Transcript
Transcript: Finding Inspiration from Cloud Leaders: Dispelling Myths About the Cloud
[The text "GC Cloud For Managers and Executives" appears onscreen.]
[00:00:07] Hi there, my name is Marc Brouillard, and I'm the Chief Digital Officer for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the former Chief Technology Officer for the Government of Canada.
[00:00:14] I'm here today to dispel some popular cloud myths, and I'm going to try to keep this very non-technical. The first myth is: is the cloud safe? So first we have to look at what are the differences between the cloud and traditional IT [information technology].
[00:00:29] In the traditional IT model, we build data centres. We fill them with computers and we talk about locking down the perimeter. Let me give you an analogy of what that means. Imagine that you want to become an egg farmer. First, you're going to go out and buy some chickens and then you're going to build a coop. You're going to put the chickens in the coop and you're going to put a fence around the coop to keep the foxes out.
[00:00:56] In this scenario, the chickens are our computers. The coop is our data centre and the fence is our network or our perimeter defenses. And the foxes are the hackers and bad guys that are trying to get at our data. In this perspective, we're looking at a very controlled environment. But if that perimeter, if that fence gets broken and the fox gets into the coop, it has access to all the chickens. Not good.
[00:01:26] How is that different in the cloud environment? The fundamental difference is the cloud is designed to be without fences. So, imagine that we're going to go again with our egg farming analogy and we're going to put all our chickens with everyone else's chickens and there's no fence. Instead, we're going to actually put fences around each individual chicken. This means that we have much more granular protection. And if the fox does get into the field, it doesn't put every chicken at risk.
This is the fundamental difference in security models between the cloud and our traditional IT systems. We call this a zero trust model or software-defined networks. It's much more flexible, and it allows for that protection to follow our applications however they move around in the environment.
[00:02:21] So, it's a different model. It requires different skill sets, but it certainly can be as safe and sometimes even safer than our traditional IT models. In addition, cloud service providers spend an awful lot of money investing in protecting their environments and monitoring the traffic to ensure that bad actors don't get in, even if their clients are not as good as they should be on the security side.
[00:02:48] The second most popular myth is: is the cloud more or less expensive? And the answer is: it depends. Paying for cloud is fundamentally different than traditional computing. Again, going back to our egg farming model, you have to buy each of those chickens; you have to buy the coop, you have to buy the fence, you have to make all those investments so that you can harvest the eggs. In the cloud model, you only pay for the eggs that you harvest. You don't pay for the initial investments, but you pay for the ongoing use of the environment. There's a couple of advantages to this.
[00:03:26] First of all, from a project funding and investment perspective, you don't have to have large capital investments upfront, but you do have to have ongoing operational expenses. The good news with that is those operational expenses include things like the ongoing evergreening of hardware, software, patching, security. So it is an all-in price. You're only paying for what you use. The other significant advantage of this is exactly that: you're paying for what you use.
[00:03:56] If you're not using the system at night, you can turn it off and you get no charges. If you need a high usage on a particular event—for example, a census or tax season or end of year for whatever your business cycle is—you can scale your infrastructure up to meet the demand of just that period and then scale it down when you don't need it. And, I'm sorry, I don't have an egg farming example for that one. But what it means is you're paying for what you get and only for what you use.
[00:04:29] However, that also takes a new type of approach. You have to design your systems so they can be stood up and taken down automatically and very quickly. This is the third benefit of the cloud: cloud is on demand and it's designed to be stood up, turned on in an instant, and then turned off when it's not in use. What this means is there's essentially a limitless capacity. There's no wait time for procurement. There's no wait time for implementation installation. There's no issues if a computer goes down, they just put you on the next one. So, your flexibility in being able to stand up environments and then stand them down again is very, very easy.
But once again, it takes a different approach. We need people who are skilled in building those capabilities, those automations, so that they can meet those operational demands. But automation is the real key. It changes the way we develop, test and release things to the cloud. It means that we can have automated pipelines for releasing software, which greatly enhances the predictability of how our systems are going to respond. How many times have you seen a system that has worked very well in tests, and then when it goes into production, it falls down? This helps eliminate that problem by creating environments that are identical to each other and then automating the release process through that capability. It's also very ideal for experimentation because there's no upfront costs; you can stand up an environment, run a test, try something out, and if it doesn't work, you just turn it off. If it does work, then you can scale it into production and scale it up for the needs of your users.
[00:06:17] I hope this has been informative, and I hope you enjoy your journey to getting on the cloud. Thank you very much. Have a great day.
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