Stratégie Multi-Cloud - Idéologie versus réalité

0:00 Vous connaissez un peu la profusion chez Comit ou pas ? Tous ces bonbons partout, ces petits gâteaux. C'est chouette, j'espère que vous avez fait le plein, parce que maintenant plus personne ne sort. Vous respectez aussi nos speakers qui sont là, qui prennent du temps pour être avec vous. Donc je pense que c'est important que les temps où ils s'expriment, vous restez bien, bien assis. Vous avez bien fait la provision de boissons et de petits bonbons. Alors, j'ai décidé de redémarrer, non pas avec un speaker, mais avec... Oh, quel talent! Il faudra venir tout à l'heure sur scène avec moi. Et donc, je vais appeler François Pasquet, qui est Technical Account Manager chez DoiT International, et Mark Gilbert, CTO chez Cafeyn, de bien vouloir me rejoindre. It's the miracle. You're there, it's the miracle.

1:01 Yes, indeed. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Donc vous allez vous exprimer tous les deux pour répondre à une question qui nous étreint tous. Est-ce que le multi-cloud stratégie, c'est un idéal ou une nécessité? Exactement. Un vaste sujet. Un vaste sujet et on va parler en anglais. En anglais? In English, my dear. Yes, indeed. Okay, so everybody agree with that? Sure? Let's go. Thank you. The floor is yours. Okay, good morning everyone and welcome to today's session on multi-cloud strategies. The ideology of that versus the reality. My name is Mark Gilbert. I'm the Chief of Technology and Product for Cafeyn Group. And my name is François Pasquet. I'm a Technical Account Manager at DoiT. Thank you, Francois. So before we get into the main session today, I'd just like to ask the members of the audience today a very quick question, please. First of all, this week or very recently, have you been in a presentation or a seminar or read some document where you've seen a picture of a cloud?

2:12 Please raise your hands. Okay. I thought that was going to be the reaction, and I think it's fair to say that this icon has probably been the most overused icon in recent years. Perhaps to overcome that, maybe some of the more creative members of the audience have tried to do something a little bit more creative as well. But let's see. Because today we are going to talk about lots of clouds. So first of all, please allow me to briefly introduce Cafeyn Group to you. We're a leading European media streaming platform. We were first created in 2006 in France. We now operate across 14 active markets. And today our business has grown to around 200 staff across six countries. Our platform is accessed by millions of subscribers, and they have access to thousands of titles and media brands. In recent years, the Cafeyn Group has grown dynamically, and we've recently acquired and successfully integrated brands such as Blendle in the Netherlands, Malibras in France, and Kijo in the US.

3:25 In a little bit more detail, Cafeyn partners with publishers and content providers worldwide, offering them new monetization avenues and to promote journalism. For our subscribers, they get access to diverse, verified, high-quality content. across newspapers, magazines, news feeds, and content provided by major pure player providers such as AFP. All of which is optimized using innovative smart reading technology that will show that content on different screen sizes. Thank you, Mark. And just to give you a quick overview of what we do at DoiT. Today, our main goal is to help our customers overcome all the challenges they encounter in using the cloud through technical and architectural consulting, follow the sun technical support, and a range of tools around medical governance and fine ops. We are an NWS, GCP, and Asia reseller partner, and all of our services are unlimited and free for all of our customers.

4:32 So before we go into a medical strategy, we need to understand what an enterprise strategy is and how we can define a business strategy. It is obvious that every business should have an objective to generate revenue and to earn money. But this is not a strategy, really. It is more about how to generate the money with the product your business makes or delivers. Some important questions have to be answered before you go. What is the position? Do we have a long-term planning? Do we have a financial structure? And then, during your multi-cloud journey, one crucial question remains. How do I keep control? Because we want to avoid cases where costs in multi-cloud environments grow over your heads, where you don't have a clear overview of who is managing the systems, and most importantly, where systems bring in severe security risks. Anyone in here has probably done a lift and shift migration, and the promise of the cloud was made, but getting there is tough. So let's get to the strict definition of multi-cloud. Multi-cloud refers to the use of two or more cloud computing systems at the same time.

5:37 A simple feature of combining solutions and services from different cloud providers and or private clouds doesn't make up the cloud concept alone. There is more of it, and we are going to elaborate with Mark and Cafeyn's journey. From my experience, Nearly 80% of our customers have a multi-cloud infra, but don't often choose it from the very beginning. It's more like the multi-cloud chooses you. We'll talk later about the benefits and risks, plus the complexity it brings. Like I said, when a multi-cloud is not a choice, but works through the business roadmap with acquisition, imagine the hope teams. When you arrive with a new entity and tell them to manage it and integrate it with what they have, and without breaking the business continuity, it could be super. It could be not a choice for other regions. Some companies have pricing pressure, credits or discounts they can negotiate.

6:39 So what is a multi-cloud strategy? Let's look at the two scenarios here. Thank you, François. So we've got a very high-level diagram here today. On the left-hand side, you can see a single cloud setup. Your business is on the left there, obviously with applications, IT operations setups, etc. And in this scenario, you're working with one cloud vendor, and we can all probably name several of the major players out there. But this is a very straightforward, ideal state setup. You've got a contracting place with your cloud vendor. Your IT operations, security, maintenance, IT governance, and cloud management are all operating collaboratively with that one vendor. But again, that's an ideal state. On the right-hand side, things get a little bit more complicated because, yes, of course, you've still got your business, the applications, the IT operations, but now you're in a world where you're working with multiple cloud vendors. Each one of those will have individual contracts and SLAs.

7:42 But in this challenging situation, your IT governance, security best practices and maintenance all now need to work harmoniously across different cloud vendors. Now, I guess the question is, is why the hell go for that in the first place, really? Why not just keep things simple? Well, quite simply, you may not have a choice. Diverse businesses, such as Cafeyn, have to balance their finite resource, energy on time, on business growth, extending the product portfolio, or enhancing the value proposition. There's simply not enough time to have continual IT programs running that are lifting and shifting between different cloud environments or trying to aggregate things. So a multi-cloud strategy can't be avoided sometimes. So really, why really go for one? Why not just keep things simple and bite the bullet now? And perhaps if you're already in a multi-cloud environment, well, maybe you're considering to squeeze all that back into a single cloud environment.

8:45 Well, there's a number of compelling benefits by going to a multi-cloud strategy. But hey, we're here to talk about reality today, and there's a number of risks as well. So let's talk about some of these now. So on the benefits side, and I speak from practical experience here, certainly in Cafeyn and in other roles as well, of the benefits of working with multiple cloud vendors. Cafeyn to date has four cloud vendors actively using cloud consumption and services. But the benefits that we are seeing is we get to choose best-in-class providers and services. Yes, the major players are all out there asking for business, but they are not dyed from the same cast. Yes, they provide hosting and consumption in the cloud, but they are prepared and willing to offer you additional services over and above that if you ask the right questions. They are readily available to give you access to technical resource to help facilitate proof of concepts or technical innovations.

9:50 And by having a multi-cloud strategy, that means you can do a best fit for the cloud provider for the services that you want to deliver. Of course, as well as... We're talking about multiple vendors here, so you get the opportunity to do competitive pricing, which in turn allows you to get to that bottom line and improve profit margins as well because you're avoiding that vendor lock-in and being completely susceptible to any price increases going forwards. I've mentioned here about releasing product to market and that being faster. You know, we've seen some real, real good outcomes from our cloud providers. They've been engaging with us in proof of concepts, hackathons. They've been giving us access to technical expertise and certain product feature innovations as well. And that's really helped us accelerate product to market because we are able to draw in external expertise without necessarily paying for it as well. And that helps us to get product market faster as well. I've mentioned here about vendor lock-in and improved resiliency and security.

10:54 Really, it gives us a chance to avoid having all our eggs in one basket with a single provider, and now we can balance our applications or distribute applications into different cloud environments. Perhaps, François, you could talk about the risks on that. Yes, thank you, Mark, because there is a flip side. The lift and shift miss and the cost of delay because of a lack of familiarity. If your market demand arrives and you don't adapt fast enough, you might lose a part of revenue. So when you adapt a new technology or accelerate the development of your application, It comes at a cost, and this cost corresponds with missing the opportunity because the timing is not good and not getting your product released in the market on time. Latency, if you have a high-speed query when your main workload is Cloud Provider A and your data is stored on Cloud Provider B, you may face a network latency problem and at the end, a bad user experience. Research says that more than 75% of mid-sized and large organizations will adopt an hybrid or multi-cloud strategy in the near future, if they haven't already.

12:04 Yet, many organizations have been dissatisfied with their cloud experience thus far. They spend more than anticipated on implementation and the user experience doesn't meet expectations. It is easy to lose control of many spending decisions and you must trust your teams to run your infra with reasonable budgets. The biggest concern, I saw it yesterday with a customer asking for help. He wanted to understand what would be the consequences with the new pricing announcement. So I would say now it is more about her to forecast spend that is currently happening. And then you realize that most of the conversations have shifted from ensuring services have the capacity to ensuring that they are spending the right amount of money. It is difficult enough with OneCloud. Imagine with more. And finally, it can be difficult to match a solution to the given strategy.

13:06 How do you ensure your business and valuable resource is focusing on the right thing to deliver product to market as quickly as possible? It is easier when you have tools and automation to manage technology portfolio rather than build, migrate or manage. Look guys, it's no longer about being cloud first. That's a completely understandable situation that businesses want to adopt. It's really now about being cloud fit. And by what I mean by that, in other words, is making sure your businesses are striving to deliver the benefits of having a multi-cloud strategy, but also making sure that you are aware of the risks and mitigating them wherever possible. And I think it's really important that as part of that, you know, you try and avoid that trade-off between trying to develop product and get that to market versus cloud management, because before those two tracks could not run at the same time very well together. So yes, now it's about managing your technology portfolio.

14:11 So if you think that fine ops is about saving money, well, you may think twice, because fine ops is about making money. Sometimes a business will decide to tighten the belt, sometimes it will decide to invest more, but now teams know why they are making those decisions. Earlier I said that the conversation I've shifted. It is even more abuse when I talk with my customers every day because now we don't fight about infrastructure anymore. We fight about its business value. So one very good advantage with this dashboard, it is cloud diagnostic, so you can manage all the costs in one place. And one very good best practice would be to provide engineers with feedback on the impact of their actions as close as possible to the time those actions are done. actions occur. This tends to create automatic behavioral changes for the better. So, DoiT is about helping the business make better decisions while moving more quickly, and it is achieved by enabling frictionless conversations between teams.

15:21 Recently, I wanted to buy an electric car, so I went to a car dealership, and when I was driving the car, I saw that when you put your foot down heavily on the pedal, you see on the screen the energy flowing out of the battery. Then, when you lift up your foot, the energy flows back into the battery. It is obvious and instantaneous. You can see how the choice you are making at the moment is impacting the amount of energy, and maybe before it was unconscious. So what is the point to this story? The real-time visual creates an immediate effect. You start to drive a bit more carefully, and step down on the accelerator, and maybe you don't need to go so fast to get where you are going. If you are running late, you decide to push harder, and if you decide to push harder the accelerator, you know that it's worth the extra energy cost. Now you are making an informed decision. To use the appropriate amount of energy.

16:22 This is what we provided as an example to Cafeyn. Thank you, François. So, look, I just want to share with you our... experience of working with do it we've been working with do it now for just over a year now and you know they've helped us greatly to be honest in grappling some of our complexities of managing multi cloud environments the our business has got really great talented people across the business and technology and certainly across Cafeyn group we get certainly on the technology side of things We get access to a lot of the latest tech, technical innovations, and experimentation work as well. But the reality is we're a finite resource base. So, and certainly in the cloud technology space, it's changing all the time. And the security implications of that as well. So this is where we've used DoiT to help us provide technical spikes and extra resource into the teams to help us plan our technology portfolio better. From a practical perspective, just on the sort of Cafeyn side, if I may, we've done a number of business accelerations with cloud vendors.

17:32 I can't mention the major brands, but we do work with the major brands. But over the course of the last 12 months, we've done hackathons. We've had technical experts from the major brands helping us on certain spikes. This could be the developing infra as a code. It could be experimentation work or trying out new product features and becoming an early adopter with that cloud vendor. They've been really helpful as the cloud. vendor and give us this expertise and do it have been there to help facilitate and organize these sessions and that's really good for our team because it keeps tech really working well and you know it does accelerate our business because we can try and preempt some of the problems before they go get to market Francois has already mentioned about the technology portfolio management. We've got a lot of clouds in our business, and it's just really good now that we do have a single place dashboard and single view of the consumption and projections of that going across our cloud environments. And the way we are able to manage our IT spend now is a lot better than what it was before.

18:38 The product development focus as well. I think these are some of the outcomes from some of our POCs. It's amazing, guys, what hackathons can do. If you can allocate certain members of your IT team to work with a cloud vendor, and potentially we do it, you know, over a five-day period with really focused attention, you will be amazed what that team can output. There's a real good camaraderie and a team sort of culture going on there. And, you know, in other businesses, that's sorely lacking, certainly in the technology space. But that's what we've really been seeing, certainly over the recent year. Exactly, and then you also have the opportunity to talk with SMEs, because we can help you to better understand and fully optimize your cloud and to build, deploy, iterate on your projects and with greater efficiency. with also account team interactions with a team and an account manager. We help you enable and upscale your team so you continue to grow and succeed with the cloud.

19:41 We provide proactive heads up, QBRs. This is an important point of how do it works with customers. We give you the guidance, the advice, the tips, the benefit of our experience to enable you to overcome challenges. answer questions, and build the programs that will deliver value for you today and in the future. So this is why we are here. Our mission is to enable greatness through the cloud, and we help you to get the most of it. Thank you. And I'm going to go a little bit off script here, but talking about partnerships, I'll report back to you all on Monday about the quality of our partnership, depending on how the England and France game goes on Saturday as well. Sorry about that. I just had to get that in. I'm sorry. So, look, François and I have brought today a very broad and deep topic, which is obviously the multi-cloud strategy.

20:45 What we've attempted to do in literally 20 or 25 minutes is try and at least bring in some of the main benefits and risks that you should be considering. So, you know, we've tried to summarize on the next slide a few key points that we would like you to go away and give careful consideration to if you are considering either moving to a multi-cloud strategy or indeed you have one already and you're thinking about how to try and manage that cloud environment better. So some key points first. Multi-cloud does give you the benefit and freedom of choice, but do make sure you are clear on the benefits that you're trying to get and the risks and how this affects the management of your team. technology portfolio. And the second point would be do not underestimate the governance, the maintenance, and the complexity that multi-cloud brings. The next point is, I don't know why we've got four ones on that slide, but hey, it happens.

21:49 Major cloud providers do have the best secured platforms in the world, but it does not take away your responsibility to have secure frameworks, principles, and rules to protect your business. Do not make security a secondary topic. There's only so far a cloud provider can go to ensuring resiliency and security on your platforms. The rest is up to you. Do not think you're suddenly just going to hand all that off to them and everything's going to be fine because it won't. It's still your responsibility at the end of the day. And also, don't forget to explore the different cloud strategies. If you want to become cloud fit, and also, this is very important, but, you know, don't be afraid to partner with an expert, and then a partner can help you. So thank you. We've got a little bit of time left. I think we've got five minutes or so to take any questions from the audience. So we are ready.

22:50 We are prepared. Please raise your hand if you have any questions. Please don't talk about football because I'm not really a big follower of football. So we'll keep that one off the agenda. Are there any questions, please, for either myself or François? Let's go have a drink. I think we may have a question in the audience over there. Hey there. Hi there. Hi. Thanks for the presentation. Thank you. Just a quick question. Doesn't the multi-cloud strategy only allow you to use the least common denominator between the different cloud providers? And so reduce the amount of pass or as a service solution that you can use from different providers. From a Cafeyn's perspective, if we looked at each of our cloud environments, they do massively vary in size and consumption. And because we're a European business and in the States as well, obviously there's time zone elements of that as well.

23:56 We haven't really had to go to a sort of lowest denominator, really. We've really gone for a sort of best fit purpose, really. Some of our applications are optimized to work with certain cloud vendors, but we've not really had to. You know, yeah, we haven't had to go for a lowest denominator and choose that to the partner. We are using all the major cloud providers. Is there anything you wanted to add to that, François, at all, from your perspective? From my perspective, sorry. Well, yeah. This is, I don't know, I'm sorry, I'm nervous, my English is not that good. So maybe we can have a... a coffee after you can ask me a question. Thank you for the question. I think we've got another. Ray, stand out. That's better that we've got the lights on now. The hands went up and then they went down. Hi there.

24:57 Hello. Thank you for the presentation. You're welcome. Thank you. My question is for Cafeyn. I understand that Cafeyn did much external growth. So if there wasn't such an external growth and acquisition, do you think that Cafeyn would follow a multi-cloud strategy? That's a really good question. Yes, in short, because I'm a firm believer of avoiding vendor locking. You know, I think I'd be probably as bold to say, irrespective of the size of your business, wherever possible, do seek out different vendors. Again, I mentioned earlier, they're not dyed from the same cast. They don't just provide hosting and monitoring of your cloud environments. Depending on the vendor, some are very proactive in wanting to work with your teams.

25:59 They are prepared to give you access to their technical resource. In some cases, we visited that vendor's HQ. We've been able to work directly with their tech teams and do event spikes, for example. And you could argue if you did that with just one vendor, it becomes a price conversation typically. Now, I'm being very generalist there, but I do see the benefits of having a multi-cloud vendor just because you can get that collaboration. But, of course, it also gives you a chance. Let's look at resiliency across your IT landscape as well. You know, there's no textbook answer there, but, you know, I would seriously recommend looking at vendors because it is surprising what they are prepared to offer you if you go asking for it. You're welcome. And we've got another hand over there. Hi there. Hey, hello. I'm just curious because you're talking about not being vendor locked, but at the same time you use the right feature on the right cloud.

27:01 That's Cloud Fleet, right? So aren't you multi-cloud vendor locked? Multi-cloud vendor locked. Yeah. Well, let's put it like this. We've done various, because we've got multiple brands in our business, I mentioned Cafeyn, Blendall, Malibris, Kidjo, and there will be others in future. We are constantly trying to look at the product landscape and see as an IT strategy where we can start using reusable components across some of those platforms. And this is giving us the ability to see which cloud vendor we want to apply that particular application into. So, yes, we're using multiple vendors, but personally, I don't feel locked in with any of them. If vendor one is not providing the service that we expect from them or the pricing, they are fully aware that I can give vendor two a call. And there's almost a bit of horse trading going on between them sometimes.

28:03 And we're very open with them. You know, again, I'm trying to avoid the major brand players here, but they are all aware that we're working with several of them. And it's amazing what they come to the table with, whether it's pricing, resource. So, yes, I guess we're locked in because we are using multiple vendors, but it's our choice. We do have the freedom to choose between these vendors. And in some cases, we do lift and shift those applications within those cloud spaces. Thank you. You're welcome. Why do English people... Yes, it's a very typical trait in England. The weather's usually miserable. It rains a lot. And you will find English people are obsessed with the weather, whether it's family, friends or colleagues. There's always five minutes talking about the weather. It just is. That said, every time I come to Paris, to be fair, it's always cold and miserable as well. So it just is what it is, really.

29:06 Okay, are there any, I'm just keeping an eye on the time, are there any final questions at all? No, great. Well, thank you for putting up with the English speech there, and Francois obviously translating in English as well. Thank you. So thank you all, and have a really good session for the rest of the day as well. Thank you. I have nothing to do, so thank you so much. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah. Take care, guys. Merci beaucoup. Bien, merci Tommy pour ce petit dessin qui nous a tous bien fait rire, et en particulier Marc.