Cloud can mean so many things to different people and organizations. It can be an infrastructure approach, a delivery model or a business model.

“Cloud is not strategic; for me, for most companies, it’s tactical,” said Jason Hoffman (pictured), vice president and global head of cloud infrastructure at Ericsson.

Hoffman spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to discussing cloud approaches, they talked about the importance of infrastructure. (*Disclosure below.)

Infrastructure for cloud

While cloud may currently be strategic to Amazon or Microsoft, as an integral part of their businesses, time would tell whether it is strategic for other companies, such as Google, Hoffman stated, saying it’s a fine distinction to make, because tactical means there is more to do.

As software and apps are continuously deployed into infrastructure, there is always the risk of making infrastructure inaccessible, he said. For example, if a new operating system image comes out, an organization won’t immediately reboot thousands of its servers. And, as the applications that sit on the top of the infrastructure have historically inherited that risk from the infrastructure, the latest effort has been on separating them.

“Infrastructure, by its very nature, is always risky to manage,” said Hoffman.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE