Over the years, several trends have taken hold of the IT world, such as virtualisation, cloud computing, big data and DevOps. However, there’s always been a fairly distinct line separating these technologies. They interacted out of necessity, but it didn’t happen often.

These days, it’s a very different story, and the lines are no longer clear. Data centre, cloud and IT heads are working more closely with application development and DevOps teams, as they lay the foundation for future solutions, services, and delivery methods.

At the ITWeb Cloud, Data Centre & DevOps Summit, being held on 24 February as a virtual event, iOCO will be hosting a panel discussion, on ‘Cloud adoption trends to advance digital transformation’. Moderated by Matthew Burbidge, senior writer and editor at ITWeb, the panel will be made up of Richard Vester, cluster executive UK, Europe, Cloud & Security; Alex Pryor divisional head of Digital Innovation, and Varsha Ramesar, cluster executive for Data and Analytics.

According to Vester, many businesses are still not using cloud in any meaningful kind of way yet, due to fears around costs and security. The field is complicated, it takes a certain amount of expertise to move data and applications to the cloud.

As a tech provider, iOCO specialises in several areas, including DevOps, cloud and data. Vester says it’s important to understand how these different specialities work together and how they compliment each other. "For example, building apps in the cloud is best practice. We have massive data warehouses in the cloud, and all these disciplines work together, in the cloud.”

Vester says if you look at organisations out there, they may have problems with legacy applications, and building and modernising those applications so they can take them into a hyperscale cloud is obviously critical. 

“It’s about looking at cloud, DevOps and data as an offering together, and how they can help the business do what its always done, but do it better. It’s not about radically changing what a business does, but doing it more easily, and with less cost and effort,” he adds.

The panel discussion will explore considerations, risks or drawbacks, lessons learned, use cases and actionable insights to help businesses on their digital transformation journeys.