'The biggest challenge in cloud is culture, not technology', says Oracle

John Abel, head of technology and cloud UK, Ireland and Israel at Oracle also admits that cloud isn't cheaper, and that it can represent a risk to CIOs, and the wider IT department

The biggest challenge in cloud is culture, rather than technology.

That's the opinion of John Abel, head of technology and cloud UK, Ireland and Israel at Oracle, speaking at Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit.

Abel added that cloud can also be a risk to the CIO.

"The biggest risk to the CIO today is cloud," said Abel. "It's because of what the business can do without technologists. So it's time to challenge the IT function and ask things like do we really need our own virus scanners and firewalls?"

He continued to discuss cloud pricing, seeking to dispel the popular view that cloud is a cheaper way of doing things.

"Cloud is not cheaper. Around 56 per cent of users say that cloud is the same or more expensive. It's not a price battle, it's about simplification.

"There is no magic in cloud. The magic is hidden away in the infrastructure, power, network, storage, disc, and other heritage problems, you might have. Think about how to challenge your cloud vendor as to how they remove those challenges or they'll become the heritage problems of future," he stated.

Also taking part in the same panel was Alex Hooper, head of operations at the British Medical Journal. He described the cloud journey at his organisation.

"We have a bunch of different applications which don't talk to one another, all sitting within a monolithic legacy application in a private cloud.

"We started modernising about three years ago," he continued. "Our journey now sees us in a hybrid situation, with a private cloud hosted by an MSP [Managed Services Provider] in [London] docklands, connected to the AWS public cloud offering. We had developers in-house on various bits of tin, and we had bunch of private cloud, which is now joined with AWS. It's a hybrid model with workloads from the old monolithic applications now farmed out to AWS. We are now cloud-first, adopting more, more infrastructure in the cloud, and more automation," said Hooper.

Abel explained that his organisation's strategy has to a large extent been driven by its large number of acquisitions.

"We started to move when we started acquiring lots of companies. One key sucess of those acquitions is our policy of standardisation. Everything was moved years ago into a private cloud. We also use all our own prducts, all our own cloud, our own SaaS. We still have some older acquisitions sitting in a private cloud, but most of it's now in public.

"We couldn't scale to do what we do without cloud, because the number of people we'd need would be too great," he added.