In the discourse on innovation in Cloud within the enterprise, Aju Sebastian, IBM Cloud Platform Leader, IBM ISA, maps out the three things that stand out the most, in his keynote address at the CIO 500 Conclave & Awards 2019.
In today’s cloud-conscious age, industries are exploring different ways to use cloud with their Digital Transformation journeys. From running applications, new workloads, storing data, accessing different kinds of data, etc. Cloud is being deployed everywhere. Enterprises are all in various stages of success in terms of how they are able to leverage the cloud and amalgamate that with their journey to innovate for their enterprises.
In the discourse on innovation in Cloud within the enterprise, Aju Sebastian, IBM Cloud Platform Leader, IBM ISA, maps out the three things that stand out the most.
Innovation: The ability to innovate with the latest technology that is available. Cloud has brought new-age technologies like AI and ML far closer to the enterprise than they have been ever before. It is easier for enterprises to consume, to use it to derive insights and deliver outcomes. It has also enterprises to access multiple types of data which was not possible earlier in organizations with on-premise environment.
Accessibility: Cloud has given the ability to access one’s own enterprise data and map that with external data. Bringing the different data sources together, it has enabled CIOs to drive business outcomes out of it.
Options: Cloud has also given ability to have the options and choices on where an enterprise wants to run its different workloads. Earlier they were stuck with a standard set of frameworks that existed with the on-premise data centres. But with different cloud service providers available to run data enterprises are able to choose the most optimal place to run their workload irrespective of where that destination lies – on-premise data centre, cloud provider, or a hybrid situation.
In spite of this, there is still a far way to go before absolute Cloud adoption can be achieved across enterprises. Aju Sebastian, IBM Cloud Platform Leader, IBM ISA says, “Yet, we see that only 20% of the enterprise workloads have moved on to the cloud. This is big opportunity. There is about 80% of the enterprise workload still sitting in the siloed environment. It means that innovation that we can drive out of those workloads is lost.”
Looking at the challenges that are causing the slowness of the movement to the Cloud, explains how some workflow is still restricted to the siloed environment. “Some of these applications have unique characteristics which bind them to a specific destination from, perhaps the security point of view, most likely to an on-premise destination. These workloads are very uniquely and optimally positioned on the on-premise environment. And it becomes very difficult to move that,” says Aju Sebastian.
When it comes to moving those applications on to the Cloud, which in itself is a feat, the CIOs are again faced by certain challenges in the course of dealing with multiple cloud environments. Earlier we used to have the challenge of managing your on premise data centres, but now with shadow IT and the kind of innovation that is happening, there is penetration of cloud at a high level within the organization. And with multiple clouds coming into the picture, the management of all these clouds simultaneously and the workloads being run on them, is what the challenge for the CIO is.
