Alexis
Hi everyone, welcome to Talk Tech with Data Dave. I’m Alexis, your host of this podcast along with my dear friend Data Dave. Hey, Dave. 

Data Dave
Good morning, Alexis, how are you? 

Alexis
I’m good. I’m good. I’m excited, today we have another cloud question. I actually noticed that our cloud podcasts are getting a lot of love, which is why I’m excited. I have another cloud question for you. Hope you’re ready. 

Data Dave
Okay, very good. Let’s go for it. 

Alexis
Before we begin, I do want to just throw out there- hey, everybody, if you have a question for Data Dave, please feel free to submit a question to us at talktech@d3clarity.com. Just send us an e-mail, and we’ll be happy to answer your question on the podcast.  

Dave, our question today actually came from one of our team members. Why are organizations using a hybrid or a multi-cloud approach? I think I have to start with, can you describe what hybrid and multi-cloud approach kind of mean? And then can you answer the question? 

Data Dave
Yes, absolutely. So, a multi-cloud approach or hybrid approach is essentially as it says, hybrid is not pure in any way. It’s a mixture of different approaches to computing classic hybrid would be on-premise (traditional on premise computers). I’d buy the computers. I put them in the computer room, and I manage them myself, linked to a cloud.  

Now, of course, because we’ve got multiple clouds, everybody and their brother seems to have a cloud. You can have multiple clouds and link everything together. That becomes what we term a hybrid cloud where you’re operating on-premise. You’re operating in Microsoft Cloud, you’re operating in Amazon Cloud or Google Cloud and there’s various other smaller clouds that different people offer whether they’re rebadged of the big clouds, or whether they’re actually private. But it doesn’t really matter. There’s also the idea that a large organization might actually create their data center, essentially using cloud-shared computing type techniques, so they divorce the machinery from the applications, and they operate it as kind of a private cloud.  

We operate it in that way, the operating model being a shared services model. They’ll also have organizations that rent a significant portion of, say, in AWS data center or a Microsoft Data center. And so, they’re permanently ensconced in that cloud and it becomes a private area of the cloud. So, there’s multiple sort of structures there, there’s on-premise, traditional, there’s multiple public clouds. And then there’s this concept of a private cloud that you own and is run like a cloud. And then you’ve got the idea where I’ve bought, purchased, or rented a section of cloud and operate it as a private cloud. 

Alexis
You went through a couple of different terms there. You kind of described hybrid as in using cloud and using something on-prem. And then you described a private cloud taking a section of the cloud and putting it aside, so it’s just yours. You hit multi-cloud a little bit, but would you mind describing that just a little bit more? 

Data Dave
So multi-cloud becomes the idea, you’re using different services from different providers, and they happen to be on different clouds. If you use Microsoft Office 365 or office products now and you’re using office on the cloud, your e-mail is in the cloud or you’re using Gmail or you’re using whatever e-mail provider as a cloud provider for e-mail. Then, you don’t actually know where or how that is running. It is running in the cloud somewhere. And then you’re using an application that is in a different cloud, so you might be using zoom. We’re using zoom right now. Zoom is a cloud-based application, no idea where it’s running. 

Alexis
Yeah, no. 

Data Dave
No, no idea. It’s on a cloud platform somewhere. I don’t know. It’s owned by Zoom or whether they’ve rented it from AWS wherever. I don’t know. There is a hybrid cloud model. Just because you happen to be using things from different providers that are essentially hosted somewhere else. 

Alexis
That statement you just tells me that, definitely, we use multi cloud approach because we use M365 as our suite provider and then we use in the AWS to host our website. And then obviously we’re using zoom, right now. Is like everybody using a multi-cloud.  

Data Dave
They actually are probably. 

Alexis
That’s what I was hearing. Okay, good. 

Data Dave
It’s very rare, now that you’re not multi-cloud because you use different applications for different places, and we don’t know and they’re especially a large organization. They’re probably all over the place. Salesforce.com is somewhere in the cloud, and PeopleSoft is someone in the cloud, and you might be using Oracle’s cloud suite and Microsoft Cloud suite and you might be doing some Google Analytics for best of breed. You might be doing some AWS work with Chime or hosting your website or using their Edge providers or whatever.  

There’s all kinds of things that we use all over the cloud. So, you tend to choose the cloud or choose the application that is best fit for your needs, and then where it’s running is becoming less important. Now what that means as you get more sophisticated, it’s fairly straightforward to start with sort of Microsoft e-mail and different things. That’s pretty straightforward. If you’re a large organization and you want to give your employees a good experience. You want them to have single sign- on across all these services that you’ve purchased across the board. You need to now get into the multi-cloud technologies, and you want to pass on your identity from one provider to another provider. So you don’t want to re-log on every time. “I went to Microsoft. I went to Salesforce.com. I went to Oracle, I went to AWS.” And each time, you’re challenged for your identity, you don’t want that. You want to be able to pass your identity across all these clouds. 

Alexis
That’s just a good practice because we have to remember so many passwords otherwise. 

Data Dave
Exactly. And it’s actually more secure to do it as well. But then you get into the multi-cloud technologies where all the clouds can take a delegated identity or an identity from one of them, the one we use is Azure Active Directory. Then, we integrate that with the other providers that’s relatively common. The other thing to think about in hybrid cloud is if you’re doing a data platform. If you want to bring all your data together and your data is now spread, of course, across on-premise, in the cloud, different clouds, different places, different applications, your data is spread all over the place. You don’t always really know exactly where it is.  

Now if you want to do some deep analytics, you want to load it in Snowflake. You want to do a data warehouse. You want to do an extended data lake or something like that. Then you want to put the technologies in place, and this is where the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud starts to become more complicated and get more real. “I want to bring together my operations data from Amazon and from Microsoft and from different places and bring it into one place so I can analyze it, do some machine learning.” Like we talked about the other day. Yeah. “Bring all this data here again to make that carter of data that I can work on.” And so, this is where you get into the cloud integration technologies and that sort of thing. While it’s very common, you still have to pay attention to, “Where is my data, what is my identity as I move around this landscape and as I pull the data together from the different landscape that I have”. 

Alexis
What I’m hearing you say is kind of like what we talked about AI last week. Many of us are using a multi-cloud approach to some extent, and we probably don’t even realize it.  A multi-cloud approach is the best option for a lot of organizations because it offers the opportunity for us to do so many different things.  

Like you just dropped the word “Snowflake” in there and I know “Snowflake” is a technical term, and I don’t know what it means. But we’re going to put that onto another podcast. Now that is something that probably is going to be better to run on its own versus having to transition to our cloud to be able to use, is that correct? 

Data Dave
That is correct. 

Alexis
Okay, that’s what I was like hearing you say. The initial question – why do organizations use a hybrid or multi-cloud approach? Mostly out of necessity.  

Data Dave
It’s kind of out of necessity and it’s kind of out of best of breed. Each one of the cloud providers has a particular leaning, if you like. They’re all good at one thing and not so good at another. To a certain extent, there are differences, so people choose them for different reasons.  

You’re also not necessarily in control of which clouds you use. If you buy an application. If you buy like we just said, Zoom, I’ve got no idea where Zoom is running. They could be hosting it on their own cloud, they could be hosting it on there somewhere, they could be hosting on AWS. I’ve got no idea. If you buy into that service and as software as a service continues to grow, if you buy into a service, you simply don’t know when you get into business application say, “I want to buy it a HR management application and I buy the one from Workday”. I’m not advertising Workday, I’m just using it as an example. 

Alexis
Again, though, Workday, if you would like to sponsor Talk Tech with Data Dave, just let us know. 

Data Dave
Yeah…  

If you did do that, then Workday has probably already chosen where their instance is gonna run for you. But if you want to then pull that data and use it somewhere else, then you have to integrate with that instance of Workday that is running somewhere to get your data out and move it to wherever you’re going to work with it and analyze it. Because that is all your employee information, so, that’s valuable information for you. If you’ve chosen to use Microsoft Dynamics, then it’s probably Microsoft running on Azure probably, or a flavor of Azure.  

If you then want the data you’ve got to integrate with it and pull that, so you’re not always in control when you choose these applications. You choose the application for the benefit of the application. You hire it essentially to do a  job and where it’s running is a secondary choice, but when you want the data, you have to pay attention to that choice. And when you log into it, you have to make sure that your identity is recognized by that platform. 

Alexis
That’s a perfect kind of short and sweet explanation of that answer. I would love to know if there are other suggestions if you happen to be watching the video, you see that Dave’s backdrop says Data Dave Dives Deeper, which is our bonus podcast. If you’re interested in joining us for Data Dave Dives Deeper, where we talk to industry professionals about their life in data and cloud and all things technology, just reach out to us at that talk tech e-mail and we’d love to have you on the pod. We’d love to have this conversation with you and explore your thoughts and opinions on this topic. Dave, thank you so much for answering that question today, that was kind of the perfect answer for what could have been a very complicated question. 

Data Dave
Yes, absolutely. No worries. Alexis, that was a good question. Very good. Thank you. 

Alexis
Thank you! Don’t forget to send us your questions and have a fantastic day. Bye. 

Data Dave
Yep. Thank you, everybody, and bye.