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No rain, no gain

Harold van Graan
By Harold van Graan, strategic sales director at Actifio.
Johannesburg, 19 Mar 2015

Towards the end of February, the eCloud Summit 2015 in Austin, Texas, brought hundreds of senior tech executives from the world's top enterprises, cloud service providers and enabling technology companies together for two days of ideas and conversation around the move to the enterprise cloud.

The business case [for cloud] is often strong and compelling, but not automatic.

It is rare to see so many senior people gather for a conversation. Rarer still are the occasions where executives who would be considered business competitors are willing to share their thoughts on an important strategic imperative so openly.

Perhaps it was the strategic importance of the topic at hand. Or, it could have been the fact that transforming technology infrastructure and changing the way organisations consume technology is really hard to do. Whatever the reason, some very bright people were willing to share their experiences in order to learn from each other, and it was a great opportunity to learn from those who are just planning cloud adoption, are currently on that path, or have already reached their destination.

It did not take long on the first day to recognise there were several broad themes that would repeat themselves throughout the conference. In short, organisational changes of this magnitude can take significant time. The journey to the cloud still has numerous challenges, and a future where the vast majority of enterprise computing is done in the cloud is a longer time away than a casual observer may guess. But, the potential gains are huge, and not just on the cost reduction side.

The business case is often strong and compelling, but not automatic.

In his keynote conversation, Gary Reiner (ex-CIO of GE) clearly laid out the themes of lower costs, better responsiveness, and greater flexibility as core drivers of this movement. The software-defined aspects of cloud infrastructure enable the use of much cheaper hardware and a much smarter allocation of work and consumption of resources. But the cloud also enables new and transformative business processes and better customer user experiences.

Taking a swing at cloud

Rich Roseman (ex-CIO of 21st Century Fox) told a story of being at the US Open, and realising IBM was running countless systems and processes for the operations of the tournament with five people and very little on-premises technology. That was when he decided to drive the vast majority of Fox's infrastructure into the cloud. The results included the successful migration of 90% of 21st Century Fox's infrastructure to the cloud, migration of 80% of the company's global applications to SaaS, and the company running with much improved speed to market, agility, operational efficiency and reduced costs.

But, despite the tempting advantages and success stories, many large companies are taking a much slower approach to the cloud, and in fact, today only 10% of enterprise workloads are being run in the cloud.

One of the big reasons for this - which emerged in the panel discussions, as well as in Gartner analyst Donna Scott's presentation - is that for many applications, switching costs are just too high. And for certain apps, their usage patterns don't need the flexibility and burst capacity that drives many of the cost advantages of the cloud.

This combination of factors means not all apps will move quickly to the cloud and many systems of record and home-grown custom apps will take years to make that move, outside of any considerations around data security.

In my second Industry Insight, I will share the major concerns around cloud migration that emerged from the conference.

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