Moving towards cloud 'inescapable', says Met Office CIO

Speaking at Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit, Charles Ewen says cloud is the future

The Met Office is very much looking towards a cloud-based future, but an internal data centre will always play a role within the organisation.

That's what Charles Ewen, CIO at The Met Office, told the audience at Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit 2014, taking place at The Waldorf Hilton in central London.

He made the remarks during a presentation titled "Cloud as part of a mixed economy", which detailed, among other things, how The Met Office is becoming a platform-as-a-service provider for various organisations examining weather trends.

"What does the future look like? the strength of the wind varies from organisation to organisation and it certainly varies over time, but the direction is inescapable; for all kinds of reasons we're moving towards more cloud-based provision," said Ewen.

However, the Met Office CIO explained how despite moving some applications and services into the cloud, the organisation will never, at least in the foreseeable future, be in a position where it won't have an internally operated data centre.

"I'll never not have a data centre, at least not in my lifetime, because at the end of the day, a core part of my mission is to run a very large HPC supercomputing environment," Ewen explained. "And because the economics really aren't there and nor are the services to be able to outsource that job we've got a data centre."