Business and industry press always tout how quickly companies are moving to the cloud. While this is true for cloud-first, start-ups, internet 1.0/2.0 companies, it is typically not the case for traditional enterprises, along with the vast number of local, state and federal government agencies and institutions. Over the past several years, ONUG Community members have voiced their concerns about moving workloads into the public cloud. To date, most community members deploy between 10 to 15% of their corporate workloads in the cloud, and those tend to be consumer-facing mobile applications and other digital products. With business continuity and agility attributes, public cloud is a highly desirable option to create business value. What ONUG Community members want are choices, and they need CONTROL. Enter Enterprise Cloud 2.0.

Enterprise Cloud 2.0 is a set of attributes and architectural features that enable the mid to large enterprise and governments to consume public cloud services with the controls needed to ensure the security, monitoring, resiliency and mobility of workloads. No company will give up control of their applications and data; that’s a recipe for being in the press for all the wrong reasons. To date, cloud service providers offer convenience. Need to scale up capacity or scale it down? They deliver. Need business continuity? They deliver. Need the latest-and-greatest developer tools as a service? They deliver. Need agility to react to market dynamics? They deliver. Need to extend your on-prem workload controls to public cloud providers? They don’t deliver. Need to extend your corporate policy to public cloud workloads? They don’t deliver.  

Thus the paradox: why aren’t you using the public cloud, since they offer so many conveniences? At the same time, you will hear voices questioning: why are you using a public cloud? After all, they don’t offer the controls you need to protect your brand. ONUG Community members are confronted with this convenience vs. control trade-off – and control wins every time. That’s because the cost of a public breach is too high a price to pay even for all the convenience in the world.  

Governance, policy and controls are at the heart of Enterprise Cloud 2.0.  At its center are the missing pieces of connective tissue between on- and off-prem infrastructure.  Indeed, some of the bigger gaps between on premise and hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure are:

• Elastic Infrastructure to connect into multi-clouds
• Orchestration and Automation of workloads across clouds to deliver workload mobility 
• Tools to operationalize hybrid/multi-cloud
• Governance and risk controls that span across hybrid/multi-cloud
• AI applied to operations
• Cloud Security Notification Framework (CSNF) for consistent cloud security logging of alarms and alerts 

The above list is partial. There are many gaps. Make no mistake: this is a massive multi-trillion dollar market. The combined market capitalization of Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Google is some $5.7 trillion. Even with that massive market capitalization, there is much room to grow with less than 5% of corporate computing currently conducted in the public cloud. Yes, only 5% of corporate computing is in the cloud.

At ONUG Fall 2021 we’ll start an industry conversation around Enterprise Cloud 2.0 attributes and how this connective tissue gets built. Solutions will come from start-ups, cloud providers, traditional on-prem suppliers, open source communities, academics and home-grown approaches to close these gaps. Public cloud is in the very early stages of corporate adoption.  Enterprise Cloud 2.0 will be the basis upon which the corporate world and government institutions adopt and consume the public cloud services that will address their unique needs. It is the infrastructure upon which the secure digital economy is being built.

Registration is now open for ONUG Fall