CIO opinion
“
90% OF ALL DATA
EVER GENERATED
WAS GENERATED
IN THE LAST FIVE
YEARS.
on fluctuating demand. An insurance
company, for example, needs more
infrastructure up and running when more of
its customers are on the road – to scale up
and down over the course of days or hours
requires an agile solution.
The other side of the same coin is scale
over time. As an organisation’s data
requirements grow, so does the public
cloud bill – exponentially. Today, there is an
entire industry being created around public
cloud cost management. Many CIOs report
directly to the CFO, and when we speak to
them, cost certainty is a recurring theme.
A volatile and unpredictable operating
expense can be untenable when building a
digital organisation.
For all its agility and ease, the public cloud
often comes with a performance and
reliability downgrade when compared
to the best on-premise solutions. This is
corroborated by findings from the survey
as availability (52%) and performance
(47%) were cited as two of the key drivers
for continued use of traditional on-premise
solutions. Availability and reliability are
core tenets of any cloud strategy. Today,
CIOs need to be much more deliberate and
thoughtful about the impact of outages
on end users and customers. In the public
cloud, disruptive outages do happen. In
fact, it happened to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) this past February. For mission critical
business operations, like high-performance
analytics or anything at scale, a hybrid
environment is better suited.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Last, and top of mind for a great many
CIOs I’ve spoken with, is compliance,
something that is particularly important
in the MEA region; 74% of IT decision
makers surveyed said their organisation
has reduced usage of public cloud over
the past year due to security concerns and
38% cite security as the key roadblock
to adoption of public cloud. In highly-
regulated industries such as healthcare
and government, data sovereignty and
direct control over response to outages
are a non-negotiable requirement for
many workloads. CIOs need to consider
compliance strategy in a world where
data sovereignty and regulations are
fast changing. In light of global events
like Brexit and geopolitical tensions in
the region, CIOs need to ensure that
their cloud strategies align with ever-fluid
national and international regulations
and requirements.
Ultimately, smart, successful companies
use resources toward solving customer
problems. Organisations need IT to work
for them, so that their best and brightest
technical minds are working to advance
the next wave of innovation rather than
managing infrastructure. n
ABOUT YOUSUF KHAN
Yousuf Khan is CIO of Pure Storage.
As the first to hold the role, Yousuf has
helped Pure Storage scale infrastructure
and processes through the fastest growth
of any systems company in history. In
addition to his instrumental role in the
expansion and management of Pure’s
internal infrastructure, Yousuf serves
as a technical customer advocate,
working closely with prospects and
partners to provide strategic insight
into challenging IT environments. With
more than 15 years in the industry,
Yousuf brings with him extensive
experience in building infrastructure
and application development. Through
constant, targeted engagement with
CIOs and other IT decision makers,
Yousuf helps shape future generations
of Pure Storage innovation by providing
direct, practical feedback from industry
peers. A frequent speaker, Yousuf’s areas
of expertise include emerging solutions
like public cloud, private cloud and SaaS,
with a specific focus on how successful
CIOs have strategically combined
those solutions with modernised on-
premise storage to build the strategic
infrastructure of tomorrow.
www.intelligentcio.com