Key Takeaways on Hybrid Cloud Networking, Security, and Protection from Cloud Field Day 22 – Tech Field Day Takeaways

Hi, I'm Alistair Cook. I'm an event lead at Tick Field Day, and these are my takeaways from Cloud Field Day. Cloud.

Field Day is very much about what enterprises are really doing with cloud, and one of the things that I've seen is that Cloud native is absolutely important and new applications are being built with Cloud native, but that those cloud native applications often have connectivity to things that are very not cloud native. And so Cloud Field Day encompasses not just what you are running in public cloud platforms and what you're building new, but also how it integrates with the things that have been running your business for the last 20 years. And so hybrid cloud is very much a part of what I think we we focus on for Cloud Field Day and more than just hybrid cloud, it's also the reality that for large organizations, the different public cloud platforms are quite differentiated.

And so often there's a reason for large organizations to use multiple public cloud platforms. So it really ends up being a hybrid multi-cloud environment for a lot of large organizations rather than the everything all cloud native, all in one place that we might have hoped for 10 or so years ago. An element of this hybrid cloud pieces, the networking gluing together all of the pieces that make up your hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

And this really is a huge amount of complexity in part because the different cloud vendors have really different ways of approaching and thinking about and talking about networks. They come from their own paradigms and often these paradigms of design are a little different from what you design on premises. And so there's a lot of complexity just mapping together how things are named, how they're described, and how they're connected together.

This multi-cloud hybrid cloud networking gets really complicated pretty fast. And one of the challenges then is also that hybrid cloud and particularly the public cloud side, is often about innovation and fast change. And so the rate of change of the hybrid cloud network can be much higher than what we used to working with a, a conventional enterprise network and enterprise wan.

And so constant change is a really important part to recognizing the complexity of managing these hybrid cloud networks. The other element is that these hybrid cloud networks often involve access over the internet, and so security becomes even more of a vital feature. Now, it may not be that we're using VPNs, we may well be using dedicated fiber connections back into the various cloud providers or through something like Megaport to provide our connectivity, but the applications we're delivering into public cloud are often being accessed by our customers over the internet.

And so security is a, a really vital part of building out that network. And I think that's one of the underlying themes through all is that requirement for security and that complexity and speed of change means we need to approach through sort of automation mechanisms and the operational challenges can be pretty high. And so using advanced operational tools, AI operations tools like we saw from selector AI becomes vital Hybrid cloud networking feels like something very new and very exciting, but the fundamentals really do matter in hybrid cloud networking, and this was something that came through particularly as we were, we were exploring things with Infoblox and thinking through some of the consequences of having this hybrid network that spans both your on-premises and multiple public cloud environments.

And coming back to some of the fundamentals of IP address management and DNS management and integrating DNS between your cloud environments and your on-premises environments and being able to treat them like just one big homogenous network, even though under the covers there is a lot more complexity to it. But we know that the fundamentals of connectivity are about TCP, uh, and DNS, right? If, if you can't find a resource, it's very hard to connect to it.

And so that cohesive management of IP address management and DNS management across a hybrid cloud environment, uh, really brought back to us the the importance of knowing the fundamentals, understanding the fundamentals and getting them right, but as is a secondary theme, right through the security in that environment. As we're looking at Fortinets presentation and, and talking with Catchpoint about their solutions for performance management, these things coming together, bringing us back to the fundamentals are how you're delivering your application out to your users in this hybrid multi-cloud environment. Are we making sure that we're doing this securely and at a good level of performance?

That networking is complex and the fundamentals of networking are still absolutely vital in hybrid multi-cloud And protection, the need for protection as you are moving your applications out into public cloud environments or even if you're allowing your users to access your applications directly from your on-premises environment, the need to treat the internet as an untrusted and potentially very hostile location is absolutely vital for us. But beyond just the network components, you also need to protect your data as you are starting to use more and more, particularly software as a service applications, uh, these software as a service applications, we think it's all somebody else's problem to deal with, but fundamentally, the risks still lies in your organization. If data loss occurs and and from your organization, it's your organization that's going to be in financial, possibly legal troubles rather than the cloud provider.

And so data protection is also a vital part of using a public cloud hybrid cloud environment, especially with those SaaS platforms or SaaS messaging or maybe SaaS CRM. Being able to protect your data within that SaaS platform was where Haiku was coming to for us, that simply protecting your virtual machines is great, but a lot of software as a service platforms are holding vital data for you and protecting those is absolutely crucial. I really enjoyed Cloud Field Day.

Uh, it's, it's always been one of my favorite events and Cloud Field Day, this edition, which focused a lot on networking was a lot of fun. We had some awesome new delegates, uh, particularly wanted to call out Barton George who had some great opinions to share during the event, uh, as well as Mike g Graff who's joined us for the first time and he's a nice local being in the Bay Area, so it was great to to see him there with us as well. And one of my friends, Mitch Lewis joined from the Signal 65 team within RUM Group and you she'll be seeing some more futurum people at more of our Tech Field day events because there are some really awesome skilled, knowledgeable people right throughout the Futurum group.

You can find me. I'm Alistair Cook. Probably easiest place to find me is on LinkedIn.

Uh, you can also find me on some socials as Demi Tass nz. Uh, that NZ means I live here in New Zealand, which is an absolutely awesome place to live. Keep in touch with also all of the Tech Field Day podcasts.

Uh, follow the Tech Field Day website. We have plenty more events coming up for you and, uh, lots of social media connections, all of the blue skies and all of the other places. You'll find Tech Field Day and various team members at Tech Field Day, right across all of those platforms.

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