It’s just been a few weeks since ONUG Spring gathered over 3,000 Global 2000 IT community members in the largest spring meeting to date. It was our third live virtual event, and we’ve all become pros adapting to the new technology. You can see it in how speakers, sponsors and community members are engaged, having become comfortable with the virtual ONUG platform. A few stats: nearly 80 countries and 1,000 unique companies, including Bank of America, Bank of NY, Wells Fargo, State Farm, FedEx, Merck, Cigna, Federal, local and state governments, Johnson & Johnson, Starbucks, Disney, Humana and 100’s more joined.  

The average number of hours participating was up from 4 hours to over 10. The ratio of IT executives to sponsors was over 150:1! I visited all the sponsors in the digital transformation showcase booths; the one thing I heard from all was that they were having great conversations! Yes, conversations and engagement. That’s the first time I’ve heard that so systematically.   

ONUG Spring was about putting a stake in the ground around requirements to scale enterprise cloud deployments way up and to assure that the technologies provide the flexibility to drive business value. The ONUG Board calls this Enterprise Cloud 2.0. Cloud security is a large requirement in Enterprise Cloud 2.0. The ONUG Collaborative launched the Cloud Security Notification Framework or CSNF “Decorator” to enable Enterprise Cloud 2.0. The Decorator provides a common definition of cloud security events that can be enriched and ingested into security infrastructure such as SIEM/SOR and security data lakes. Its purpose is to reduce the integration toil of security professionals plus increase visibility across cloud providers to maintain minimum viability security posture.    This is a big deal and as such, was reported on by Fortune, TechCrunch and a host of other publicatications.

There were so many great topics and discussions at ONUG Spring like the analyst roundtable, the great debate, the CTO roundtable and all the Proofs-of-Concept or PoCs; in fact, the PoCs were one of the biggest draws to ONUG Spring!

Building upon the momentum and success of ONUG Spring is planning for ONUG Fall in late October. The CSNF Decorator will be demonstrated for the first time. Many in the community want to see the Decorator also used by on-prem suppliers, thus we hope to include them with CSPs in the first CSNF Decorator demo. We’ll focus ONUG Fall on planning to build, run and secure Enterprise Cloud 2.0 infrastructure. Topics under consideration include hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure including IoT, 5G and WiFi 6.  Operational models will be explored as will economics as so many are struggling with CapEx vs. OpEx. Zero Trust and IAM will be center stage as we plan a new build for remote workforce infrastructure. Cloud sprawl is starting to become serious as is AIOps and now AISecOps, thanks to the Decorator. Cloud Edge will be front and center as it is so linked to business value creation offering consumers, suppliers, partners and employees a better digital experience.

The ONUG Collaborative Working Groups will take the second day of ONUG Fall to report out play-and-run books for Enterprise Cloud 2.0 in the areas of Elastic Infrastructure, Orchestration and Automation, AIOps, Cloud Native Security and of course, CSNF Decorator. We welcome all to become members of the Collaborative to engage with peers and change the industry with either open source projects, best practice sharing, aggregate requirements and more. Just go to https://onug.net/collaborative/, pick a membership level and engage. 

See you in the working groups and at ONUG Fall this October. Have a great summer everyone!