Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mark White, CTO Of Deloitte (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Saurabh Mallik

SM: In terms of the collaboration cloud, the messaging cloud, and the analytics cloud, those are applications that are running on the private cloud?

MW: That’s right.

SM: If you go the small and medium businesses, all of those are running on public clouds, right?

MW: I believe that to be the case.

SM: It does seem, then, that there is a democratization of technology in the adaption of cloud computing, because smaller companies are able to afford these technologies, to manage and maintain these technologies for much less money. Is that an accurate observation?

MW: Yes, and I believe that is the case for several reasons. On is the sophistication of the solution that they can afford because of the cloud’s preference for opex over capex as well as the outsourcing of the administration hand. Another, and this is not ubiquitous yet, is best-of-breed integration. So, this is pushing enterprise application capabilities through integration in the cloud, and when you go from cloud to clouds. That’s still nascent at this point. But we do see small and medium businesses, or the classic have-nots, pressing forward rapidly for the same reason.

SM: For large companies, what are your thoughts on key adoption in the cloud. What are people evaluating again?

MW: That’s a big question and a very important one. There are several parts to my answer. First, for large-scale enterprises adopting the private cloud – and frankly, it’s adopting private cloud architecture and implementing private cloud services – there are two parties in play: the technology, or IT shop/CIO and the business or mission. In moving toward the adoption of private cloud architecture and the implementation of private cloud services inside their trust zones, CIOs are looking at what it takes, from where I am today, to establish the disciplines, standards, and operations that would represent running a private cloud inside their house. In our discussion with CIOs, they will say that they don’t have any cloud, and we will say to them, “That might very well be the case, but I would be willing to bet a dollar that someone, somewhere out there has whipped out their AmEx and subscribed. So, in fact, given the inevitability, why don’t you aim to become the preferred provider of enterprise services?” And that becomes a driver of adoption in private cloud implementation, that is, to become the preferred provider. And that leads obviously to the public cloud and to hybrid clouds. Second is, in order to become an effective provider of cloud services, you need the IT disciplines, IT service management, and the simplified, standardized, virtualized, automated, integrated, and innovated cycle. So, when talking with CIOs about private cloud adoption, we encourage them to look closely at disciplines of IT service management to develop a coherent services catalog to which their internal marketplace can subscribe. First we have to be certain that they have done the blocking and tackling, and that’s first to simplify, to get as much rid of unnecessary complexity as possible in their infrastructure, platform, and software suite. Simplified and standardized, where you might not just look at one supplier risk, but you probably don’t need five different operating systems or five different types of storage. Simplify, standardize, and virtualize, which are all the things we have been doing in the virtualization of computing, storage, and network and operations and facility. And then automate, integrate, and innovate. So, look at service management, look at the catalog, look at the disciplines, the cycles (simplified, standardized, virtualized, automated, integrated, and innovated). That puts you in a position to be a provider of cloud services and a participant in the cloud ecosystem services, including public services. The other half of the equation is, if you are going to be a provider of private cloud services, you need a subscriber of private cloud services. In your business case and your operation model, you have to actually go and enable that for your business units, or whatever the composition of your IT customers is. That is a business model and skills change and sometimes even an operating model change.

SM: I think there is room for innovation in the entire delivery model of private clouds inside the large enterprise.

MW: I agree, and we are seeing that because it’s possible for people to stick their toe in the water and use a private cloud platform as a service for their development and testing environment, or private clouds for infrastructure as a service, or the storage cloud. Private clouds can be tested for messaging or collaboration. Those are great first efforts, and businesses can use them to understand what the opportunities are to change the business model.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mark White, CTO Of Deloitte
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