Guest: Jim Murphy (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Akamai commissioned Forrester Consulting to garner insights from hundreds of global IT leaders on the issues they face with multi-cloud implementations.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Akamai Strategic Sales Executive Jim Murphy shares some of the findings from The Great Cloud Reset report as well as insights from Akamai’s customers.

Current trends in the market:

• Companies are re-evaluating the way their applications and services are deployed. They want to examine those apps and services that they host and run those, not just with what provider they’re working with.
• Half of the respondents say multi-cloud is the way of the future. They love it, and it’s the best way for them to do the most with the resources and the teams that they have.
• The other half says it’s complex, hard, and takes them a lot of time, so why double-down efforts on different places when they could just be doing it in one.
• Two-thirds of the respondents are prioritizing cloud providers that support workloads from core to edge, to maximize performance, efficiency, and cost savings. That will require cloud-native architecture that supports workloads from core to edge.
• The requirements around where these applications and services are hosted are starting to take over. Data sovereignty and regulations in the EU came up, but a lot of that is about where the data is stored, where the data is processed, and who has access to that data. These are real-world implications that are changing the ways in which these services and applications are being built and deployed.
• There’s a lot of downward pressure right now on reducing budgets, making sure that people are doing the most with what they have. There’s a big focus on efficiency.
• Customers are thinking about not just wholesale partnerships with big providers, but where they can eke out the best advantages for the different things they’re trying to do. A lot of the cloud technologies, especially in the open-source world, are allowing that flexibility.

What’s driving the interest in Multi-Cloud?

• Continued pressure to make applications and services as real-time and responsive as possible.
• Some providers are available in different places, and they need to be able to satisfy our customer requirements there.
• They have development teams who are familiar with certain platforms, and they want to satisfy all the abilities of our developers.
• It is a means to get better pricing.

On Edge Infrastructure:

• There’s so much more pressure to make applications and application servers to satisfy their customer requests very quickly, with no downtime, with new and interesting ways to interact with those apps and services.
• Akamai focuses very heavily on edge infrastructure: fast delivery, lower costs on the egress because it has that established delivery network, resiliency, and security.
• The edge offers a promise that we can push more of these requests closer to these end users, in a way that satisfies that demand for faster, better, to also for against some of these regulations and requirements that are coming around to this needs to be in a certain place.
• One of the things Akamai is seeing in terms of the ecosystem is the number of sites. It’s a balance between how many sites and how much capacity you put at each of these edge sites.

Impact of moving Data closer to users:

• Better metadata, or just better insight into where information is going. Tools that provide visibility and reporting are becoming more and more important.
• Sectioning out the data and storing it in different ways. There will be finer segmentation around the ways in which data are being handled, especially those that fall under personally identifiable information (PII), which images and videos that might contain people.
• Stricter requirements in terms of auditability. As more countries with massive populations join in on the internet, more and more regulations similar to GDPR and the California regulations come in to protect their people.

On Generative AI:

• There is a lot of interest in generative AI, the underlying models, and where the logic is actually running (client side or server side). There is interest in employing some of that on the server side so as not to overtax devices and degrade customer experience.
• Pricing for these new workloads is hard to figure out. The compute and the applications are running in finer grains of timescale.
• Companies are more interested in one- to three-year agreements, not long term. Things are changing so fast, customers are not exactly sure what’s going to happen in the next few years. They might have to rethink the way in which they’re building and running the services.

Advice for companies re-evaluating their cloud strategy:

• Understand the problem you’re trying to solve. What are the pain points of your customers?
• Figure out the right tool to solve that problem, in terms of the cloud infrastructure and emerging trends.
• If considering distributed computing, think about actual requirements in terms of latency, data sovereignty, etc.
• Great innovation comes from people playing with new things. Giving your team the flexibility to try new things and explore is always a good idea.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.