CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11 - 8

The massive shift to cloud resources is bringing
with it some challenges, like new talent
requirements (see the sidebar "Growing Your
Own Cloud Talent") and changes in security and
risk management (see the sidebar "Managing
Security and Risk"). However, forward-looking
CIOs are working to overcome those issues
because they know the future enterprise will be
cloud-driven.

CLOUD COMES OF AGE
At this point in the evolution of cloud computing,
many companies, like the National Australia
Bank are aggressively pursuing a cloud-first
strategy. "We believe that what the public cloud
providers are able to do is superior than anything
we can achieve in our own data centers," says
Yuri Misnik, NAB's Executive General Manager
and CIO. Although the bank had pushed some
workloads to the public cloud starting in 2012,
those moves were incremental. Looking ahead,
everything new - and everything else for which
it makes sense to migrate - goes to the public
cloud. (As with many banks, the company still
has a number of legacy systems - some of
them 45 years old - that continue to reside onpremises for the foreseeable future.)
The bolder direction came after analyzing the
benefits of public cloud, which NAB has found
yields cost savings of up to 50 percent and -
more importantly - puts it in the best position
to innovate. It also enables greater resiliency,
stability, and automation. "We've proven that
building things in the cloud gives us the most
efficiency in terms of pace and also gives us the
best costs," says Misnik. "We can use all of the
great innovation that public cloud providers are
creating. Our developers can focus on business
systems and customer-facing value rather
than building undifferentiated stuff that AWS
[Amazon Web Services] and others can give us."

8

Many companies are finding that public cloud
options can better enable them to meet today's
incredible demand for technology-enabled
business transformation. "Most IT organizations
are oversubscribed; they have more project
demand than they have capacity and funding.
And their business partners are complaining
about their slow delivery," says Mark Peacock,
principal and leader of the IT consulting
practice at The Hackett Group. "Cloud-native
technologies allow IT teams to focus on
developing the unique or strategic functionality
that their business partners need rather than
having to build and configure infrastructure,
middleware, and commodity services."

THE CLOUD "GIVES US GREATER
ACCESS TO NEXT-GENERATION
TOOLS THAN WE WOULD HAVE IF
YOU HAD TO STAND ALL OF THOSE
THINGS UP ON-PREM."
STEVEN CARTER
CIO
CNX

A FOUNDATION FOR
TRANSFORMATION
As companies make their future plans for cloud
computing, they view it as not just an enabler of
innovation - freeing their own resources to focus
on differentiating technology capabilities - but a
prerequisite for it.
At CNX, a Pittsburgh-based natural gas
exploration and production company, CIO
Steven Carter sees the cloud as a key part of
the firm's innovation strategy. "We are a datadriven company and everything we do is geared
towards moving fast and allocating capital
CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11
