British Gas, Atkins plan to move all systems to the cloud in near future, say CIOs
Atkins CIO wants to move all systems to the cloud by 2020, while British Gas CIO thinks it could happen in 'several years'
The CIOs of British Gas and engineering firm Atkins believe that they will be able to move all of their systems into the cloud at some point in the near future.
Richard Cross, CIO and CDO of Atkins told Computing that the firm wanted to have all of its systems in the cloud by 2020, and suggested that the firm would not switch overnight but would instead take a hybrid approach as a stepping stone.
When asked whether the firm's plans would take five years because of the complexity of migrating away from on-premise systems or because cloud offerings were not mature enough yet to hold sensitive data, he said it was "a bit of both".
"Things like moving to Office 365 are a bit more mature now, whereas specialist tools such as those in business information modelling (BIM) have had to run on big powerful PCs [up until now], so it's not the easiest thing to [migrate] to the cloud," he said.
Meanwhile, British Gas CIO David Cooper said that his firm currently has some applications running in Amazon, others in a HP virtual private cloud and it also has a deal with Microsoft Azure.
"We have things in all places but we have some things which are still left on physical hardware at the moment - they are of a massive scale; SAP says we are one of the biggest SAP utility instances in the world and the cloud providers aren't really ready for this yet because of the SLAs that you'd want wrapped around this," he said.
He said that shifting towards the cloud was mainly a "timing issue".
"[Cloud providers] will get there, and they will be able to underwrite the SLAs that they need, over the next several years - even SAP itself would [currently] struggle with the size of our SAP instance on its cloud environment because we've had that discussion; it's just a matter of time and maturity," Cooper said.
But is the cloud secure enough for sensitive data?
Cross said: "I think it can be. You need a different environment but if you look at people like the CIA, they have signed Amazon to provide storage in the cloud, the MoD has [also moved some of its applications into the cloud], and some of our clients who have sensitive data see the benefits of the cloud and are looking to establish secure environments that comply with all of the security constraints.
"For me it is no different - the rules and the constraints apply to data wherever it may be. Whether it is in the data centre or the cloud, you have to make sure there is no compromise on that."
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