Microsoft's David Willis Highlights the 3 Key Values of Cloud

The cloud has arrived at Microsoft headquarters. The company started experimenting with cloud solutions a few years back when it converted its leading productivity Microsoft Office, into a cloud-based version called Office 365. The move proved to be a smart and salient one, as software vendor Adobe adopted a similar approach with its Adobe Creative Cloud.

Why is Microsoft so bullish about the cloud? Because it makes life easier for IT workers. For David Willis, Microsoft corporate vice president of U.S. small and midmarket solutions & partners, it boils down to three key differentiators when it comes to the cloud: speed, scale and cost.

"The three key areas we see are speed. Obviously, you can spin up new workloads in minutes and hours, as opposed to days and weeks, to really stand up a certain workload on premise with hardware and software and everything else that goes along with that," said Willis. "You know, from a scale standpoint, obviously being able to access an infinite amount of computing power through the public cloud, being able to scale up and scale down as you need. And then cost -- you know, this is a pretty simple one. You pay for what you need and use, right?"

Willis was one of several IT leaders who gathered to discuss the most important and needle-moving technology challenges facing businesses today, as part of CDW’s Bring IT On technology leadership series. During his talk, Willis outlined why he believes that Microsoft is technology company best suited to provide IT shops with end-to-end cloud solutions.

"Being enterprise-grade, you know, we've got years of running, of experience, running cloud services on the consumer side and on the business side and running data centers at hyper-scale," he said.

Watch more of Willis’s Bring IT On talk below.