Public cloud services vendors have had a number of notable outages that have taken down well-respected web-based companies, temporarily putting them out of business. In a session, presented at Data Summit 2016, Michael J Corey, president, Ntirety – A HOSTING Company, and Don Sullivan, system engineer database 
specialist, VMware, posited that, despite the fact that cloud is no longer a cutting-edge, disruptive technology, 10 years after it first came to the fore, in many ways, the public cloud environment is still the Wild West.
Corey and Sullivan discussed recent cloud trends, the lessons learned, and what it means to companies moving forward as they migrate to the cloud. Here are some key takeaways about what to be aware of from their session.
1. Make sure you read the fine print in the contract on what the cloud provider is responsible and what you are responsible for.
2. The customer is rarely right – what enterprises hope to achieve with public cloud services rarely occurs.
3. You are responsible for backing up your data with public cloud services and clouds.
4. More and more vendors are offering licenses by the drink because people don’t want long-term contracts.
5. Buying by the drink is fine until everybody decides to have a drink not everything should be bought by the drink. Examine costs carefully.
6. Buy cloud services like a commodity and leverage vendors that allow you to do that.
7. Don’t design your architecture with everything in one basket - or with one cloud provider - use diverse cloud service providers. This helps reduce risk because clouds are not highly redundant.
8. You need to know the individual components that constitute your critical architecture - if you don’t know eventually it is going to burn you. Don’t expect to abdicate responsibility and don’t try to develop an enterprise cloud strategy without help from qualified infrastructure providers.
9. More cloud providers are moving toward the paradigm of being brokers who are selling a portfolio of services, so risks are spread out.
10. Think hybrid. To be safe, hybrid - mixing cloud services and on-premise - is the way to go.
Data Summit is an annual 2-day conference, preceded by a day of workshops. Data Summit offers a comprehensive educational experience designed to guide you through all of the key issues in data management and analysis today. The event brings together IT managers, data architects, application developers, data analysts, project managers, and business managers for an intense immersion into the key technologies and strategies for becoming a data-informed business.
Many presentations from Data Summit 2016 have been made available for review at www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2016/Presentations.aspx.