As the role of cloud technology in business, data management and so many other facets of the tech-connected world continues to grow, companies that once seemed to be following the crowd with cloud adoption have moved to become players who shape its development on a global scale.

Yousef Khalidi, corporate VP of Product Management for Microsoft Azure Networking, met with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the Riverbed Disrupt conference taking place in New York City. Topics covered over the course of the conversation included the complexity of responsible security, the continued importance of IT’s network side and the trajectory for cloud integration.

Real clouds and dependencies

“We have been on this cloud journey for a number of years,” Khalidi noted early in the conversation. “At first, cloud was a buzz-word, but now it’s real.”

And through the changes that have taken place along the course of that journey, the network has remained a vital part of the equation. “Between you and your customer, you have to reach the cloud somehow. And how do you reach it? The network. … Ultimately, you have to hit the network somewhere to get to the cloud,” Khalidi said.

Framing the situation

“Without a first-class network, you cannot have a first-class cloud,” Khalidi asserted, and with that guiding concept, he outlined several ways in which Azure is looking to enrich and reinforce its existing capabilities, from the handling of virtual workloads to the security of the physical undersea cables responsible for shuttling around so much data.

“Customers need technologies … to connect their applications to the cloud,” Khalidi noted. He added that “there’s a wide variety of partners needed to make that complete.” In Azure and Microsoft’s enabling of Riverbed as a service, that networking slice of that spectrum is gaining even more solutions utilities.

“We have partnerships with the security vendors, all the brand names you can think of,” Khalidi said. He addressed both the local and virtualized sides to that by saying, “There will always be something that you have to do on-prem. … It’s an evolving system, and there will always be different parts, but we believe that the hybrid model will dominate for a long time.”

Writing forward

Khalidi also offered some insights into how he and the rest of Azure anticipate the next few years to further shape the cloud and networking landscape. “The market will eventually evolve into a few [cloud] providers; that’s what we believe,” he said.

In addition, Khalidi said, “What customers want the cloud for is agility, more than anything else,” in part due to the ease it allows in getting initial builds up and functionally running in short time.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Riverbed Disrupt.

Photo by SiliconANGLE