What is cloud computing and how does it work?

Oracle Academy Tech Chat

What is cloud computing? This is one of the questions Oracle Executive Vice President Applications EMEA answers in this episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat Podcast. Cormac also gives valuable insights on data sovereignty as well as defines the differences between public, private, and hybrid cloud.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;36;25

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Okay, So welcome to Oracle Academy, Texas, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generations workforce.

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My name is Orelon and I'm your host today. And in this episode, I'm joined by Oracle executive vice president of Applications for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Cormac Waters. And we discuss cloud and why understanding cloud is beneficial to both faculty and students. But first, a little bit about my guest. So coworkers based in Dublin, Ireland. He's a dedicated sports and especially rugby fan from what I know, and his sporting background enables him to value the power of collaboration and teamwork to grow and innovate high performance teams.

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So welcome, Cormac, and thank you so much for agreeing to our podcast today. It's lovely to have you here. Hey, thanks, Ira. It's great to be here. We have to be careful with our accents. We don't let them slide back to proper Irish accents and nobody understand a word we're saying. I think you're right there. Yes, There could be two Irish people.

00;01;31;03 - 00;01;59;06

Exactly. So maybe we could just start off with learning a little bit about your background and your role as Oracle. Okay, so you get my title. It's actually it's off of the ground with all those words. Basically. I live in Dublin, Ireland. I work at Oracle, and my job is to lead the team that sounds and implements AR applications, which are business applications across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

00;01;59;08 - 00;02;24;23

My background is I've been working in technology my whole career, so and I grew up in Dublin actually, and I actually went to my left secondary school. I went straight to IBM as a student for a year and did all their training courses and then they got a job in the software company and went to university, Dublin City University, at night to study computer applications and computer applications rather than computer science.

00;02;24;23 - 00;02;48;01

Computer applications was actually a bit of both. It was the scientific which I kind of like and naturally gravitate towards, but I was always worried that there's no point in deciding to do it if I couldn't play it to business or how to. How do people actually use it? And I joined Oracle in the middle of the pandemic back in 2020, and there's about four and a half thousand people in the team.

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And we have people working actually to about 75 countries across the region. So it's a it's a wonderful job and I'm very lucky. It's a difficult time to start during the pandemic, but things have changed, thankfully, since then. We were going to talk about cloud computing and its benefits, but what exactly is cloud computing for those who don't know what it means?

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It's one of those things, actually, and we often talk to people about like you talk to most people and say, Oh, we're moving to the cloud. And everyone goes, Oh, that's great. There's no real standard definition. It can be a multiple of things, actually. So how I describe it, I mean, you have to go backwards a little bit.

00;03;26;23 - 00;03;48;12

So computing and I guess the original ones were mainframes, big computers, they like fill a room type of computer and they would do very specific tasks. And then in the early eighties and personal computing, our PCs came in and with IBM and then Microsoft and and they took over and it was big. Everyone had a computer on their desk.

00;03;48;15 - 00;04;13;09

I'm not sure people knew what they'd use it for, but they had 100 ask and then it became clean server to talk about. And then, and then it moved into computing cloud. So what is cloud computing? I think the best way of describing it is that it's how do you use the power of a computer that's not physically on your premises, which you can get access through an Internet connection.

00;04;13;11 - 00;04;35;13

So it could be a massive computer that you can use one day a month, one day a year or every day, and all you're doing is connected to the Internet. And then how do you utilize that massive computing power? Because it's a different technology and how you develop or how I would secure it. So all of that is needed in the cloud, actually.

00;04;35;18 - 00;05;04;02

So the cloud is effectively Internet connected to develop and run applications. That's where the computer is, not on your premises. And can you maybe describe a little bit as to how the cloud computing works, the functionality behind us? I think there's there's multiple layers to it and there's effectively three layers to it as we talk about it from a tech perspective.

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And people have talked about SAS, and I asked them so, so what would it be? And I asked, is infrastructure as a service? So that is, I want to connect to a computer that's not on my premises and use that storage and computing power. So it like into infrastructure, but I'm getting it as a service pass or platform.

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As a service is the middleware. That's typically how to play the balance. How do I integrate stuff? How do I have clouds talk to each other and, and very relevant if you're looking at security and then all of that stuff and then SAS or software as a service, that's the stuff that that my, my particular part of the business worries about since the applications and so but it's also from a consumer point of view it might be I think SAS covers things like Tok or Snapchat, Facebook, these are applications that you're accessing through an Internet where it's actually accessing the software as a service to the cloud.

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To me, the exciting part is the applications, right? And that's because I'm biased. And and for us and we do consumer stuff as well, but mainly we're aimed at businesses. So we do things like your your system or your finance system or you procurements system or your online shopping system. So I often talk about it's when you're at home on the way to work in the morning unkown to Oracle quite often so it might be that you're buying the ticket for your train or plane and or you buying your cup of coffee in Starbucks and you're using an oracle point of sale.

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We you look at the actual cash register it's typically Oracle and or you're paying your electricity bill or water bill and or you're buying something online from credit, if you're very lucky. And all of those things are actually using applications that are connected back to the cloud into what we do. Oracle applications or you're doing online banking. So we're we're actually kind of used a lot in the world, but we tend to be the invisible part of what people are using.

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Yeah, I think that's really interesting. The business to business part, I think they're for the everyday person. They don't realize just how much technology is using Oracle technology. And you know, you mentioned social media platforms, Facebook, etc.. So it's it's just huge the amount of customers that we touch, etc. out there. So and on itself, yeah, it gives huge opportunities to students.

00;07;33;01 - 00;07;56;18

Absolutely. It's it's I mean it's it's everywhere. It's all around us. Right. So I think you encounter an Oracle piece of technology. I think everyone encounters it every day, actually. You just don't realize it. But it's very interesting. And you mentioned there a security thing that brings me on to a term that we are familiar with data sovereignty, and that's something that's becoming more widespread and being used.

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So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and explain what that is and why it's so important to to do that. You're going to have to imagine that. So you have an Internet connection and you go into the cloud, right? So where is the cloud? Actually, where are all where are those compute? So you actually have different kinds of you've got private accounts and public clouds.

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And so a public cloud will be something that's you don't really know as a customer, As a user, you're not you don't care. You're using the same cloud as everyone else. So you don't mind the fact that the resources are being shared. Now, you want your data protected, but you don't want the resources feature. However, it is also a private cloud.

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So it's like if you're a government and you typically want your sense of the citizen data to be held discreetly in a place that's actually using cloud technology. But the actual this cloud is not connected to anything else. So it's private and therefore there's no data leakage or whatever. Not what actually data sovereignty gets into is more and more.

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And particularly in the US, actually we have a requirement to keep data within national boundaries. And you probably heard of things like GDPR and slightly less and this is about, yeah, how do I know that my data and you've often hear some high profile cases with some of the big social media platforms that their data has been shared somewhere else.

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So how do I make sure my data is kept in the geographic location that I want and for national security or for health, for example? And these things are very private. And, you know, individuals want their permission to be shared beyond a known boundary. So what we're seeing is more and more countries or regions saying that the cloud data has to be within my country or region, and and I need to make sure that it's even if it's public and that there's multiple customers using the same infrastructure.

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The data is separated by each customer, but the data itself doesn't go beyond that region. So you've got public clouds, private clouds and then data sovereignty. So it's it's not as complicated as it sounds when you think about it practically. Yeah, that's really interesting. Especially, I suppose, from a European perspective and the GDPR and all the rules around that.

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And I think more and more countries are looking at that as well and developing legislation around it. So it's probably something that's going to become more universal, so to speak. I think it is. I think it's going to be a common conversation and this is where it enters. And so you develop applications and you develop your you say so so-called platforms, services like how you integrate Twitter, all of that stuff needs to be developed for a cloud.

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But then can I set up a cloud in in the box? Can I utilize that same applications and security standards? But how would this that this cloud is only for my use? So it's very, very private. I'm very, very small. So and can I put that into every government on the planet? But they all have the role. They're all using the same software, but they're all working within a separate entity that there's never any way of data leakage across them.

00;10;59;22 - 00;11;23;28

So it's it's going to become a big topic, actually. Excellent. Okay. So and that leads me on then to the next question, which is like, why do you think it's important for faculty to teach their students around about cloud computing? And how does having cloud computing skills prepare students for future jobs? Good question. I think it's it's it's absolutely the future.

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Everything we do an ATM, we're all living in a very connected world. So so all that we do and all that we use is actually in the cloud, right? So if I'm an engineering perspective, you need to understand how that works. So it is a different to the old days. Yeah. And you you're now looking at making sure you know how to minimize traffic, maximize traffic and make sure that you can access multiple clouds are actually the same cloud.

00;11;50;05 - 00;12;35;04

All of that conversation is vitally important and understanding why clouds are commercially important. And I mean and as well as that wider important for society because actually cloud computing can be a way where we do minimize greenhouse gases because if we use fewer but bigger computing power, we can actually take away a lot of the redundant capacity that these servers have all around the world and focus them at the smaller and smaller footprint, which can then we can manage the both the power and the what the what they see you miss at the same time.

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So I think it can be very good for society perspective as well. So it's important that people understand how they work and then how they connect and then how they are secured and protected. And then the last piece is pretty sure everyone in the in the academic space right now would refer to generative air. So these eight technologies, they're actually they only work when you've got access to huge datasets or very large datasets, and that means access into a cloud dataset.

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So you can add anomalies to data and then give access to it. You can then start to pick out trends and learnings and have generative a produce and relative and meaningful output. And so not just write a poem, but actually how to make it meaningful from a business perspective. And I'm actually what they say is if we can actually get to grips with the potential of generative AI and then there's actually a much, much greater potential here than any other technology that's been come to this space in the last 20 years.

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20 years might sound like a short time. It's actually a huge amount of time in waiting. So I think it's a real thing and everybody should just instinctively gravitate towards it at this point. Yeah, and I think I know I've heard recently that database is going to become database skills and understanding is going to become more and more important as AI takes off.

00;14;02;26 - 00;14;24;14

It's all about data and understanding the structure and the content of data, structured and structured, all of that stuff. So and I got I've got three kids and all their friends. So for the last five, ten years, I've be telling them all, if you don't know what to do, do data science. That sounds like very good advice. Okay.

00;14;24;17 - 00;14;43;08

Well, I was going to see if you could give a final piece of advice to faculty or students. You know, what would it be? The data science is one, right? And yeah, the other piece that I find and I trained hard in this conversation, that's why I paused a few times, not to use all the jargon, because it's my world is full of jargon.

00;14;43;08 - 00;15;09;25

I mean, I can probably give you a full sentence and three letter acronyms like, you know, I am I need to use the post that updates the ERP value to HCM to get to the C, external drive to CRM and all that mean. And actually we all make a bit of sense in the bizarre kind of way. So I think it's people use jargon to protect themselves and to almost make it make it a little bit of a barrier to entry.

00;15;09;25 - 00;15;39;07

So don't be put off by the jargon. It's just words. And be curious. Ask the obvious question I ask them every day when someone puts up a three letter academic, What is the album? So that's the first thing. Don't be put out by the jargon. And then I would say, try to discover the good side of it. And I mean, we have several customers and I don't want to make this sound like we're trying to be making myself sound grander than we are on this basis.

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But and there's some fantastic organizations that do humanitarian work that need access to high level computing in very unusual places on the planet where it's either war or natural disaster, where comms and so on are stretched. And and they need to be able to get there quickly and deploy humanitarian aid. This is good stuff. And there's lots of I.T. that can help in all of that, which I think people could be interested to go go explore.

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And then the last thing is, I do think the sustainability, the Green planet, I think we need to be ultra aware of this. And then like, for example, all of Oracle's data centers in Europe right now run on 100% renewable energy, which is fantastic. How do we get to carbon net zero? So I can cloud computing has a greater opportunity for us to achieve that than having every single consumer and business have their own servers in their own premises and they're all doing their own power consumption and emitting whatever they emit as a result of that.

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So I think it's and those few things, the last one, which is topical in Oracle, Oracle's perspective is actually global health. I mean, they joined in the middle of a pandemic. I think what we discovered was actually all of our health systems were not that connected in reality. So I think there's a lot of work going on now to see how can we overcome that.

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I mean, and not that I would hope that it would be another pandemic, but how do we get better and use it better to provide excellent health care to every citizen on the planet no matter where they are? That sounds like a bit of a far fetched idea, but that's something that's real and something that I think everybody could get involved in and try to drive it.

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It's about knowing who you are in an anonymous, secure way, knowing what your own personal medical history is, so that if you take me as an Irish person, I go on vacation to California where they had offices and I break my arm. How do I how do I make sure that my medical records are available to the emergency center in California, even though they're actually stored in Dublin?

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And how do we get in the activity that security of moving across the planet as aware in a seamless way? And then how do I make sure that the right vaccine that's the start in or how do we develop vaccines in the first place by looking at global data sets. Now, once we have them, how to make sure that they're deployed globally so I think the use of cloud i.t for global betterment in a health perspective as well as sustainability are very real.

00;18;24;24 - 00;18;49;24

Well, thank you so much, Cormac, for that insightful, very interesting discussion on cloud computing that brought its true touch on the environment. How can we be better citizens in relation to the environment and health, which of course is a hot topic as well with Oracle and making us realize just how much we have technology in our lives and how important the skills will be for the future generation.

00;18;49;26 - 00;19;10;06

So thank you so much again, Cormac. Much appreciate it. Thank you for asking me to learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thank you very much for listening. Bye bye. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.