Chief Information Officer & Senior Vice President, Netscout
Search every verified Thor Wallace interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a January 2020 CUBEConversation, Thor Wallace discussed his role as Senior Vice President and CIO at NETSCOUT, describing his responsibilities as providing tools and environments for running the company and improving customer relationships and user productivity. He stated that NETSCOUT had virtualized its data center operations and moved workloads to the cloud, including applications like Salesforce.com and Office365, while maintaining a mixed on-premises and cloud environment. Wallace said the company redesigned its network from a centralized model to a cloud/edge-based network, partnering with Equinix to establish local presence in three locations for a software-defined network that provides low-latency access to cloud services. Wallace emphasized the importance of holding vendors accountable for performance and using fact-based data to resolve issues, citing examples of troubleshooting Office365 performance with Microsoft. He noted that IT remains responsible for user productivity regardless of where workloads reside, and that upskilling the IT team is critical as cloud environments require different skills than traditional on-premises setups. Wallace stated that greater visibility into multi-cloud and multi-prem environments is "table stakes" for maintaining control and effective troubleshooting.
“As the CIO, I am obviously responsible for providing the tools and the environment for running the company. I'm also heavily involved in understanding the applications and the business direction that we're taking, improving our customer relationships and experiences, and driving user productivity worldwide.”
“We as a company are being challenged by the same sort of environment that everyone else is being challenged with which is to be able to move as quickly as we can and provide as much of an impact to our customers as possible. So my mandate is really to focus on improving our customer experience, re-platforming and refac...”
“We've virtualized all of our operations in the data center and moved a lot of workloads to the cloud, including major applications like Salesforce.com and Office365. We maintain a mixed environment with on-prem data centers and cloud, living in all of the worlds.”
“We have been redesigning our network from the ground up, moving away from a centralized monolithic network to a cloud/edge-based network. This includes converting hardware investments in offices into software-defined networks, allowing centralized deployments worldwide for security and patching.”
“We have partnered with Equinix to put services into local presence worldwide in three locations, enabling a software-based network that moves traffic directly to the edge and provides backbone speeds into cloud services like Azure, AWS, Salesforce, and Office365 with low latency.”
“One of the key things is holding our vendors accountable for performance. For example, if we experience an issue with Office365 performance, we want to have the data to show Microsoft exactly where the performance isn't great so we can prove our network is performing well and the issue is on their side.”
“Without fact-based information and deep visibility, it's really hard to have productive discussions with vendors or contractors. Having greater visibility into multi-cloud and multi-prem environments is table stakes moving forward to maintain control and troubleshoot effectively.”
“IT is still responsible for user productivity regardless of where workloads reside. In the past, you could troubleshoot within your own data center, but today you rely increasingly on vendors, which requires a contracting style of coordination and fact-based evidence to resolve issues.”
“We've had situations where performance issues or bugs from different vendors impacted NetScout. Without deep understanding and visibility, you really don't have anywhere to go. This is a key lesson from our cloud migration journey.”
“Upskilling the IT team is critical as cloud and mixed exposure environments require different skills than traditional on-premises environments. Upgrading network capabilities means upgrading the ability to get information about how the whole system is working together.”
Thor Wallace, Senior Vice President and CIO at NETSCOUT Systems joins Peter Burris for a CUBEConversation from our studio ...
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