Kelly Mock, Account Executive, Infoblox
In a recent Forbes article, 13 members of the Forbes Technology Council identified the major challenges facing CIOs that are migrating to the cloud.
These challenges prevail whether you are considering public, private, or hybrid clouds. Five necessitate an evaluation of your core network and security infrastructure. Those challenges are:
- People and Processes
- Dependable Technological Infrastructure
- Modifying the Architecture of Cloud Services
- Translating Security Posture to The Cloud Environment
- Connecting Legacy Applications to Cloud Systems
Within these challenges in cloud migration, a common theme emerges – cloud automation and ability to integrate legacy infrastructure behind firewalls.
As an account executive at Infoblox, I meet CIOs, CISOs, and VP/Directors of IT. Most of them are also focused on figuring out the best way to move to the cloud. As they prepare their strategies, they realize that the existing networking infrastructure needs to change and they need a strategy to prepare their data centers for the next generation of infrastructure, of applications, of devices, and users.
In a recent customer engagement, I was working with an IT team that is advanced in their thoughts and their needs. Their CIO has a mandate that over 50% of the data center footprint needs to be migrated to the cloud. This mandate became a catalyst for the following cloud migration requirements, which I believe will be common for many of my customers.
Requirement #1 – Drive Integration and Automated Provisioning in the Cloud. Since applications can scale well within the cloud, automation is important to meet the capacity requirements within the approved budgets.
Requirement #2 – Flexibility to adopt one or more of major public cloud providers in addition to working in a hybrid cloud environment. In this customer’s case, they were looking at Amazon AWS, though Microsoft Azure was a close competitor.
Requirement #3 – Enable visibility and control across the infrastructure spanning on-prem and cloud deployments
Requirement #4 – Avoid bringing on specialists to create custom integrations/migrations and maintain them. To avoid expensive resourcing investments, my customer wanted standardized API support that can integrate well with their legacy and cloud applications.
Requirement # 5 – Ensure cloud experts are available to bring best practices. Again, in my customer’s case, access to the Infoblox Cloud team and Professional Services experts became a critical requirement to trust the Infoblox team.
Requirement # 6 – Security at the core networking level can’t be an afterthought. Securing the core network infrastructure like DNS becomes critical across the entire infrastructure and strategies need to be adapted to take advantage of the cloud to proactively monitor for cyber threats. Using advanced technologies such as Machine Learning and AI to detect and defend against zero-day threats such as DGA and Fast Flux becomes critical as cloud applications are more prone to attacks due to the open nature of the cloud.
Cloud migration is a complex task that impacts multiple processes, people, and applications. Change management is key while keeping the overall business focus intact. That’s what excites me as an Infoblox executive – to be able to help my customers go through the complex migration process by providing market leading Infoblox solutions and expertise. While I will be happy to chat more on this aspect, you can also get more information.