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

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.