Does the cloud hype match the reality?

A few years ago I was responsible for creating a brand new secure data centre hosting environment for a number of Police customers. We established, from scratch, a new data hosting environment offering virtual cloud services including infrastructure, platform and co-location “as a service”.

I remember the challenges of setting up something new: we needed to ensure that we had the service ready for our new customers within the timeframes that we had agreed with them. I remember us talking to one particular customer about how they were going to securely send some of their physical servers from one end of the country to another over one weekend in order for us to establish a “colo” presence in our new hosting environment. Our only challenge was to have everything installed, tested, ready and working for the following Monday morning! On the colo side, all went well, but our challenges had only just started as we grappled with delivering the “infrastructure as a service” environment. What we hadn’t fully appreciated was how long it would take to do the  penetration (PEN) and security testing on the new environments and without which we wouldn’t have had a service to offer!

That was only five years ago and yet things in the cloud technology arena have changed so dramatically. Firstly, more and more Government customers including the Police sector were wary of holding any data or applications outside of their physical data centres. Today, we’ve seen a real shift in attitudes where many Government departments and agencies spend significant amounts of money on cloud and cloud-related services. Who would have thought, even five years ago, that Government departments would buy their enterprise email system from the cloud and allow it to be hosted outside of the UK!

Secondly, the basis on which a lot of these third party cloud platforms are based, have been proven to be very secure at all aspects of operation including access, audit, infrastructure and transport layers.

Five years ago, despite the Government’s ICT Strategy aspirations of encouraging a “Cloud first” approach, adoption and take-up was slow. Traditionally, Government organisations generally don’t want to be “bleeding edge” and it’s often an approach from Government to “watch and see”. As I’ve mentioned, confidence of hosting some of your most critical applications and data in someone else’s environment was treated with caution and scepticism. Customers also struggled with the strategic business case: how could they make a reasonable return on their investment when they could not offload/sell the data centres that they’d now freed-up and how would they realise savings in staff when moving to cloud did not always free-up full time equivalents?

Many of those organisations that I worked with back then have since moved a long way in their cloud adoption journey, and whilst there were often technical challenges, many wouldn’t go back. Those that moved to full-scale adoption are now reaping the rewards. Their total cost of ownership (TCO) has reduced and they can invest time and money in developing and delivering other change programmes that yield other benefit programmes for their organisations. They enjoy much greater flexibility as they adopt and implement new systems and platforms. Data storage is becoming ever cheaper and there are many more players in the market, all offering very competitive services yielding better choice and cost options for customers.

In the very first phases of cloud adoption, IT departments enjoyed cheaper computing and storage capabilities and whilst these phases are still significant in their own right, for the more advanced of customers, cloud-based infrastructure now offers new opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI) and a furtherance in what they can do with the internet of things (IOT).

It’s important for business leaders to understand that the journey to a successful cloud plan and implementation doesn’t happen overnight. Cloud services now offer organisations a digital opportunity and one which can truly transform their organisations. These transformation opportunities are not just centred on a lower TCO or more reliable access to services, but moving to cloud also offers huge opportunities for organisations to transform their business operations too. Too often we’ve espoused the mantra of “business-led change” but there is also a place for “technology-led change” in today’s business environment.

Whilst businesses and Government need the flexibility and freedom to exploit new services from potentially multiple cloud providers, they are often under pressure to implement new service models and products in very quick time, such to keep up with their competitors, shareholders and general market demand. Many private sector businesses are adopting cloud-native applications where customers are able to better harness the additional capabilities available. Organisations can gain better insight into the data that they hold on their customers. Commercially, drivers such as “time to market” and “lead to cash” are more greatly accelerated because often the underlying data that drives these cloud-based applications is organised and structured in a way that makes the adoption of new services more agile.

Cloud computing has evolved to become a natural part of how any business thinks. When I talk about “business” I mean the public sector as well as the private sector. In the past, it was perfectly reasonable to think about cloud computing as something that the private sector did to itself. As I mentioned earlier, many Government organisations looked upon it with some scepticism and often when I talked to IT leaders, they also cited a sense of “loss of control” as a key factor for not wanting to adopt cloud either in part of whole. They were also concerned about the safety of their data – after all, they were still accountable for it, irrespective of where it resided.

As cloud technology develops in both its adoption by customers and the capabilities and services it is able to offer, it will continue to play a pivotal role in a company’s IT strategy. There are still opportunities for organisations not yet on the cloud adoption curve to start at the entry level and yet there are those at the other end of the spectrum who are now looking at how cloud technology can provide a more disruptive play across their organisations in areas such as IOT and AI.

Many organisations are still focused on digital and process transformation. Whilst there are lots of merits in these types of initiatives, these programmes are often internally focused, have long lead times and don’t always keep up with what customers and citizens demand. Customers’ needs and their appetite for “everything online” will never dissipate and yet organisations can do so much more if only they spent more time focusing on how and whatdata they store and manage .

Unfortunately, many organisations still suffer from holding data in silos which, by its very nature, impedes their ability to make better and more informed decisions. Data is a key enabler to business and technology change, and investment in this area is often overlooked much to an organisation’s peril only often realised further downstream. Often, IT departments are stifled by the complexities, costs and maintenance overheads involved in creating expensive adapters between application systems and by what many see as creating yet more sticking plasters within their IT infrastructure .

As organisations continue to evolve and react to market, financial, technological and social changes, so must those sitting in boardrooms think more carefully about where and how they will make their investment cases in the future. Customer demand, activity and interest to consume all manner of products and services over the internet is unabated; in fact, the trend is only heading north. So the challenge for those vested with the responsibility of IT infrastructure, platforms and data must think about how they will continually evolve to meet those challenges.

In my formative Civil Service IT days during the mid-1980s, compute hardware and its associated data storage spanned large arrays of fixed and moveable disc cartridges in vast computer halls. These units were (comparably) very expensive and required lots of human intervention. I remember our key supplier at the time talking about a new dawn where “grid computing” and “bureaux services” were the future. Well, they say that everything goes full circle! Grid computing became cloud computing with the early concept that you “plugged in” to what you required for compute and data services. The bureaux services of the 1980s became shared services.

At the moment, the world seems to offer lots of uncertainty and endless distraction on subjects like Brexit. But if we are to continue to evolve and prosper, we must keep our eyes wide open for the endless challenges and opportunities that IT can still deliver for us. The hype is here, how we use it in reality is always going to be our challenge.