The Future of Cloud Computing, Business Transformation and the Role of IT: Q&A with Siki Giunta

Siki Giunta, Senior Vice President, Cloud, Verizon

The Verizon State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014 report identified the current state of cloud adoption and use (65 percent of enterprises are using cloud computing) and forecasted the future of cloud computing (71 percent of enterprises expect to be using cloud for external-facing production applications by 2017).

The report also addressed the role cloud is playing in business transformation, the rise and fall of “shadow IT,” and the growing focus on purpose-built, workload-focused cloud environments.

We sat down with Siki Giunta, Verizon’s Senior Vice President, Cloud, to get some additional insight into the report findings and what they say about the direction and future of cloud computing in the enterprise.

How is cloud driving business transformation in today's enterprises?
Siki Giunta: Cloud focuses IT resources on business value versus ongoing operations; limiting upfront IT investment and freeing up capital for strategic investments. In fact, 35 percent of companies that have adopted cloud said business agility was their primary driver. This is critical for businesses as they look to embrace things like streaming video, big data and social media.

How are line-of-business and IT working together to promote cloud adoption in enterprise businesses? How does this impact “shadow IT?”
SG: Two words come to mind: speed and control. In the last 24 months IT has regained credibility on these two items and line of business employees are trusting IT with their competitive developments. Additionally, as concerns have risen about privacy, security and compliance in the cloud, IT has gotten back into the driver’s seat because these have always been part of the role of IT. This hasn’t eliminated “shadow IT” but it’s brought those one-off cloud projects back into the fold and made them part of the cloud solution process.

Now that cloud is becoming mainstream, what will that mean for future IT deployments?
SG: IT will face new roles, new responsibilities. They will need to think of deployments in new ways – it’s not about managing hardware lifecycles anymore. When everything is delivered “as-a-service” IT will face new expectations for agility and innovation. Technology no longer stands in the way of new business ideas.

With IT acting as the principal “service broker” for cloud solutions it’s increasingly important that they understand the risk profile and characteristics of the workloads to make sure they select the right cloud services and providers. That’s why we’re seeing CIOs directly overseeing more than half of all cloud spending.

How are enterprises overcoming the burden of legacy systems and building cloud around these hurdles?
SG: By embracing a hybrid cloud strategy. The concept of hybrid cloud means that some workloads will run on premise—maybe an IT initiated Private Cloud—and other workloads will be run by one or more cloud providers off premise. The lead cloud provider will deliver the network and security connectivity, management, integration and automation for all the applications and business processes to operate as one.

This is complex and only a few cloud providers are able to deliver on this today. However, properly designed, the additional complexity of operating and monitoring the hybrid cloud environment is offset by the cost benefits that accrue from the more granular billing arrangements coupled with the ability to shut off surplus capacity when it is not required, and then quickly reinstate it. Gartner predicts that by 2017, 75 percent of organizations will have gone bi-modal in some way.

Where do you see cloud computing heading in the near future?
SG: The future is all about speed. Cloud computing will need to support ever-faster delivery of larger amounts of information, including high-definition video and big data. Reliability and network performance become increasingly important. In fact, 84 percent of Verizon customers surveyed for our report rated uptime as “very important.” Couple that will the fact that through next year at least 50 percent of cloud deployments will suffer network performance issues and you know where work still need to be done.

Going forward the focus will be in making sure cloud computing supports a specific business need or program. We’ll talk less about number of virtual machines and more about computing resources supporting a specific container or business application.