Presidio is in full force at this year’s Microsoft Ignite…
Gil is a 35 year industry veteran and current CIO of Stater Bros. Markets. He has worked for companies that include Hyundai Capital, Ford Motor Credit, AIG and ConAgra Foods.
Rob Kim
Not to state the obvious, all of us have been affected by COVID and the globally-instituted quarantine mandates. It wasn’t just business professionals who had to adjust to Work-From-Home. Students and teachers now had to interact virtually, retired citizens now had to access essential needs differently, and friends and family now had to socialize in a completely new way.
We sat down with Presidio’s Vice President of Technology Strategy Rob Kim recently for a wide-ranging question-and-answer session on the trends, challenges and critical solutions for cloud and digital success in 2022.
Gartner recently released a new Magic Quadrant for SSE – Security Service Edge for 2022 in addition to the Critical Capabilities Guide for SSE. Yes, it’s SSE and it’s not a typo – we didn’t forget the “A”. So, what about SASE – and why the need for another IT acronym? While the differences in the two may seem subtle, the application of technologies that fall into this space are distinct with the COVID Pandemic serving as the backdrop and impetus for the need in re-classification.
Innovation and top-line growth are consistently two of the top three key priorities for business executives. Security is always sandwiched right in between these goals, as the threat landscape and perimeter constantly evolves – and never for the better. The digital paradox holds that the same technologies that allow us to innovate and grow give sophisticated intruders the same tools to innovate their method of attack. Just like a chain is only as good as its weakest link, the same goes for our approach to security. It doesn’t matter where in your IT environment a breach occurs; in the end, everything gets affected.
The worst kept secret in the business world is the rapid disruption of traditional workplace and workforce norms, accelerated of course by the ongoing pandemic. There is no shortage of blog posts and think pieces written that compel organizations to digitally transform their business and operations to keep pace. Yes, technology is emerging as a true business partner, as executives across sales, finance, marketing, and other departments lean on their IT counterparts to innovate. Most organizations are even embracing a software engineering mindset, as containers and low-code options are democratizing the development space.
Just as the pandemic impacted technology investment and brought to light the need to do some “spring cleaning on technology debt”, the corresponding quarantine has changed the way we view work, including how we resource, build, and organize teams for collaboration. All organizations, including Presidio, were forced to quickly adopt and adapt to a remote workforce, with a greater emphasis on human-centric approaches to managing worker productivity quickly overshadowing the traditional office-centric design.
Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the IT foundation – compute, storage, network – are the food, safety, psychological and self-actualizing resources needed to run applications and access data at a fundamental level. Without them, cloud is not achievable at the scale and performance level companies need on their digital journey. Still, we run into companies who question whether their existing foundation needs to be modernized at all. Let’s discuss why “Modernize the Foundation” is such an area of focus.
A couple of years ago, our family moved to a new home. To no surprise, the simple act of having to pack up belongings and move them to the new house forced us to get rid of all the junk. Two years later, we have accumulated a lot more junk in our house, yet the annual process of purging has not yielded nearly as much clean-up as that single move. This is the essence of “Move to Improve” – the rationalization method that accelerated during COVID. For many organizations that were paralyzed and as an effect had not modernized their virtual environments, a simple move to the cloud via VMC allowed a quick way to get out of the technology debt that accumulated over the course of years. Without the lingering technical baggage, the move to modernize workloads to cloud-native became much easier. Moving and then improving helped accelerate digital initiatives like workload portability (deploying Kubernetes and container strategies) as well as OS and DB migrations to Linux and RDS, respectively.
It is generally agreed that workloads are what determine the resourcing options. Anytime we typically hear about the “repatriation of workloads” from the cloud back to on-premise deployments, it is typically a consequence of not properly rationalizing the best migration option for said workload. And as expected, the workloads that migrate first and remained in the cloud were those around re-factoring/re-engineering of applications, or re-purchasing through SaaS delivery options.
