I'm back with a new episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
In the hot seat this time: Nokia's Paul Unbehagen. Paul has a deep history in the networking world, so he approaches his role at Nokia—NE Americas CTO—from the perspective of a network engineer.
Although our main topics this week are enterprise cloud and right-sizing cloud utilization, we use those as a springboard into many topics circling the state of the network in 2023.
We touch on the history of the enterprise’s move into the cloud and why some companies have reevaluated their cloud strategy in recent years.
As it so often does, the geography of the cloud comes up, along with Paul’s take on location and design in the cloud. This brings us to the edge—not only what it means and where it is, but some of the new and exciting use cases of what edge computing facilitates.
Embedded in that conversation is also 5G and how mobile can push the network into being a central part of the business. And we can’t resist bringing up AI/ML.
Paul and I had a great time waxing philosophical about how networks and cloud have changed and what it could mean for the future.
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Key Takeaways
Enterprise Cloud Strategy is Evolving Beyond "All-In"
While the initial drive toward cloud adoption was fueled by the hope for ease, faster application development, and significant cost savings, many companies have since re-evaluated this strategy due to unexpected complexities and higher-than-anticipated costs.
The conversation highlights that there was a "large belief in application teams that the networking teams are just too slow," pushing things toward cloud.
However, moving to the cloud involves "a lot more work than what people expect it to be," and the unpredictable cost structures, like those compared to losing track of cell phone bills in the 80s, were a shock.
Cloud Should Be Understood as a Design Principle, Not Just a Location
A central point emphasized is that "cloud's not really a location, cloud is a design principle."
While there's a natural tendency to associate cloud with specific cloud providers or physical data centers, the true value and flexibility of cloud lie in its underlying principles of flexibility, modularity, and streamline tools.
The Network's Role is Becoming Central and AI/ML are Key Drivers of This Transformation
The network is transitioning from being seen merely as a necessary utility or cost center to becoming an "equal leg of the stool as compute and storage."
It's a "critical component" and a "flexible component underneath and along with the compute." This shift is driven by the rise of AI and machine learning (AI/ML), which demands massive bandwidth and requires "very low latent networking between storage and compute that is highly adaptable and programmable."
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
