Flirting with the Public Cloud: Challenges of Regulated, Large Enterprises in Moving to the Public Cloud

GOTO Amsterdam 2022

The public cloud is by now a mature infrastructure that many businesses are fully leveraging. But some are still in the initial stages of their relationship with the public cloud – testing the waters, flirting, not committing yet. In this talk we look at the challenges – even today – for regulated industries and large enterprises in adopting this tempting, popular way of running their applications. What are the dynamics at play here?

The special challenges to be taken into account include:

• Public perception of security
• Impact of Schrems 2 – the landmark data privacy verdict issued in July 2020
• Sometimes non-aligned stakeholders with conflicting goals
• Managing separate accounts and cost allocation for local departments vs corporate-wide
• Additional risks when all major players of a given industry are deployed on a specific cloud provider

Architectural challenges:

• Which public cloud to move applications to? Just one? All the major ones? Keep some on-premise, and go into a hybrid mode?
• How much of the cloud services to use? Infra only? Managed services? Only value-added services such as machine learning model generation?
• “Lift and shift” existing applications, vs rearchitecting
• Applications on the cloud and some on-prem – intercommunication
• Geographical regions and availability zones vs data privacy regulations

Technical challenges:

• Choice of gateway, service mesh, cloud-managed vs own services for databases, containers, etc.
• Standardizing risk proofs across cloud-managed systems
• Integrating enterprise CI/CD pipelines to deploy to the public cloud

In this talk, you will learn:

• What makes regulated, large enterprises slow in adopting the public cloud infrastructure?
• The architectural and technical challenges given the additional constraints.