Acknowledged by “Wired” magazine to be one of the top 10 influential people in cloud technology, Bernard Golden (pictured), vice president of cloud strategy at Capital One Financial Corp., is an enthusiastic supporter and backer of cloud. On his personal website, Golden discusses the latest in cloud computing, and provides training modules on different aspects of technology. He is additionally an author and public speaker on all things cloud or tech-related.

Golden spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed what considerations organizations need before they move to a hybrid cloud environment, as well as some of the announcements at Ignite that interested Golden the most. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: I’d love to ask you a very broad question to start, and that is, where are we right now? What are the biggest challenges that you see with companies adopting and embracing the cloud?

Golden: Unlike a lot of people, I think we’re still [early] in cloud adoption. I think the barriers tend to be twofold: One is for traditional enterprises, [as] there’s still a lot of embedded a lot of legacy, a lot of investment sunk costs. How can we step away from that? Should we step away from that?

You hear a lot of discussion around what’s the right role hybrid cloud [should play]. For companies like Capital One that have announced it’s going all-in on public cloud, the challenge becomes, “How do I adopt the practices of the organizations that are on the frontier of cloud?” Because you have to really adopt a whole range of things. A lot of people treat cloud computing like it’s a data center at the end of a wire. [They] have [their] traditional practices, [their] traditional models, [their] digital tools, [their] traditional cost models — all of those things have to change.

Knight: Can you walk us through your decision process at Capital One and then also maybe tease out some best practices?

Golden: For most organizations, there’s two factors [to] think about in terms of looking at using multiple clouds. One is from a risk mitigation strategy; do you want to have all your eggs in one basket? For most enterprises, that [is] not much of a problem, in the sense that [enterprises usually] own something of everything. You’ll never find any enterprise that only uses one thing in any technology place.

[The second factor is] you might also be looking at opportunistic deployment of workloads if you want to take advantage of superior functionality available from [a] cloud provider. So do you really like the machine learning that comes out of Azure? You might just decide to put workloads based on that. Or if you like something about certain kinds of database offerings, you might look at AWS. So there’s a sort of a criteria you’d have to establish about what you want to accomplish with your applications or what you want to do around sort of risk management.

Miniman: What other things have you been seeing at the conferences? What’s exciting you, any takeaways for people who haven’t been at the show?

Golden: I attended a number of sessions yesterday; I was pretty impressed with the [Azure] Cosmos DB multi-master. There were [also] a couple of announcements around ExpressRoute; they’ve announced 100 gig connectivity, which is pretty amazing. The second thing [was], let’s say you’re a corporation with [data] in Argentina and Switzerland; you can basically put ExpressRoute connections into the Microsoft fiber backbone, and then just transit your data across, which is pretty interesting.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored coverage of Microsoft Ignite, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE