How Infrastructure as Code is Accelerating Cloud Adoption, with HashiCorp VP of Engineering, Preeti Somal

The journey to cloud is not the same for everyone. In fact, for some, it can be a grueling and daunting process. For CIOs and CTOs of century-year-old companies, they are burdened by server after server piling up and as they tackle the obstacle of migrating data to the cloud. Meanwhile, peers at digitally-native companies, born in the cloud, use their agility and ease of scale to soar past their old-school brethren. So what’s a legacy company to do?

“The reality in the environment is that there are all stages of software in these companies and disentangling that and figuring out how to move to the cloud is a journey. And that's the thing where we're really excited about being able to help with at least kind of taking care of the infrastructure pieces. So CIOs and CTOs can focus on the application layers and not really have to worry about how the infrastructure gets operated.”  19:37

That’s Preeti Somal, Vice President of Engineering at HashiCorp, a company constructed on the idea of building open-source communities to help users quickly implement the infrastructure necessary to run cloud applications. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Preeti unpacks how open-source tools are helping customers get to the cloud faster, how hybrid cloud models have evolved over the years, and more. 

Main Takeaways

• All Shapes and Sizes: There is not a one-size-fits-all method for companies trying to move to the cloud, but cloud adoption has been driven by organizations prioritizing the ability to quickly add applications and implement them within their network.
• Building a Secure Environment: The shift to operating in the cloud requires a different approach to security. Instead of focusing on a secure network perimeter with the assumption of trust, you must shift your focus to securing the infrastructure and application services themselves through a trusted source of identity management
• Building a Remote-First Team: When you’re building a remote-first team, you have to be intentional about how you document your process so when you scale, your team members will have a complete understanding of the workflow.

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