Taking place on Thursday 16th November, our first CloudVision event — hosted at the remarkable offices of Milbank LLP in London — was extremely well received by attendees.
The session, which brought a range of speakers from our trusted strategic partners, delivered insight into an array of topics centred on cloud innovation and security, offering guests the opportunity to ask questions and receive answers in real-time.
Compèred by our head of cloud services, Lee Thatcher, the afternoon went by all too quickly, with presentations by Microsoft, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Comms-care and Solace Cyber, all in the extraordinary environment of our chosen venue.
A light lunch — sponsored by Microsoft — was served, alongside refreshments throughout, and the experience wrapped up with an open bar and networking.
Key session highlights included:
Microsoft security — David Morrow, security lead at Microsoft
Key points David covered included:
- Organisations are increasingly relying on technology for agility and innovation in the cloud.
- Customers feel cloud is the logical place to take advantage of benefits AI brings, over large datasets.
- Microsoft is the largest security company in the world, by revenue and by clients, and can harness the power of the network to analyse signals and allow users to stay ahead of emerging threats.
- Users are on a journey to zero-trust, and this begins with identities and end-points, and the proper management of sensitive data.
And further to the presentation, the audience posed a few questions to David, such as:
Audience member: Do you think in terms of cyberspace, reactive rather than proactive, other services seem to think a bit further forward?
David: Our days of playing catch up are done, Microsoft has innovated and is now competitive with other vendors in space.
Audience member: What is the biggest threat right now when it comes to the security landscape?
David: Where multi-factor authentication (MFA) isn’t enabled — people have it but don’t deploy it, especially in critical admin accounts. MFA will protect you from 99% of attacks, outlier attacks make up just 1%.
Accelerate development for AWS — Darren Crawley, partner development manager, AWS
Darren pointed out:
- Cloud services are rapidly gaining traction and it’s vital that everyone is aligned — AWS is responsible for the cloud in its physical sense, whereas customers are responsible for what’s stored there.
- AWS is happy to work with CloudCoCo due to its multi-cloud approach and its remaining cloud agnostic approach, bringing together experts and specialisms from a wide variety of vendors.
- Customers mainly come to AWS for its scale of services and global reach, providing flexibility through a single console.
- A robust platform is key, and AWS’s services offer 99.9% reliability.
The audience also posed questions to Darren, a key highlight including:
Audience member: [Regarding a slide containing a map of infrastructure] Can you further explain the significance of the locations described?
Darren: There are 32 regions with multiple data centres and three separate availability zones, with their own infrastructure, with the ability to spread data across multiple zones.
Cloud technology and creating innovation — Chris Hill, alliances director at Alibaba Cloud Europe & ANZ
Chris particularly mentioned:
- There are currently 1.3 billion users of Alibaba Cloud globally, with 30 cloud regions, 89 availability zones, 3,200+ CDN nodes, and 200 countries.
- The organisation spearheads continuous global efforts on ESG and sustainability, including a commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
- Alibaba Cloud is also dedicated to international data protection standards across all customers, around the globe.
- With an inclusive eco-system, 11,000+ global partners and 500+ joint solutions, Chris shared a selection of insightful case studies to underpin the service offering.
And Chris shared an extremely interesting fact regarding the business’ services:
The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang were the first to be streamed via cloud, with Alibaba delivering the services and infrastructure. Due to the success of this partnership. Alibaba Cloud has been appointed to deliver the same service for the Olympic Games in Paris, 2024 — facilitating the streaming of the events through its data centre in Frankfurt.
Flying you to the cloud — Alex Parkinson, practice manager at Comms-care
Alex’s presentation covered:
- An introduction to Ingram Micro Services — with Comms-care being an Ingram Micro company since 2016 — a leading UK-based channel-first IT services provider
- The three-way partnership between CloudCoCo, Ingram, and Comms-care to bring key programs, motions, and incentives to CloudCoCo customers — driving cloud transformation.
- What the key drivers to move to the cloud are, such as CAPEX to OPEX conversions, cybersecurity threats, IT resource constraints, the need for insight, application innovation, cost optimisation, enabling hybrid work, and hardware/software contract expiry, among others.
- Funding opportunities available from AWS and Microsoft, meaning cloud migration would be at little or even no cost to the customer.
Any Cloud security — Paul Cashmore, managing director, Solace Cyber
As CloudCoCo’s cyber security partner, Paul from Solace Cyber — alongside our head of cyber security, Mark Allen — shared the following insightful points:
- Recommendations for security services, including identity security, SSO, next-generation security monitoring, assessing PII data held, and reviewing back-up and disaster recovery.
- The project onboarding and implementation process, such as secure configuration, permissions and creating a business continuity plan, among others.
- Security management information, including risk registers, utilising the knowledge of security specialists to investigate alerts, and integrating into a single ticket system.
- Where to begin: starting with a forensic audit, assessing external vulnerabilities and mail security, before moving on to MFA assessment, firewalls and perimeter, end-user and endpoint, phishing assessment, and cyber insurance status.
During the Q&A at the close of Paul’s session, the audience shared real-world examples of organisations that had experienced critical incidents, including one business with a turnover of £150m+ that went into liquidation following a ransomware attack, and another that took two months to recover from the loss of 23,000 users following a similar occurrence.
We’d like to thank our speakers for delivering value for our attendees, and showcasing the current state of the cloud/cloud security landscape.
Our second CloudVision event will be announced soon, so watch this space! Sign-up to our newsletter to be the first to receive information.
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