This week I attended the “Google Cloud Exec Connect” at the Scandic Continental hotel.
The official event description reads as “Like many Nordic innovators,
your company has already embarked on a journey to the cloud. Experts
agree that adopting a best-of-breed Multi-cloud approach is your next
step. Multi-cloud is the key to gaining the promised agility of the
cloud and its economic advantages”. I was interested in knowing more
about what Google Cloud can offer, and why Google was focusing on the
multi-cloud approach.
The keynote had two main topics. Guillaume Leygues, from Google,
acknowledged that Google Cloud lacked in the past some enterprise
features that now are present on their offering. And that Kubernetes,
the base for much of Cloud solutions, is Google’s technology. Google is
not aiming, yet, to be your primary cloud provider. However, they want
you to use their service for disaster recovery, fast prototyping
provider and artificial intelligence needs.
After the Keynote, Joakim Erlandsson presented IKEA’s multi-cloud
Strategy. This is as Swedish as an en event can get, even that for the
benefit of non-Swedish speakers all the presentations were held in
English. Ikea uses the multi-cloud provider strategy to improve
innovation and to avoid vendor lock-in.
In Accenture’s view on Multi-Cloud, Jens Lidholm showed their very
down to earth approach. A multi-cloud provider strategy mixes well with
an already invested private cloud or old data center strategies. He also
pointed out the necessity for global companies to be able to change
provider fast in case of unexpected problems, like when Russia blocked
full ranges of IPs affecting all customers from one of the providers.
The key take out of the event is summarised as “Multi-cloud is the
key to gaining the promised agility of the cloud and its economic
advantages”.
Google is playing catch-up in the cloud as a service and being your
second provider allows Google to show what their products can do. I
can’t agree more on the fact that if you don’t test your services on
production in multiple providers, it is an impossible task to move when
is needed and to ask for discounts to your current provider on the
possibility of leaving their platform a toothless statement.