Tell us a little about yourself. What does your job at Telefónica involve?
I am the Technical Lead of the Public Clouds Technical Centre. My job is to coordinate the team that provides support for the Exploitation and Operations of the Azure and OCI clouds for our corporate clients.
I also carry out technical tasks and help the team by contributing my knowledge and experience. The team is made up of 10 of us based in Spain and Colombia.
What are public clouds and how do they work?
Public clouds are an extensive network of computing and storage services distributed globally. There are companies called hyperscalers that market these services.
These hyperscalers use data centres distributed all over the world, complying with a series of quality standards and ISO certifications that guarantee the availability of the service in practically all their products at over 95%. They are distributed in regions and areas to maximise proximity to the company, as well as data redundancy.
What is the difference with other types of cloud, such as private or hybrid?
The main difference with the private cloud is that, in general, the private cloud only has a supply of virtual machines (IaaS) while in the public cloud we have elements such as service (PaaS and SaaS), abstracting ourselves from the infrastructure administration part in these cases, since it is assumed by the hyperscaler itself.
This greatly simplifies IT processes in the company. The hybrid cloud is made up of both (private and public). It is the scenario most used by companies.
What benefits do public clouds offer?
They have an impressive range of services at the click of a mouse, allowing companies to get up and running in a matter of minutes.
The company does not need to have its own infrastructure; it can be born and grow directly in the public cloud. This makes things much easier, especially for SMEs, saving them a lot of time, logistics and money.
What are the main characteristics of public clouds?
The billing model, which is pay-per-use. If used correctly, this can save companies a lot of money, as we don’t pay for the entire IT infrastructure as such, but rather for what we use of it.
Another great benefit is elasticity. We can grow and shrink as quickly as we want based on our needs without having to think about limited resources, as can happen in traditional data centres.
It also has a large catalogue of services and applications ready to be deployed and consumed, which saves time and money on purchasing and renewing licences. The hyperscaler also keeps renewing services to the latest versions, allowing us to make updates quickly and transparently, in order to keep our infrastructure up to date.
How is data security protected in public clouds?
Data in storage and in transit is encrypted. The hyperscaler takes care of this part, as well as managing the encryption platform, which can also be delegated to the company for some modules.
In some modules we can also choose the encryption hashes. The public cloud also offers security services such as antivirus, firewalls and security appliances to complement the offering. Remember that, although much of the security is managed by the hyperscaler, another part would correspond to the company.
Can you give us some examples of public clouds?
The biggest are Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s GCP and Oracle’s OCI, although there are many other companies.
Who do you consider to be a star at their job at Telefónica?
I nominate Vanessa Plaza. She’s a great colleague, a machine in everything she does and I think she’ll be a good addition to #Creators.
