Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you picking up from your customer base?

Sash Sunkara: There’s some immediate problems that enterprises are trying to solve. One of the biggest issues is security. I think the clouds have addressed that. They have the newest technologies. These are new data centers with the latest in encryption management. With current data centers, these data centers are aging. The software is aging. They’re finding that, “I’m probably better off going there.”

The bigger issue is managing this. What was really happening, from an enterprise perspective, is that developers get frustrated as IT is not delivering fast enough. I’m just going to take a credit card and scan it into the cloud and do whatever I want. That’s a problem from a cost control perspective as well as a security perspective. They’re putting company data without the knowledge of their IT organization and without going through the proper channels and proper vetting. That’s a big problem.

The biggest trend that I’m seeing is governance. We’re finally there. We’re starting to put our application into the cloud. How do we put controls over this? All of those things are starting to become really critical. Any vendor that goes in and who doesn’t have answers to that is going to be challenged. You do have to have a way to be able to manage multiple different resources and provide governance from a cost perspective as well as compliance and security. Also, what is the audit trail? That’s some of the biggest things that we’re seeing.

We preached hybrid for a long time but I just heard it parroted back from major enterprises that it isn’t going to be everything in one place. We don’t trust a single vendor to do everything. Even us. That’s a real learning curve for these guys. It used to be, “We’re going to give IBM a big chuck. They’re going to do everything for us.” I have seen a movement away from that. It is going to be a multi-cloud strategy. It is going to be about hybrid. It’s really going to be about how do I find solutions that will help me manage that.

We’ve heard this a lot. IT is trying to bill back to their BUs. IT is in the business of providing resources to help the business. They no longer want to be a considered as a cost center. They need solutions to say, “We’re providing the best technology to develop as fast as we can. We need methodologies, tools, and workflows that allow us to understand the cost of that and ways of being able to bring that back to the business unit.” That’s becoming much more important. Lastly, it’s around application development lifecycles. People are interested in accelerating and gaining a competitive edge without costing ridiculous amounts of money.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware
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