Just over a week ago, risual held its bi-annual summit at the risual HQ in Stafford – the whole company back in the office for a day of learning with a new format: a mini-conference called risual:NXT.<\/p>\n
I was given the task of running the technical track – with 6 speakers presenting on a variety of topics covering all of our technical practices: Cloud Infrastructure; Dynamics; Data Platform; Unified<\/span>\u00a0Intelligent<\/a> Communications and Messaging; Business Productivity; and DevOps – but I was also privileged to be asked to present a keynote session on technology trends. Unfortunately, my 35-40 minutes of content had to be squeezed into 22 minutes… so this blog post summarises some of the points I wanted to get across but really didn’t have the time.<\/p>\n For all but a very small number of organisations, not using the cloud means falling behind. Customers may argue that they can\u2019t use cloud service because of regulatory or other reasons but that\u2019s rarely the case \u2013 even the UK Police have recently been given the green light (the blue light?) to store information in Microsoft\u2019s UK data centres<\/a>.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 hybrid cloud is more than tactical. It will remain part of the landscape for a while to come\u2026 that\u2019s why Microsoft now has Azure Stack to provide a means for customers to run a true private cloud that looks and works like Azure in their own datacentres<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thankfully, there are fewer and fewer CIOs who don\u2019t see the cloud forming part of their landscape \u2013 even if it\u2019s just commodity services like email in Office 365. But we need to think beyond lifting and shifting virtual machines to IaaS and running email in Office 365<\/a>.<\/p>\n Organisations need to transform their cloud operations because that\u2019s where the benefits are \u2013 embrace the productivity tools in Office 365 (no longer just cloud versions of Exchange\/Lync\/SharePoint but a full collaboration stack) and look to build new solutions around advanced workloads in Azure. Microsoft is way ahead in the PaaS space – machine learning (ML), advanced analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT) \u2013 there are so many scenarios for exploiting cloud services that simply wouldn’t be possible on-premises without massive investment.<\/p>\n And for those who still think they can compete with the scale that Microsoft (Amazon and Google) operate at, this video might provide some food for thought\u2026<\/p>\n1. The cloud was the future once<\/h3>\n