Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 2)

Jeetu Patel: The second major trend we’re seeing is that as cloud proliferates, security and the role of security within the cloud is getting accentuated at a very different level to what it used to be in the past. This is getting more exacerbated with some of the things that are happening – with the NSA. At a macro level, how do software vendors build cloud applications that large enterprises and companies that are highly regulated can feel comfortable deploying their sensitive data? That tends to be a major area where there’s going to be a huge amount of investment in the next 10 years.

The third major trend that we’re starting to see is the infrastructure availability. Cloud has been a big trend for a while, but we are seeing a major movement in 2014. This is the year of the hybrid cloud where we feel 100% of our customers will be in a hybrid cloud scenario. According to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), 97% of customers who were early adopters within the public cloud are now looking at hybrid cloud where they want to have sensitive data in the public cloud moved over to the private cloud. That entails deployment flexibility in the cloud. The cloud makes it easier but how does that deployment truly take scale in highly regulated, compliant, security conscious, privacy-driven organizations make the most out of the cloud? That’s where we’re starting to see the model of hybrid cloud really starting to take effect.

Sramana Mitra: Based on what you have said so far, what comes across is that privacy and security concern has come back as a major concern on the cloud. There’s a switch to hybrid cloud even from people who are very comfortable with public cloud. There’s a shift to hybrid cloud at this point in response to that security and privacy concern. Is that accurate?

Jeetu Patel: That’s right. What do people like about the cloud and SaaS? The rapid pace of innovation. What people love is the fact that I can have three-week product release cycles compared to 18 months for on-premise software where people would just wait for the release once every couple of years. That just didn’t create a level of agility in organizations’ consumption of technology. There is a big gap though between the consumption rate of technology and the desire to use the greatest and latest. That’s what they love about the SaaS model. The moment I have a new technology capability that’s made available by the vendor, the users immediately get provisioned. They don’t have that massive delay that most large enterprises have for deploying enterprise software.

What large enterprises don’t like about the cloud is that sometimes highly sensitive and regulated data goes into the public cloud. Major Fortune 100 companies are thinking, “I have thousands of users within my organization and I want to make this an enterprise standard. I want to make sure that everyone has the benefit of having all of these amazing and beautiful applications that they can use on their mobile devices and SaaS platforms.” What we found is an effective operating model that works really well.

What we have done is devise the model so that you can have the application running in the cloud. You can make sure that you, as a customer, have the flexibility of your data either residing in the cloud or on-premise. You decide where your data should be stored depending on the nature of the data because not all contents are created equal. If you have marketing content that you want to share with other people in the public cloud, go ahead and keep it that way. But if you have legal or mergers and acquisitions content that you want to keep on-premise managed by you with your standards and controls, you should be able to do that with any application you deploy.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity
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