This week's Cloud Computing World conference in London heard some tips and advice from leading CIOs on making the move to the Cloud - and not all of it was plain sailing.
“We’re still learning. Remember to watch the log files – they nearly killed us on a couple of occasions.” Andy Ross, CITO of recruitment and behavioural assessor SHL, which operates across the global, working with multi-nationals including, Citigroup, IBM, Dell, 3M, Avis, and Walmart, to provide employee behavioural and ability assessments. “We operate around the clock, they expect available and performance from us. We also support groups of recruitment cycles throughout the year.”
Ross spent his keynote highlighting several key areas for companies looking to jump onto the wave – and monitoring log file activity was just one of them. One piece of advice is for companies to be aware of the pain transitioning from Capex to Opex can bring. The payoff for SHL is that the move to what Ross describes as the ‘near-cloud’, a stepping stone to being fully on the cloud, is its success in reducing costs and improving performance.
It did however take three attempts to make the transition work and he acknowledged that capacity management remains a big challenge for SHL which may explain his advice to Cloud vendors around improving administrative and management tools. “The industry needs to step up a gear and make it much easier for people to managing their environment on the Cloud,” he said.
The transition to the cloud was far from painless for Schaumacher either. Douglas Menefee, CIO at Schumacher Group, noted that IT staff turnover at the outset in 2005 stood at a staggering 87%. At that point, 5% of resources were on the Cloud. By the end of 2009, Schumacher aims to achieve 75%, whilst IT staff turnover has reduced to around 1%.
The utilisation of Cloud Computing within Schumacher was not driven by increased buzz surrounding the Cloud, according to the CIO. “It was driven exclusively by business needs. There was never a Cloud strategy!”
But Andrew Hyett, former head of IT at Cable & Wireless wholeheartedly advocated a move to cloud services in his keynote at the conference, and commented the current trend “isn’t a false dawn. The take up is rising.”
In fact, the former head of IT operations drew comparisons between the Cloud space and virtualisation. “I don’t see any difference between Cloud and virtual in the private space,” he said. “If you’ve got a private data centre, then virtualising it is essentially Cloud-ing it.”
Hyett advocated the removal of laptops from many corporate environments and switching to a robust virtualised infrastructure, using thin client desktops as dumb machines akin to the traditional mainframe/terminal structure. “Back in the 80s, we had mainframes with dumb terminals. Now we’re doing it again with virtualisation, using our home PCs to access apps through a secure portal.” He suggested a move at Cable & Wireless, where the removal of laptops would save £1.5 million.
Taking control of the infrastructure, he argued, is cost efficient, and goes beyond the hardware – it saves money in support too. “[Companies that follow such models can] get rid of 2nd and 3rd level support because it’s not needed. If the PC stops working, the help desk can just blow it away and start again – it’s a virtualised PC. All of this saves money.”
Hyett concluded: “My job is to make money or save money. If you have that thought process, the board will like you better.”
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