The "Cloud forever, or never!" Summit organized on February 9 at PwC Luxembourg's Crystal Park Building by TechSense, the all-channel platform fully dedicated to the Tech, Innovation and Digital community, gathered over 200 CIOs and tech decision makers eager to exchange views, ideas and practices with cloud majors AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Thales.

Cloud computing has become the norm for today’s organizations in order to innovate, cut cost and increase agility. One of the fundamental questions that is often asked by businesses when they embark on their cloud journey is "which is the best public cloud provider in the market today?" The answer is not so simple and straightforward, as each hyperscaler brings unique strengths that are likely to be best suited to the use case the customer has decided to solve. This is one of the reasons why most customers today have a multi-cloud strategy.

On the other hand, organizations have growing concerns about the ability to meet data sovereignty and GDPR requirements in the Cloud. Yet, the push for digital transformation is driving the need to find solutions to these issues.

These are among the timely topics that were addressed during the second edition of The Dots' TechSense Summit. 

VIP Workshops

The conference started with special sessions reserved for VIPs, where Emanuel Da Costa, Cloud Subject-Matter Expert at Check Point Software Technologies, explained "how to build a strong cloud security architecture". He was followed on stage by Fabrizio Heitzmann, Sales Manager and Julien Varela, Cloud Architect, from Nutanix Luxembourg, who demonstrated the business value of Nutanix Cloud platform. Vassilios Kakarakis, Chief Architect Business Development, Data & AI Practice Lead at Kyndryl, closed the VIP session with a workshop focused on "how to assess data and applications dependencies for a cloud journey".

Multi-Cloud, Security, and Data Sovereignty

Patrice Witz, Technology & Digital Leader at PwC Luxembourg opened the plenary session with an introductory speech. Kamel Amroune, CEO of The Dots, and Laurent Pulinckx, CIO of Luxembourg Stock Exchange, THECIO23, and Master of ceremony of the conference, then joined the stage to address welcome words to the participants. Laurent Pulinckx launched the conference, announcing the keynotes by global cloud actors AWS, Thales, Oracle and Google. He introduced Jean-Pierre Le Goaller, Head of Technology Benelux at AWS and Michel Etienne, Foyer Global Health's CTO, for the first keynote. They highlighted FGH's cloud project, an "insurance born in the AWS cloud", explaining the firm's cloud strategy, the benefits drawn from AWS Cloud and the health insurer's cloud journey through 2023. They also gave their vision of a sound cloud implementation, insisting on security, a topic that "needs to be at the core of the development".

The Master of ceremony then called on stage three experts who shared their thoughts on how to ensure data sovereignty in multi-cloud environments. Romain Deslorieux, Director Global SI/SP at Thales hold a discussion with Olivier Cardinal, CIO and Franck Hohnecker, IT Director, from PwC Luxembourg, who talked about their company’s experience with Thales and the forthcoming steps in their own cloud adoption process. Referring to the day's theme "Cloud forever, or never!", Olivier Cardinal stated that "we have to embrace the Cloud, and to do it forever".

After this first part, Patrice Witz invited Fred Giuliani, Head Of Information Technology at Spuerkeess and Mihai Giurgiu, Head of Architecture, Applications and Data division at European Investment Fund, to join him for a fireside chat during which they shared their respective cloud adoption strategies, the benefits they could draw from this, the pitfalls that must be avoided, and an overview of what the future could have in store. They also addressed the issue of security and gave some advice for the most skeptical.

Gérôme de Gea, Senior Director Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Strategy, and Lionel Coquin, Head of Enterprise Architecture at BIL, steered the conversation towards "the future of cloud". Gérôme de Gea notably underlined the importance of a supporting partner at each stage of the cloud journey.

The last keynote was led by Enea Taga, Territory Manager at Google Luxembourg, and Eric Reding, Director IT Infrastructure Services at Clearstream. Together, they provided valuable information on "how Google Cloud VMware Engine is enabling a hybrid multi-cloud strategy".

Insights from the Cloud Giants

Laurent Pulinckx then gave the floor to Cécile Gellenoncourt, Supervision of Information Systems and Support PFS at CSSF, and Ananda Kautz, Head of Innovation, Digital and Payments at ABBL, for a round table. Cécile Liégeois, Regulatory & Audit Partner at PwC Luxembourg, moderated this session. They gave their input on the financial sector's maturity level in terms of cloud adoption.

The second round table gathered 4 key cloud actors. Thales, Google, Oracle and Microsoft were respectively represented by Romain Deslorieux, Director Global SI/SP, Enea Taga, Territory Manager, Gérôme de Gea, Senior Director, and Ron Pooters, Business Strategy Manager. They shared their feedback, their companies’ development axes and prospects for the future, and some key advice with Stéphane Zema, Director IT Infrastructure and Cloud at PwC Luxembourg, who moderated the session.