After being deeply involved in public cloud for the last several years, as both a provider and a consumer, I have been very pleasantly surprised at the rate at which large enterprises are rapidly moving to the cloud. For all the right reasons, even the most regulated and risk-averse of industries -- banking, for example -- are rapidly moving workloads out of their own owned data centers. Public cloud is not just for the "unicorns", but for the "horses" as well. This short vignette, presented at the GOTO Aarhus 2014 conference, tries to explain why this trend will continue and accelerate, and why we should be excited about it.

1. Why Enterprises are
Embracing the Cloud
Randy Shoup
@randyshoup
linkedin.com/in/randyshoup

2. Embracing the Cloud
(The Obvious)
• Provisioning Speed
o Minutes, not weeks
o Autoscaling in response to load
• Near-Infinite Capacity
o No need to predict and plan for growth
o No need to defensively overprovision
• Pay For What You Use
o No “utilization risk” from owning / renting
o If it’s not in use, spin it down

3. Embracing the Cloud
(The Less Obvious)
• Instance Optimization Opportunities
o Instance shapes to fit most parts of the solution space (compute-intensive, IO-intensive,
etc.)
o If the shape does not fit, try another
• Service Quality
o Amazon and Google know how to run data centers
o Battle-tested and highly automated
o World-class networking, both cluster fabric and external peering

4. So You Still Want Your
Own Data Center …
• Unstoppable Economics
o Can you buy hardware more cheaply than Amazon and Google?
o Can you operate the data center more efficiently than Amazon and Google?
o Can you achieve better resource utilization than Amazon and Google?
• Resilience to Breaches and Failures
o Is your security team as practiced as Amazon’s and Google’s?
o Can your teams manage machine failure, disaster recovery, etc., like Amazon
and Google?
• Global Footprint
o Do you have the same global footprint of data centers, edge points of presence,
and peering relationships as Amazon and Google?

5. “But I Work at
a Bank …”
• Banks are using public cloud today
o 3 top Australian banks (Suncorp, NAB, Commonwealth) use Amazon Web
Services today
o Netherlands banking authority has cleared public cloud for use by NL banks
o Many others piloting, evaluating, etc.
• Majority of computing at a bank is not “banking”
o Not about talking to a financial exchange
o Not about regulated operations

6. The 2010s of computing are like the
1910s of electric power(!)
“Soon it will be just as common to run
your own data center as it is to run
your own electric power generation”
-- me