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Security, security, security

The move to cloud requires a mindset change, as security fears impinge on adoption.

Harold van Graan
By Harold van Graan, strategic sales director at Actifio.
Johannesburg, 26 Mar 2015

As Gary Reiner (ex-CIO of GE) said, the three biggest challenges or roadblocks to cloud adoption are security, security, and security. But the challenge is not the actual level of security; rather, it is that fears about security impact adoption rates.

Across the board, Actifio eCloud Summit participants widely echoed this sentiment, and especially by those on the service providers' panel, which included executives from CenturyLink, IBM, SunGard Availability Services, Tyler Technologies, and Verizon. The reality is most cloud providers have more experience and greater resources devoted to security, and have a much better record at keeping data secure and free from breach than the average enterprise.

This reality, however, is in conflict with the existing worldview in many companies, and is just one of the cultural barriers to greater cloud adoption. As mentioned by those on the enabling technology provider panel, which included executives from Arista, Citrix, IBM, Oracle and Actifio, because security is so critical, it is easy for companies to use it as an excuse for not moving to the cloud. At the end of the day, it's the people, their mindsets, and organisational culture that need to progress in order to complete the move of substantial workloads to the cloud.

People, processes, mindsets

With the adoption of most transformative technologies - plus business processes - change is hard for most companies. Those recently founded consumer tech companies that use the cloud as their primary infrastructure did not have the legacy systems, existing business processes, and a workforce with legacy skills to transform. Someone on the enabling tech panel said a new company of 1 200 employees with two IT guys could be all in on the cloud because it started there. But, change for people is hard.

This became especially clear during the enterprise panel, with executives from Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Nasdaq, Wells Fargo, Yahoo, and the US government. Much of their advice to those early in their cloud adoption curves was to focus on shifting employees' ways of thinking. They said people would need to change the way they work, and training them was key. Likewise, they suggested the move would require sustained internal selling of the cloud to effect change.

In his service provider keynote, Andrew Eva of Verizon reminded the audience that greenfield opportunities were easy, but moving legacy systems to the cloud both required, and provided, an opportunity to re-factor business processes and ask hard questions about what was required to be maintained and what could be changed. The result should be a clear set of requirements to bring to a service provider to enable that move.

Process changes require a culture that can embrace them, so it's no accident the closing keynote by Bill Taylor, founder of Fast Company Magazine, focused on the nature of change and how winning companies foster a culture that embraces change to achieve success. They do so because just offering something competitive is no longer sufficient. Only companies that stand for ideas that reshape what is possible will serve their customers the best way possible and create lasting value.

All about the apps

The final theme of the conference was the importance of the application at the heart of all of this. At the end of the day, the infrastructure enables applications, which enable business. In his enabling technology keynote, Actifio's founder and CEO, Ash Ashutosh, remarked that while companies are witnessing the absolute commoditisation of infrastructure, applications are ever more critical.

Likewise, most other keynotes and panels discussed the cloud in an application-centric way: which apps to move when; which apps would benefit from cloud architecture and cost structure; and which new apps could use the cloud to drive new value for the company.

Process changes require a culture that can embrace them.

Data is the lifeblood of business and for businesses to reap the benefits of the cloud, they will need that data to be available when, where, and however they need it. Today, data is bound to existing applications and bound to their legacy infrastructure. Ashutosh delivered a compelling case that in order for enterprises to reap the full benefits of the cloud, they will need copy data virtualisation to free their data from specific infrastructure, and enable data life cycle management driven by business-centric SLAs.

After everything that was heard at this conference, the role of copy data virtualisation in enabling the enterprise's move to the cloud became even clearer.

Those were the broad themes of the conference. What is clear is that 2015 will be an exciting year in the adoption of the enterprise cloud. As the conference participants continue on their adoption paths over the coming months, they will no doubt learn valuable lessons and create compelling transformation stories.

I look forward to hearing all about them at next year's conference.

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