By Monica Brink, EMEA Marketing Director, iland

I’m just back from Cisco Live which was held in Berlin this year. It was a great experience and the iland team and I had many great conversations with customers and partners. For those who don’t know, this is Cisco’s premier education and training conference for IT professionals worldwide and runs over five days. Sessions are wide ranging and in-depth, encouraging delegates to discover both content and inspiration to help advance their careers.

Being a Cisco Powered partner and part of Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric Partner Ecosystem, it was important for us to be there and to hear first-hand what customers are saying and what challenges or issues they are grappling with when it comes to cloud.

From my perspective, it was a great five days of networking and learning. Cisco Live is not only made up of a wealth of technical and business sessions as well as keynotes with more than a hundred exhibitors, it also has a very hands-on DevNet Zone and tons of social events that provide networking opportunities. In the midst of being bamboozled with new technology, ideas, content and talks here are my four key takeaways:

1. Cloud security and compliance are definitely at the forefront of many delegate’s minds. Many were asking about how to ensure their data and apps are secure in the cloud. During discussions at our iland booth, I found that companies were looking for guidance and advice from cloud providers. They want to leverage cloud more, but also need assurance that their workloads are secure. They want visibility into their security settings and they want the reporting capabilities to be able to do this.

2. I found it staggering that many companies still don’t have a disaster recovery solution in place! That said, most folks are aware of the need to implement one and are eager to explore cloud-based disaster recovery solutions with the right partner. What I found particularly encouraging is that there is recognition that a cloud-based DR solution can be a much more cost effective, flexible and reliable approach than companies trying to implement a DR solution themselves (especially mid-sized companies).

3. Many companies are interested in ‘cloud diversity’. What I mean by this is that many are not relying solely on one cloud provider. While companies may be using a cloud for hosting some applications, they are looking further afield as they expand their cloud usage. In fact, we had customers ask us how we can help them host both production and Dev/Test apps as well as their DR solutions so that they have a diversified cloud strategy and are not relying solely on their incumbent cloud provider.

4. There is a lot of interest in cloud visibility and transparency. There is no doubt that visibility into cloud resources and being able to monitor and analyse cloud costs, performance and capacity, as well as cloud security settings, is becoming a big priority for customers.

A lot of Cisco Live is about networking as well as all the technical and business sessions. I certainly learnt a great deal, had fun, and met some great people, all of which made it totally worth five days out of the office!