What according to you are the challenges faced by CIOs
today and how has the role of CIO evolved?
When I was considering to take up the role of a CIO, my friends
warned me that CIO’s role is over, for them CIO stands for
‘Career Is Over.’ But I felt that the role of CIO is
not over, but has evolved over the years from a technologist to a
practitioner. Technology keeps on changing and this in turn puts a
lot of pressure on the CIOs.
CIOs today face many challenges, including budget and
efficiency, information growth and security threats. The IT budget
dilemma faced by the CIO is that 73 percent of their IT budget is
spent in maintaining the old infrastructure and not focusing on
innovations. Information growth is another major challenge faced by
CIOs today. The magnitude of the issue is clearly evident in the
findings of the Digital Universe study, conducted by IDC on behalf
of EMC. As per the study, digital information reached 0.8
zettabytes last year (one Zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes)
and is predicted to grow 44 fold to 35 Zettabytes by 2020. I feel
to address these challenges, organizations should adopt cloud
computing solution.
Please share some highlights of EMC’s journey to
private cloud.
EMC is a USD 17 billion company (as per 2010 revenues) with global presence and we
are growing our business through acquisitions and by entering new
markets.
Few years back, EMC had 24,000 users. Today, we have double this
number. With the growth in users, the amount of storage also
subsequently grew from 960 terabytes (TB) in 2004 to 10 petabytes
(PB) in 2011. In 2004, we had about 2,000 physical servers and
hence used to spend huge amount of its IT budget in maintaining and
running these servers. During the same year, EMC acquired VMware,
which helped the company to look at virtualization. To improve
efficiencies, we started virtualizing our servers and till date,
close to 80 percent of severs have been virtualized.
In 2009-10, we virtualized our business applications and today
about 60 percent of the EMC’s mission-critical applications
have been virtualized. Virtualization has provided immense benefits
to us in terms of cost savings. This amounts to savings of USD 11
million in OPEX-related costs and USD 74 million in data center
equipment saving-related costs. Due to these savings, this year we
could spend huge amount (about 42 percent of IT budget) on new
capabilities and innovations. The next step after virtualization
was to adopt IT-as-a Service (ITaaS). ITaaS helped us focus on
customer satisfaction and scale and consume technology as per the
need.
The journey to cloud computing has helped EMC’s IT
departments to store, manage, protect and analyze the most valuable
asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and
cost-efficient way.
Please share some of the lessons that you learnt during
EMC’s transformation to private cloud.
All the stuff in the cloud needs to be automated and this can be
done by standardization and simplification of the IT infrastructure
through virtualization. While working on the project of EMC’s
transformation to private cloud, we learned quite a few lessons. We
realized that we need cross-skilled people and not specialists of
network, security etc. People need to have technology developmental
and also have front-office capabilities rather than just back
office.
Secondly, we realized that we need to bring security at the
virtualized, data center and cloud level. Now, we have two units --
Global Command Center and Critical Response Center for monitoring
and securing the cloud. We also realized that it is equally
important to effectively manage the cloud environment.
What tips you would like to give to your fellow CIOs who
are planning to adopt cloud computing?
The mistake most of the CIOs make is that they first rewrite
their infrastructure. Instead they should move fast to the cloud,
then optimize and rewrite. Virtualization is an important step to
move into the cloud.
The three phases of private cloud is:
• IT production (virtualization of
servers)
• Business production (focus on
applications)
• IT-as-a-Service (focus on customer
satisfaction)
A CIO should spend first two phases in the optimization of IT by
fine tuning the infrastructure and then focus on business
consumption.
I believe that hybrid cloud is the best cloud computing model as
it helps in driving IT transformation. CIOs should take the classic
data center and evolve it in the private cloud. After moving to a
private cloud, they should take the best flexibility of public
clouds and form a hybrid cloud. The three tenets of hybrid cloud
computing are efficiency, control and choice. But these three
tenets should drive business agility. We at EMC too are planning to
adopt a hybrid cloud model.
Please explain the convergence of cloud computing and
Big Data technologies.
Today 90 percent of the information is unstructured but most of the
CIOs only understand databases and BI and not unstructured data.
Big Data storage is different as it is unstructured data. It is all
about scale up and automation. Just having the data and storing it
will not help. One needs to use it to grow the business, thus
predictive analytics is needed to get insights and take actions.
Big Data will sit on the cloud architecture. Cloud computing
transforms IT and Big Data will transform business.