What a whirlwind May was as we attended several conferences, wrapping up with Red Hat Summit. Red Hat integrated AnsibleFest into Summit this year, providing a diverse amount of sessions, including technical, strategic, and a number of customer use case sessions, which were a personal favorite.

The cloud creates security challenges because it expands the attack surface and impedes network visibility. Hackers can use your network to travel from vulnerable endpoints to the cloud. The cloud also creates ambiguity about who is accountable for security: your organization or the provider.

Hybrid cloud has staying power as a popular cloud model. Research and Markets predicted that between 2022 and 2027, the hybrid cloud market will grow by more than 20% annually. Today’s companies are embracing hybrid cloud because of its flexibility, scalability, and cost effectiveness.

Cloud has become so popular that the market is almost saturated. The 2019 State of the Cloud Report discovered that 94% of the companies surveyed use cloud and 84% of them have adopted a multi-cloud strategy that uses two or more clouds managed by multiple vendors.

These days, the question is not whether to adopt the cloud but what type of cloud to adopt. An overwhelming majority of companies use some type of cloud, and many have taken a cloud-first approach to their overall technology strategy. Gartner predicted that organizations that don’t use a cloud-first strategy will lose out to their competitors.

When it comes to a company's infrastructure, the word "migration" can strike fear and dread in the hearts of many CIOs and IT Directors. Why? Cost. Cost is the number one issue and time is a close second. The day to day workload is impacted by a migration and people are a costly internal resource. These are hurdles the CIO must take into account when looking at a migration. Aside from cost and time, CIOs need to ensure that the data is moved without running into a ton of problems along the way. But there are some measures that can be taken to mitigate these issues and make the migration a smooth one.

Technology trends are continually emerging. Your company needs to take on technology initiatives to maintain a competitive edge and achieve digital transformation. All this needs to be accomplished while staying within budget.