In a candid interview conducted by the CIO Club, Mohammad Wasim, VP, Global Cloud and DevOps COE Lead, Publicis Sapient delves into the rising adoption of cloud technology and how it accelerates IT Modernization. He highlights the criticality for businesses, today, to rethink their cloud strategy in a way that meets the evolving demands of the tech-savvy customers. And how Dell Technologies has been helping Publicis Sapient deliver enhanced customer service with integrated cloud solutions.Q1. What are your thoughts
on the cloud adoption within the Industry? What trends are you seeing?
I think everybody will
move to the cloud and I am already seeing an exodus to the cloud. There is a
buy-in from all: CIOs, CFOs and CEOs. CISOs were the last ones to get
convinced; some with compulsion and others with the drive to be relevant in the
new world.
The rush is to get to the
cloud to save money; however, it will deliver much more than that. Almost all
the workloads will move to the cloud but prudence is needed to plan a
migration. The trend is to first get non-business critical applications out of
the data centers while security paranoia is keeping the database in a
well-protected data center. It becomes, interesting when the ‘home runs’ to fetch
the data from the DC are too many and the size of data is huge for non-business
applications which translate in exorbitant cost of operations.
Hence, very few have
thought through the full roadmap to exit data centers and break their cloud
journey in phases. I think the ones who are focusing on making the initial
phases successful, will be at a vantage point, because learning and surprises
in those initial phased would be of immense value and they will have an
opportunity to course-correct terms, plans or revisit the technology
stack.
A lot will also get
governed by the innovation of the cloud platforms and also what governments’
policies will come in effect. Hence, a phased plan to exit data centers will be
very fruitful.
Q2. What are the concerns when
it comes to cloud adoption and how are they easing out?
The foremost concern is
security. But if you really, look at it, the fear persists irrespective of
where the workloads are running, within premises or on the cloud. I would say
it is more of a concern on how to secure a multi-tenant solution by
understanding it completely. I believe the cloud vendors are also not spending
enough time in educating their customers.
Having said that; cloud
companies would put in much larger investment in equipment, software, and
talent to secure and be compliant than any independent consumer of the cloud.
It also takes away almost all the need for deep tech security skills needed to
run operations.
Technology leaders would
now need to understand every nook and corner of their IT landscapes as the
recommended approach from the cloud is “Zero Trust Policy”. Technology leaders
will authorize through authentication whenever access is needed, else the IT
canvas will be either inaccessible or will stand exposed. Security is thus,
shifting from an outside high-end function to regular operations.
The other concern is how
the cloud can metamorph the entire IT landscape, which points to the limited
availability of the relevant talent pool that can help an enterprise embark on
its cloud journey. Well, Cloud is now the hard disk, CPU, and the RAM.
There are some cases in
the industry where businesses are returning to their Data Center, as Cloud did
not turn out to be as economical as initially promised.
Q3. How does the adoption
of a cloud-enabled infrastructure model accelerate digital transformation?
I would structure that the
cloud- is integral to IT modernization, which further drives digital business
transformation.
We are heading towards a
paradigm where customers know their needs and value their time. Also, due to
the internet, everyone has access to relevant information. In such scenario,
businesses must be nimble enough to react to the demands of the customer most
of the time, be it launching new products and services or addressing customer
feedback and concerns. The customer needs instant gratification and companies
can’t take ages to react to the customers’ demand. Hence, it is imperative to
be very agile and cloud lays down the foundational platform to be exactly
that.
A well-architected cloud
platform can only enable setup and use of the modern application microservices,
branch-based development, automation, CI/CD, self-provisioning, etc.
Q4. What kind of skill
sets should the IT workforce of tomorrow possess to keep pace with the
technological advancements including Cloud adoption?
Cloud is not just one
single technology that a business or IT can simply adopt. Cloud disrupts
everything in your organization. It drops the boundaries between the
development and the IT operations team. The team has to work together to take
the full benefit of the cloud. Otherwise cloud is nothing more than a virtual
public hard-disk, CPU, and RAM. Cloud is a software-defined infrastructure and
has to be treated as code and managed through programming.
As we progress in time the
role of a developer or coder will encroach upon the scope of system admins and
developers will need to learn about operations, infrastructure, and networks.
Thus, the system admins need to reinvent themselves to be relevant in the current
and future job market.
In parallel, for complex
foundational engineering, administrators who earlier used to provision and
manage mammoth machines using GUI or writing shell scripts, now need to learn how
to write code. This will help them to completely orchestrate various kinds of
workloads.
The redefinition of the
job description for both categories is imperative. Developers have to further
expand their skills into the space of operations whereas the operations team
has to let go of basic pieces and get much deeper in the scope of learning
cloud so that they can put pretty complex robust solutions together and
leverage AI, ML, etc.
Q5. Please share about
your love for Golf.
I grew up playing marbles
on the greens. A game of cyclic hitting a stationary ball and walking never
attracted me. My initial approach to golf was a bit immature (because
executives play it) and casual but the game has made me a patient lad. In-fact
it teaches you so many things. Golf pushes to reflect ones’ behaviour, approach
toward an action, mentally prepares to tackle situations as they come, practice
is done at “DOJO”, not ARENA. Golf just projects out your character to yourself
and to others too. I guess that’s why people say when you’re hiring for a
senior role, play a couple of rounds of golf with the candidate and you’ll find
out everything you need to know. Golf is an addiction to my schedule now, and most
of my storytelling revolves around it.
I would be very excited to
see if Dell Technologies Championship, a professional golf tournament, on the
PGA Tour comes to India.
Q6. How has been your
experience with Dell Technologies?
Our engagement with Dell Technologies
goes long back when we were setting our own private cloud twelve years ago. We
have got robust products and great customer service from Dell Technologies and
no wonder I have not been involved in escalations, as everything got managed
within the SLAs. We made investments in making our private cloud safe and we
have harvested an immense amount of value from it and the company had an
important role to play in it. I truly appreciate some of the Dell Technologies’
marketing initiatives for the CIO community in the areas of education and
learning. The program at CIO Academy, ISB Hyderabad, and the recent Security
workshop on Data Protection really stand out.
No comments :
Post a Comment