For a number of attendees at this year’s Structure conference, hosted by Structure, LLC, it’s their first time taking part in the diversity of tech-interested companies and individuals who’ve made their way to the event in San Francisco, CA.

But that’s not the case for Stacey Higginbotham, senior editor of Fortune Magazine, as she’s one of the individuals responsible for the rise of the Gigaom media company and the Structure series of conferences. Higginbotham met with George Gilbert, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about what’s new for her at the conference this year and what she anticipates for the future.

Cloud forecasts

While Higginbotham has seen cloud technologies balloon in importance and public awareness since the first Structure conference, she finds that there’s still a variety of attitudes toward cloud services, from companies that want to be on the cutting-edge to those that are still uncertain of what role it could play in their businesses.

However, as Higginbotham noted, the individual companies, such as General Electric, John Deere, etc., which are choosing to build their own clouds are doing so in ways that will lead to legacy problems and workload issues in the future. While not advocating broad adoption of single-company cloud services, such as those offered by AWS or Microsoft, she did feel that stronger efforts to future-proof these databases would eventually prove highly beneficial.

Cloud segregation

In analyzing tech/business convergence and growth, Higginbotham also felt that business models are still largely at a point where companies are unwilling to share their data, leading to latency and data gaps. Similarly, given the actively evolving nature of modern cloud tech, companies were finding difficulties with maintaining the stability of their in-house and distributed data management.

“If you have a massive array of sensors, in a factory for example, if you update all of them, and it breaks something, you really can’t control that right now,” she said. “And so, getting some sort of orchestration layer on top of that is really important.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Structure 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE