knows there’s no such thing as a weekend. Things run 24/7, so you can’t really stop these applications, especially not to move a few terabytes into the cloud,” Wilkes noted.
During his session, Wilkes shared several use cases for streaming integration, which is the process of continuously moving enterprise data with high throughput in a scalable fashion. By using streaming integration, you can process, correlate, and analyze data in a highly efficient manner that provides more value and visibility.
Migration was at the top of Wilkes’ use case list for streaming integration, but there are other practical uses for the process, as well. By studying all the use cases of a solution, you can find other ways to streamline your IT toolbox and get the most bang for your buck.
Look at the Past to Keep Pushing Ahead
Throughout the day, each presenter outlined use case examination as an effective way to select the right IT path and ensure a successful migration; however, to keep the momentum going, it’s just as important for businesses to stay ahead of the market, which is a difficult task when you consider how quickly the market evolves and expands. To stay afloat, Intel Senior Software Application Engineer Rami Radi suggests letting historical trends influence decisions and predictions. Even implementing the newer technologies still requires professionals to look at existing use cases, demos, and beta information to evaluate if it is the right fit for their business.
Up Next at CloudEXPO Silicon Valley
For the third day of CloudEXPO, the Ntirety team looks forward to attending and recapping the final day’s sessions. Check back tomorrow to hear more about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud security! If you’re attending CloudEXPO, don’t forget to visit booth #510 to chat with our cloud experts and enter to win great prizes.
Not in Santa Clara this week? Be sure to catch up on highlights like Ntirety CEO Emil Sayegh’s session, “The Great Correction: Why Are Some Enterprises Fleeing the Public Cloud?”
Ready to optimize your cloud strategy and take your infrastructure to the next level? Contact our cloud experts today.
