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It’s time for Vertical Clouds and Custom Clouds

At Cisco Live in Las Vegas this June, we met DD Dasgupta, Vice President, Product Management Cisco. He spelled out why the plain vanilla.

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At Cisco Live in Las Vegas this June, we met DD Dasgupta, Vice President, Product Management Cisco. He spelled out why the plain vanilla ice-cream brick of cloud is being sliced in new ways. And why the cloud magic is not going to melt away any time soon.

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There is no denying that the cloud is cool. It is now a staple for every enterprise’s IT has-to-be list. And yet, the expectations and deeper concerns, around this magic wand are changing. If we flip through some reports of IDC, in 2018, 81 percent of customers had reported the repatriation of workloads from public clouds to on-premises private cloud, hosted private cloud, or on-premises non-cloud infrastructures. This was a trend that was expected to rise to 85 percent in 2019.

Recently, when 451 Research conducted its Voice of the Enterprise: Datacenters 2021 survey, it spotted that 48 percent of respondents indicated that they had transitioned a workload or application away from the hyper-scale public cloud providers (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) to some other venue in the past 12 months.

Also, as an O’Reilly survey 2021 unveiled, five percent organizations showed a tendency to shift away from the Cloud and back to on-premises infrastructure. So where is the nebula moving? Let’s ask someone who navigates this feathery world as his daily passion.

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Give us some insight from what you have been witnessing on your radar recently. What’s changing when we think of Cloud?

A lot of horizontal use-cases—like back-up, archival, continuity—are done. The next big wave here is going to be beyond this. The next growth frontier is that of distributed cloud.

Interestingly, while cloud adoption has been good, there are many cases of repatriation too. Why is that happening?

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Yes, we do see that trend. The first reason is obviously–Cost. The second one can be due to sovereignty issues as companies have different geographical sensitivities. Governments are worried about their data. We can see that trend already. In the next seven years, I think the trend will heat up on the concept of Custom Clouds. Governments would want something like that. And organisations would want something like Vertical Clouds that align with their industry’s context. These would be based on specific requirements–which are not offered a lot in today’s Public Cloud stack.

What do you see when you look at India?

Overall, the pandemic has been a big accelerator. But globally, cloud adoption is not region-based but vertical-based. Somehow, Finance is always first on the adopter list, and manufacturing trails at the end. In India, there is an explosion of start-ups and that will aid the momentum of the cloud–especially for tech-savvy start-ups. I see quick adoption of Public and Hybrid Clouds. When I look at APAC, Australia and India are definitely leading the change.

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One of your industry peers has launched something called a low-latency, high-density network—does that mean a lot when we think of cloud support?

Data and control are separate elements. Data stays local. Control and intelligence get sent to the cloud. An application may not need the latency aspect too much but density can be a factor to ponder–because the number of end-points in an Edge environment is exploding.

Cisco ThousandEyes recently came up with a fascinating map of outages. Can you tell us more about that?

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ThousandEyes can track all hops and predictively tell you what can be an issue to reckon with, the role of ThousandEyes is going to get even more important.

What’s Cisco's game-plan and ambition in the Cloud skyscape?

We are not going to compete with Public Cloud companies. This opens up new opportunities because the network connects everything. We are working closely with governments and large corporations that do not want to move to Public Cloud but opt for Hybrid Cloud. We see requirements in compute, storage, and analytics areas that serve their requirements. All this would be packaged with professional services. That way, ours is a platform strategy and not a product strategy.

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DD Dasgupta,

Vice President, Product Management,

Cisco

By Pratima H

pratimah@cybermedia.co.in

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