Hi, everyone. I am Shruti Dummak. I'm a senior customer engineer at Google Cloud, and, I have been working with Google Cloud. I think it's been five years.And in my span, I've covered a lot of customers around manufacturing, logistics, digital natives, and retail customers. And from my experience, I wanna talk about what exactly does cloud adoption and transition mean for an enterprise. So this is the agenda real quick. We we do wanna start with why do customers or the enterprises want to think about cloud? What is exactly the hype? We've generally seen that everyone kind of rushes what has been popular. Right? Whether it's cloud or artificial intelligence in the last few years, generative AI in the last two years, or even agentic AI in the in the last couple of months.

So it is very important for any organization to think why should we make that move. Then once that decision is made, we will get into the how of the process, the people, and the technology along this journey. Once that is done, we need to double click and get into the details of what exactly needs to be done. And since it is a career day to day, I do wanna spend some time on the career discussion of what different roles can you actually go for if you're thinking about cloud engineering. And it's not just a discussion, but I do want to go through some of the call for actions on what can you do to actually get to the end goal. With that said, let's get started. So beyond the hype, like, why exactly cloud?

I started with, generally, everyone goes towards technology, but they don't know why you should go for a certain technology. So what we do at Google Cloud is actually encourage the people and encourage the customers to understand what exactly and why exactly do you need to get start with this journey. Generally, there is confusion. People do want to think that, okay. This is the right way to go because we cannot maintain the data centers. We don't want to take that responsibility. What we want to do is think about the business logic. We want to free our resources for maintenance. That is one reason. The other reason is having visibility and understanding what would be your cost today, tomorrow, and beyond. There are multiple reasons why you can actually think about cloud and multiple events that pushes an organization or enterprise to move towards a cloud.

And we've seen customers who are at a different spectrum. Right? There are customers who are very early in the journey, whereas there are customers who are pretty much mature and know under and understand what is it required to move to this cloud journey. So, we generally come up with, benefits of cloud, and I'll walk you through that shortly. K. So to to begin with, there are so many benefits that cloud can provide. First one is agility and speed. Like I said, your entire stack from physical to application layer generally is maintained by a customer itself when you are having your workloads on premise. But when it comes to cloud, the hyperscalers take that responsibility out of your mind, out of your day to day job, and you are basically pushed to think about just the business logic and creating application.

That's a huge thing where the resources are freed up and you can actually concentrate on your go to market and your strategy and creating products and bringing them to market. So that is one of the biggest benefits. The second one is scalability and elasticity. Let's say as an organization, if you are in a hyper growth trajectory, it could be a start up. It could be a mature organization. But if you wanna start with, today, I'm at at at 10 products and I want to go to 50 products in five years. How am I able to do that? Scalability is is is one of the biggest benefits as well for cloud where you can actually remove all the get all the resources, concentrate on building the product instead of maintaining the software, versions, instead of, thinking about how am I going to get resources for this particular app, how am I going to increase the resources for this particular application.

All of that can be auto scale and controlled on the cloud. So that is another benefit. The third one is cost optimization, which is pretty much common and everyone wants to think about it. So what happens when you have a data center and when you actually are purchasing your own hardware? When you purchase your own hardware, you are, like I said, you are the sole controller. You do have customization and you you you do have a lot of control, but you are the one who is thinking about the security aspect. You are the one who's thinking about maintaining that hardware. You are the one who's thinking about, okay. The hardware is almost this this has been used.

Now I have to purchase new hardware. So you you have to think about all those things when you are in a data center. Whereas on the cloud, a lot of that hardware is taken care of by the hyperscalers. You have, orders, orders, scalability, and then you have all these visibility to understand where your spend is going. That is one aspect of cost optimization. The second aspect is you can add governance to all these resources. I can give you an example. So let's say I have five developers and five test, engineers. I do not want the five developers to spin up BigQuery instances, continuously because that's gonna cost me a lot. Whereas the test, engineers, I do not want them to spin too many cloud runs, which is a compute on cloud, so that I can actually maintain the cost optimization.

So first is visibility and second one is the control. I will be placing a control on each of the engineers on what resources per project, what resources need to be spun up, and what resources can I spin down? So that is an important aspect for cost optimization. The fourth one is security and compliance. Security, in in in my opinion, is is not an option anymore. Everyone is thinking about it. Everyone wants to, have end to end secure. And we've seen so many, incidents in the last few years where the security has been compromised. So when it comes to security on cloud, you have a shared responsibility model where right from the physical layer to the presentation layer, the hyperscalers generally maintain the security, but the application layer security is maintained by the customer themselves. So that is, I think by default is it's nonnegotiable. And on Google Cloud, the data is secure whether it is at rest or whether it is in transit.

So this it it is, secure by default. There's no option for you to choose yes or no. So if one, two, three, four, all these four are in place, that gives you room for innovation. And, generally, you can push your developers to think about productivity and focus them on the business logic, focus them on creating new products, building new products. And that actually is does reduce barrier to experimentation. So these are I would I would still say that these are some of the benefits. Once you get into the whole journey, you know how important it is to go for cloud versus being on premise. Now since the enterprises have answered the question of whether they should go to the cloud or no, that is kind of settled. Right?

So now, yes, the CIOs, the CTOs, the CXOs, everyone has thought, okay, we have to go for the cloud. We've chosen which high hyperscaler we want to move forward. Now how do we go there? So this is how, Google Cloud generally helps the customer, and we've made it more simple. And it talks about technology, people, and processes. So a lot of times that people ask questions, and I think I reverse this. A lot of times the customers ask question as in how will I get there? How safe will it be? What is it that I have to put in resources, cost perspective to get to a point where my organization is going to look a cloud first organization? And that is the that is where that is where the the the Google Cloud has come up with this, the technology, the people, and processes.

So technology is when you look at your landscape. Let's say you are a retail customer, a retail organization, and you know what your, landscape is, whether it's purchase order, whether it's inventory, or whether it's other processes. You need to understand which would be the first movers. You have to create a heat map on these are the first movers application. These are the ones which might need modernization. Maybe you want to move from Windows to Linux. And then beyond that, you wanna think about, okay, these are the ones which is going to take a longer period of time. So once that is kind of mapped out, you know where the technology is and what technology you are going to use on the hyperscaler. The second point is people.

What exactly as an organization have I do I need to do to arrange my people? Because you do have to keep your day to day work, have a green light on your day to day work. At the same time, you have to think about, pushing your people towards cloud migration. And this is where the hyperscaler, especially like Google Cloud, comes in with options where it does provide Google Cloud consulting or there are several partners. There's data partners. There's AI partners. There's infrastructure partners. There's too many partners who come in and actually do the implementation for the customers. And the third part is processes. So once the technology and people are in place, the processes def definitely tell you how can you move forward. Is it a phased approach?

Is it going to take me a year and a half to move out of my data center? Is it going to take me a year and a half to move my whole data to cloud? How am I going to create those data pipelines? How am I going to put my resources into place because I do have to maintain what it is today on my data center. At the same time, I do want to move to cloud. So a lot of that planning goes into the third part. Once that planning and how is known, then we have to double click into what exactly needs to be done. And the what is, again, doubling down into people, technology, and processes. You start with identity, access and data management. You you think about different architectures.

There's a lot of things that are put into place. There's networking. There's security. There's also, infrastructure as a code. You can use Terraform. You're thinking about the future, and you're building for the future. So you don't have to do do things manually. You can just create a Terraform script and it can actually create a new environment for you just from that Terraform code. There's also software life cycle management. There are CICD, solutions out there. So you think about people, technology, process, map all these things, and then start with this journey. The the most important thing as you move along is learn from the assessment, lead throughout. You have to think about the scale and secure it by default. Security is is never going to be an option.

Now the the the last thing I do want to tell you since this is a lightning talk, there's so much more to share, but I I do want to, highlight this is as you move along this journey, you always have to assess yourself. You have to measure the process. You need to understand where am I as an organization in this cloud adoption journey, in this migration journey. And that's why if you think about dividing your goals into small things, whether it's a tactical thing, day to day, small tasks, or it is a strategic thing for the next four year four years or five years, Or is it transformational thing, 10 x 10 x thinking with partnerships with hyperscalers?

So you have to always measure yourself as an organization. So that was about why cloud, how do you need to adopt cloud, and, a sneak peek into what exactly needs to be done when you have to start your cloud journey. Now I do wanna spend some time and, more of an open discussion and and sharing from my end is what are the different roles that you can actually go for if you're thinking about cloud engineering? It could be a developed software developer role when you are working on certain product on the cloud. Examples could be Cloud Run or GKE or or anything. The other part is the go to market roles where someone like myself come into comes into picture. A customer engineering. Customer engineering role is more about, helping the customers deliver those use cases and deliver the technology and see the impact. I think it's it's very fulfilling.

There's there's a lot of flexibility, and, you get to learn a lot in in in that as well. The other one is a technical account manager role where once the customer is on cloud, you kind of help them maintain and even think about the future as, you're supporting the customer. There are several other roles, that you can actually think about, whether it's a partner engineer, you're thinking about, a a a field sales rep, or if you're thinking from a development perspective, you can be a solutions architect as well. So, that that that would be my thought process. Now I know I I'm I'm short of time, but the the last thing I do wanna talk about is there's one thing about researching and thinking that I want to do x y z, but there's other thing about executing. If you are thinking about embarking this journey on cloud, engineering, I would definitely suggest think about the certification, whether it's AWS, it's Google Cloud, or it's Azure or other clouds.

Think about getting the basics right. Think about getting the technology right, and then you can explore, different options. Alright. I think I am almost, over time. So I do want to thank everyone for spending the time with me and, going through this lightning talk of, the cloud adoption for customers. Thanks, everyone.