Things I Wish I Knew About the Cloud 5 Years Ago

The following speakers discuss the evolving cloud space and cloud strategies that transform organizations in the session “Things I Wish I Knew About the Cloud Five Years Ago.” The session was held at the CDO Midwest Summit 2022, hosted by CDO magazine and ComSpark.

• Sean Erikson, VP, Enterprise Architecture & IT Strategy, Grange Insurance 

• Lisa Gardner, Director of Data Analytics, Shearman & Sterling LLP

• Terry Williams, Chief Information Officer, Belcan Corporation

Mike Woods, VP of Central Region, Denodo, moderates the session.

In her opening remarks, Gardner suggests that the cloud space is attractive for experimentation and testing new technologies without a massive financial investment. She adds that data center maintenance is expensive for large organizations, making the cloud a more cost-effective choice.

Erikson discusses Grange’s cloud strategy in detail. He states that they have 40% of their applications in the cloud. The organization learned that taking a lift-and-shift approach can be expensive, and those learnings shaped its strategy, he explains.

Next, Gardner mentions how the data fabric allows users to access raw and application data from one place, whereas cloud technology makes data sources easier to connect. She cites that data sources like Azure Data Lake, Azure SQL, and PostgreSQL on Azure can be registered with the data catalog and easily connected.

Erikson concurs with running in the AWS cloud in Snowflake for faster access to data. He asserts you need a data dictionary and people who understand the data to make sense of data.

The process of determining which data deserves to be formatted for a curated data set while still making all other data accessible is fundamental, according to Gardner.

Following up, Erikson explains that enterprise architecture is responsible for setting accurate standards regarding cloud strategy. He emphasizes the difficulties in moving between various cloud providers and encourages finding the right balance.

Continuing, Gardner advocates the importance of learning from failures and experimentation to be innovative. She urges data people to understand and work with their security teams to ensure people can access the data they need. 

The speaker states that the goal is to have most applications in the cloud within five years. To do this, she explains, the teams should pick a use case and move it from raw data to a conform dataset, slowly building an enterprise data lake. 

In conclusion, Erikson declares the future of the cloud space to be hybrid and multifaceted, with both public and private cloud providers competing in the ISAs.

Watch other CDO Midwest Summit 2022 sessions HERE