Embracing cloud migration at scale

To fully embrace the benefits of the cloud, businesses have to distribute existing workloads across hybrid and/or multi-cloud environments. While the benefits of this digital transformation are undeniable, it’s not a process without its challenges.

This can be particularly true for firms with sprawling environments, perhaps as the result of mergers and acquisitions over the years, or those looking to get data in the right shape to be used for machine learning or AI.

How can businesses reconcile these problems at scale? And what are the specific steps to success when it comes to cloud consolidation?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Rajesh Naidu, SVP, chief architect, and head of data platform & data management at Expedia, to discuss the challenges of cloud migration.

Highlights

“We have over 70 petabytes of data at Expedia group, and one of the things we learned early on is we need to bring all this data together. So we actually consolidated and built a data lake, where we brought all of the data together from our brands.”

“The key thing with AI that we've seen at least, is going back to the data and having the quality of the data and other things. And I think that naturally leads to some of this consolidation and bringing things together. Because it can get expensive if you're running these bespoke spokes of data and these separate hubs.”

“I think a key requirement over here is to have the right top-down executive sponsorship, a prioritization within the company to understand what the priority is. Sometimes you may have to put a little bit of a pause on some of the growth aspirations to bring this stack together, but as soon as you bring it together you need to be prepared to turn on the growth faucet again because that is the expectation from a business perspective.”

Footnotes

• How Expedia Group used platform convergence to harness the efficiency of generative AI
• How to prepare and prioritize workloads for cloud migration
• “The tech guys want to move to the cloud, the finance people want the savings”: IT leaders feel ‘rushed’ to the cloud – here’s why slow and steady wins the race
• Consolidate to simplify application security: Why this is a business imperative
• Why 'shadow SaaS' is becoming a major blind spot for enterprise security teams
• Structured vs unstructured data management
• What is machine learning and why is it important?
• What is generative AI?

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