Real-world tech: cloud at the coalface

Every analyst says cloud computing is crazy big and only going to get bigger. But what is the state of play with real businesses right now? Adam Burns has been finding out.

Hurrah cloud! By solving problems that IT and the business have been suffering with for years, this technology has broken free of the hype cycle. Or has it? Tenses are important here.

In my second ever interview for meettheboss.tv, back when all this was fields, I asked Austin Adams, former CIO of JPMorgan Chase about the secret to being a successful IT leader. His advice: “you have to be a partner to the business.” That was 2009, and I heard the same advice at CeBIT in Hannover last week.

But a change is gonna come because cloud removes the tin barrier. IT no longer has to manage servers; IT has to understand services. The career choice is provide value and manage SLAs, or manage SLAs.

For the business, cloud computing offers scalability, agility, and more transparent costs (which it flips from ever-depreciating CAPEX to somebody-else’s-problem OPEX). Can it do more? In late 2010, I spoke with Dr Werner Vogels, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer and expert on ultra-scalable systems. He saw this new architecture as nothing less than an IT and business revolution…

“Cloud computing provides the democratisation of business creation. Now you no longer need access to huge sums of money to actually get access to physical resources, to compute resources, to get your business or your product off the ground, and in that sense, it has a globalisation effect.

“Will we see more technology development? I think technology development will shift from having to manage physical resources and having many system administrators around just to keep your service going day and night, towards building better applications for your customers, because that’s where the focus will be. I believe that cloud computing will trigger a whole new range of application building that wasn’t possible before because we were so focused on just getting the basics right.”

It’s been four years and it feels like we’re still waiting for Cloud Guevara (even if we can see the Granma on the horizon). To find out why the future isn’t quite yet, it’s worth taking one more look back, to 2012, and Forrester’s five key trends for your cloud journey:

“Trend 1. Shadow IT enters the light – deal with it.” Every senior IT executive on every IT roundtable we have run agrees (150 roundtables x five attendees on each = 750 yesses).

“Trend 2. The uncool attempting to be cool – not cool.” This was about “cloudwashing” or vendor hype, and the fact that it had to stop. Our attendees are 60/40 that it has.

“Trend 3. A risky idea puts a big fish in jail.” Forrester’s example: “you replicate a volume of cloud storage containing personally identifiable information out of country without realising a law restricts such actions.” I don’t believe this has happened. If you know different, tell me.

“Trend 4. The channel will face the music – reselling is not good enough.” For years, Forrester has been telling the value-added reseller market that it needs to move away from revenue dependence on the resell of goods and services. Sounds like good advice to me.

“Trend 5. You will finally have to budget for public cloud spend.” Here’s the nub. I don’t think business is convinced by public cloud. I think this is related to trend 3. And it’s why cloud may be more Charles than Che.

Last week I interviewed seven CIOs with seven very different companies, from physical risk management through vehicle inspection to electricity generation, via construction and infrastructure. I asked them all the same question: big public cloud providers have enormous security budgets. Why won’t you move all of your data to the public cloud: fact or feeling? If regulators / the business said ‘your choice’, would you move it?

Six said no. Why? Trust. No one wants to be the big fish in jail, and tremors from the NSA revelations run very deep.

Every IT decision is cost-based, and cloud is no different, but flexibility, agility and scale are shouting loudly. Versioning is a key personal driver. If you’ve not outsourced IT before, chances are you’ll want to upgrade your team’s skills around contract negotiation and management, and quick. IT has to get across this before the business moves ahead, which – make no bones about it – it will. There are a lot more people at the start of this journey than you might think. The future is hybrid (and you can find out more about why we believe the future is hybrid in this blog or by reading this ebook).

The seventh CIO said he would move everything, and now, because “it [public cloud] works even better, even from security perspective, than a locally managed service: procedure-wise, size-wise, and from the money behind it. And from the technology point-of-view, I would say that there are even harder facts behind the higher level of security in the public cloud than to have it in-house. Of course, there is still a question of data security in terms of legislation, but it’s a challengeable question.”

What do you think?