Last week's SIG meeting was one of the most interesting we've had in our more than three-year history. Its title was "Cloud Computing the Netflix Way," and we had two Netflix guest speakers: Adrian Cockcroft, director of architecture for cloud systems (his presentation is ), and Jason Chan, Netflix's security architect (his presentation is ).

If you're not familiar with its technology infrastructure, Netflix has, over the past few years, migrated almost entirely from an on-premises data-center environment to a cloud-based setup located in the Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

As a follow-up to my recent article titled " ," these two presentations are almost a perfect complement. Learning about what Netflix has done is an excellent primer about what, in my opinion, most enterprises will go through in the future.

One thing to be addressed right at the start: Is Netflix a good model for enterprise IT? When Netflix is brought up as a model, I hear many people respond along the lines of, "Well, it only has a couple of applications. We have thousands." Or, "It's an online company and not really an enterprise," the implication being that what Netflix did is not applicable to "our" situation and environment, so it's interesting but not really germane.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.