The “move to the cloud” makes for more resilient IT infrastructures. Cloud expert Patrick Schulz from Cockroach Labs talks about how digital transformation is changing the IT landscape in an interview.
Mr Schulz, could you briefly introduce Cockroach Labs?
Cockroach Labs is the company behind CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database. CockroachDB was developed to help companies survive any kind of outage, scale horizontally without sharding, guarantee consistent transactions and better serve globally distributed users.
Which digitalisation topics are particularly important to you?
As a database company, we help companies modernise their infrastructure and move their applications and services to the cloud. Modernising the infrastructure is important to keep up with the huge amounts of data generated by today’s applications.
What are particular challenges in your industry at the moment, and how are you working on them?
One of the biggest challenges we see is building resilient infrastructure. In some industries, such as financial services, it is even becoming mandatory to ensure that your business remains resilient in the event of severe business disruption (outage, cyber attack, etc.). One of the best approaches to ensure fault tolerance is to run your applications across multiple regions (and even multiple clouds). However, if you are using traditional “legacy systems”, this can be very difficult or even impossible. CockroachDB is cloud-native, so you can run your applications across multiple clouds, and it is much easier to run your applications across multiple regions.
How do you expect your eco Association membership to support you in this?
I’m looking forward to sharing my knowledge with existing members. We have some really interesting customers who are driving their digital transformation with our technology. I’m also looking forward to hearing what others have to say about the current digital landscape and what they are hearing from their customers.
What opportunities does digitalisation offer us in the future?
The pandemic undoubtedly forced companies to rethink their digital strategy and accelerated the “move to the cloud”. The cloud offers many opportunities when it comes to scaling and resilience. The challenge is to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the cloud with a suitable technology package.
Mr Schulz, thank you very much for the interview!
Patrick Schulz, Sales Engineer at Cockroach Labs, is an IT expert with over 15 years of experience in private and public cloud technologies. He has worked with numerous companies on cloud projects and built public and private cloud environments. He helped customers develop and secure their multi-cloud adoption with modern DevOps tools around Infrastructure as Code and Secrets Management. Patrick now enables customers to modernise their database infrastructure with cloud-native, distributed SQL technologies.
