Cloud Computing Expo is over. Time for a debrief!

The first european event about cloud computing is now over!

My favorite sentence? this one: “cloud computing is a natural evolution for IT”

Here is a quick debrief:

Who?

There were less than five exhibitors, among them VMWare, GoodData, 3Tera…The Cloud Expo was the perfect image of what is occuring in the Cloud economy: many providers, from cloud to SaaS and some curious end-users.

I wish delegates from Amazon or Google or even Microsoft were here.

Each speaker did great efforts to educate about the “cloud computing thing”. Every session was understandable even for non-technical attendees.

Main Topics?

Security first!

It has been developed many times through different angles: from a technical one to a legal one (David Snead)

During the keynote, Roman Stanek took time to tackle fears and reminded that today, traditional IT security is less secure and can’t fight people negligence nor computers’ lost by employees.
He even highlighted that none of internal IT could ensure amazon’s SLA level (EC2: 99,95%, S3: 99,9%).

To prevent from the darker side of cloud computing, Stephen Foskett gave some piece of advices like choosing one’s cloud provider depending on 3 criteria (CIA): confidentiality, integrity, accessibility.

What in case they lost your data? You must consider more than just a refund: is-it expensive enough as regards your lost?

According to Guy Bunker: standards need to be driven by customers, not by vendors.

User experience: every speakers insisted on a better user experience: cloud infrastructures enable reliable backups and redundancy and it changes the IT role to concentrate them on strategic IT problem.

They all claimed that, yes, you could trust your cloud provider because of their long term viability…Why will they have a long term viability? Because of the economy of scale done every day by both parts, providers & customers.

David Hacanek from VMWare reminded that everybody is already using hardware from the cloud: by using your Iphone or Blackberry, you don’t care about where the infrastructures are, or why your operator did this or this technical choice.

You already agreed for consumption based pricing. You already access it using standard intern protocols. You’re satisfied that it’s powered quickly, as needed and you enjoyed that prices went down (compared to 5 years ago), because of shared infrastructures.

Considering problems of latency, speakers focused on the emerging ideas of “Map reduce” and process parallelization for better performance.

Innovation:

With the cloud economy, more and more startups will appear. Now they can delay the time for VCs because they don’t need as many investments as before to test their soft at a great scale for example. Our startup We Are Cloud is one of those examples. We saved infrastructure labor. We can deal with unpredictable demand, without CAPEX. That’s great for innovation and above all, it means a better time-to-market.

First Keynote:

An On-Demand Business Intelligence vendor opened the cloud expo. We are accostumed to OnDemand CRM and Project Managment solutions but not enough about BI, that’s why it was a great thing for all of us.

Organization:

Syscon organized this event. They made a great work. Nevertheless, I still don’t understand why we couldn’t have access to internet for free the first day (we were at the hotel Hilton, we are in 2009 and it was the cloud expo…)

French people and cloud computing:

We were really few attendees and only two speakers represented us (Louis Nauges from Revevol and Jerome Bernard from Elastic Grid).

Louis Nauges is really passionate about cloud computing and I particularly recommend his sessions to startups who are crafting something related to the Saas industry. You can’t but be motivated after his speech!

Goodies:

-We were less than 5 girls…so please next time, allow your girl engineers to come!

-Have a look at this cool video from VMWare…a great one to understand some cloud benefits.

Our next “cloud computing event”? Maybe the Cloud Camp in France.

Author:  Nicolas is responsible for IT, data visualization and design at We Are Cloud.