Cloud Migrations With Tina Gravel

#AskTheCEO Podcast

Tina Gravel is the Senior Vice President of Channels and Alliances at Cyxtera Technologies, where she helps businesses migrate their mission-critical applications to The Cloud. She is an award-winning executive with more than 25 years of experience in the IT outsourcing, cloud, security and SaaS industries. Contact Tina: Web: TinaGravel.com Twitter: @tgravel Contact Avrohom: Web: https://asktheceo.biz Facebook: AvrohomGottheil Twitter: @avrohomg Instagram: @avrohomg INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS: [01:09] Cloud is becoming more prevalent in the Enterprise space, with companies migrating more of their mission-critical applications to The Cloud. One of the more recent buzzwords permeating today’s vernacular is Hybrid Cloud. What does Hybrid Cloud really mean? [02:47] What are the considerations businesses need to have when thinking about moving their mission-critical applications to The Cloud? [03:53] A critical requirement for mission-critical applications is uptime. After all, you can’t have a global bank just go offline during a stock trade! One of the inherent benefits of migrating to The Cloud is the Service Level Agreement for guaranteed uptime. Many providers use a term called five 9’s of reliability. IBM just launched the z15 mainframe platform which offers seven 9’s. What do all these 9’s mean, and why are they important to businesses? [05:24] The more 9’s you have, the more expensive it is! [05:24] With regards to Cloud migrations, you need to balance the service level you want, with what you can afford to pay for. [07:03] How does Cyxtera help businesses with their Cloud migrations? [10:44] It’s no question that Cloud is the way to go for Enterprises that are launching brand new mission-critical applications. However, in the real world, the playing field is not so cut and dry. Let’s say, for example, that one of your core business applications is a COBOL program, which resides on a server in a backroom closet and stores its data in a huge flat file. First of all, how do you even begin to “cloud-enable” this ancient application along with its archaic flat-file database? The second challenge is that for that last 50 years no one has had to worry about cybersecurity. The application is running on a server in a secure location, and no one has access to it. As soon as this crucial and sensitive application moves to the cloud, suddenly, you have a new problem to worry about! Is it even worth it? [13:33] What is Zero Trust? [15:57] When migrating to The Cloud, make sure to only provide access to people who absolutely need it. [17:49] How do people connect with you? [18:17] Do you have any parting words of wisdom to share with the audience?