Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Managed services is an area that you see that is going to develop further?

Ali Din: Yes, not just in the traditional sense of managing and monitoring the network and the data centre, but going into these specific use cases as well. We need managed security services. We need managed services around on-boarding employees. I don’t know if you’ve read this book The Experience Economy, but I see that definitely coming in where the service industry and all the work that people put in to provide value-add and differentiation around services.

Now it’s really differentiating around the experience. It’s getting even harder for companies to hire employees that are more and more picky about where they’re working. A company must provide an absolutely memorable experience not just for their customers, but even on the recruiting side so that employees want to stay. Doing all these things is not easy so managed services is going to have an open opportunity to get into that space and be able to provide these services to companies as they’re trying to deal with all this change with, if you will, the modern workspace.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to add?

Ali Din: There are some trends that transcend our industry and maybe tie in a little bit with your question just now. The concept of the global citizen and how borders are becoming less and less important to people is another challenge that companies are going to have to solve. How do you enable people to go from one border to another whether it’s for data protection and the laws around that especially in Europe, or just enabling applications to work from one border to another.

I have trouble going from just one continent to the next because applications don’t know how to handle currency and don’t realise that I live in two different places. These are things that are going to push the envelope for people. If someone can solve that, that’s a big deal. I think the other thing we’re seeing is more regulations and security requirements.

As much as there needs to be more openness around borders, people have to be more careful because the technology allows you to do so much more. Just look at what the FBI wants to do in terms of regulating devices and encryption. All these things are leading to compliance requirements within each industry’s unique parameters.

Sramana Mitra: Do you think that when you are operating in this global citizen mode, there are some countries and some geographies where the basic infrastructure is a lot less secure? In the US, the basic infrastructure is more secure. In a place like Indonesia, the basic infrastructure will be a lot less secure. That puts a lot more risk on data and breaches. When you’re accessing from those geographies, there’s probably a lot more opportunities for breaches.

Ali Din: I would actually say that those types of specific instances are already being solved today. Even we can solve that situation because when you access a virtual desktop, you’re in this protected funnel. Even if your device is compromised, when you get into the system, you’re doing dual factor authentication. We have the identity access management and then you also have a secure connection.

The infrastructure itself is being monitored and secure. I think those things are solved for. It’s more about how to enable people to move across the borders and use the different kinds of applications that they would need access to. If someone’s in Indonesia and they’re using a virtual desktop in the US, they can access the US application. If they try to access an application out of Sweden, that application thinks that that person is sitting in the US. Now, that global citizen is having a lot of trouble with identity because they have to explain to this application that, “I’m not in the US. I need the capabilities of what’s available in Sweden.”

Sramana Mitra: Thank you very much. It was nice talking to you.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud
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