Few Indian firms are using just one cloud environment today: IBM Cloud CTO

In a Q&A, Hillary Hunter talks about the trends shaping multi cloud strategies for enterprises, the industries shaping new trends, and the way forward

Hillery Hunter, VP and CTO, IBM Cloud, firmly believes the pandemic has speeded up investments made by companies in mid to back office transformation, and has accelerated the rapid adoption of multiple cloud by businesses in India. In an interview with Neha Alawadhi, she talks about the trends shaping multi cloud strategies for enterprises, the industries shaping new trends, and the way forward. Edited excerpts:

How do you think the perception of cloud technology has evolved over the past five years?

Even a few years ago, much less five years ago, there remained some companies that weren't using cloud and many companies, even several, even just two years ago, for example, were only using a single cloud environment. Globally 29 per cent of organisations were still using one cloud environment. And that might have even been a private cloud. In India, that number was like 36 per cent, just two years ago. And what has dramatically changed is that now globally, only three per cent of organisations and in India only one per cent of organisations say that they're only using one cloud environment.

And so the radical thing that has shifted and clearly accelerated in the last few years, is the use of multiple cloud environments.

How are the large cloud providers thinking about multiple cloud environments?

Interestingly, globally, the two sectors that I see are most advanced in declaring that there needs to be intentionality and strategy around hybrid cloud and multi cloud usage are government and financial services. And so, I would say that in terms of how the industry is addressing this, a lot of it is coming up from particular industries that need to addressed the cost of lock-in. Regulators don't want financial services companies to all be concentrated on the same cloud. And (for) governments, the cost of a data breach to them, their operations and their citizens is incredibly high. We have had studies this past year that indicate the cost of a data breach is now over $4 million per incident. As these two industries look at multi cloud more intentionally, I expect telcos, healthcare and many other industries to continue this as a trend. 

Cybersecurity risks have been a concern around the use of cloud over the past few years. Are there any broad trends that could directionally change the way we see these issues right now?

One is how do people get security and compliance across multiple platforms. And this is about cloud security, compliance, posture management, multi cloud tools for being able to both, understand and remediate your security and compliance in a consistent way. There's been a lot of progress in those types of capabilities. We (IBM) have our own thing that we refer to as the Security Compliance Center.

The second trend that I would point to is zero trust. You know, I think that many fewer people are considering the use of cloud without taking zero trust and zero trust based architectures and solutions into account.  This is a really important topic and I think it's going to continue as a very, very strong conversation. into 2022. 

Are there specific kind of products or other areas in the cloud that clients are more willing to invest in?

There is increasing willingness for companies to invest in the mid- to back-office transformation, and to also look at mission critical and core applications as being eligible to move to the cloud. (We see) A lot of the data security and data privacy technologies. We see a lot of interest in our technology called "Keep your own key" or hyper protect crypto services, which use confidential computing to protect sensitive data such that even the cloud provider doesn't have access to. That conversation is picking up because people are looking at more sensitive things moving to the cloud, not only the front end, but sort of the crown jewel data of the business.

Has any of this change been brought about or accelerated because of the pandemic or do you think this would have been the natural course of things had Covid not struck the way it did?

It has accelerated. I was meeting with a panel of CIOs (chief information officers) recently who were actually fairly articulate about this. They spoke of the distress the pandemic placed on the front end, whether it's a retail company that had a many times increase in online retail or a bank that had many times increase in the front end use of mobile applications and online banking. The front end, obviously, was put under great stress because of those web and mobile applications. But that led to a reconsideration of the mid and back office. It meant that the most common processes were being exercised in a completely different way. There were entire business flows that were no longer or hardly used or for periods of time, and other business flows that had different opportunities, for example, for data analytics or other things. And so that change in the front end of consumer behavior, I think, has led to a reconsideration of the efficiency of the mid and back office in sort of being smart about business processes.