CIO: 'Cloud lock-in is easy to stumble towards, hard to get out of'

Julian Burnett, former CIO of House of Fraser, discusses cloud strategy at Computing's Cloud and Infrastructure Summit North

"Cloud lock-in is really easy to stumble towards, and really hard to get out of."

That's the opinion of Julian Burnett, until recently the CIO of retailer House of Fraser, speaking at today's Cloud and Infrastructure Summit North.

Burnett explained how he moved a huge part of the organisation's business onto the cloud when he first arrived in the role.

"We really pushed the limit in terms of tolerance for change within an organisation, as much as pushing the technology envolope. We moved a billion dollar e-commerce business off DemandWare onto Azure."

But this move wasn't without challenge, due to cloud lock-in, he cautioned.

"When we tried to get out of this relationship with DemandWare it got tense, because it's very hard to extricate yourself from cloud services."

Burnett continued, explaining that the organistion's cloud use didn't stop there.

"At the time we implemented it we made the biggest implemention of Hybris on Azure, and the first Mulesoft implementation on Azure.

"At its first peak the website served 132,000 customers an hour. On Black Friday we served over two million, and it just works. It takes a lot of engineering rigour behind scenes to make it work, but it's a fantastic expression of what you can achieve quickly," he argued.

Further back in Burnett's career, he explained how things weren't always quite so smooth.

He gave the example of a Sainsbury's 'Perfect Christmas' TV advert, produced at vast expense then aired during an X-Factor final whilst he was CTO at the supermarket chain.

Due to a breakdown in communication from the firm's media agency, the URL inviting viewers to enter the competition at the heart of the advertising campaign was wrong. At the time 18,000 people tried the URL and were thrown out to the main UK website, causing it to promptly crash.

It took over 48 hours to bring the site back up, by which time the organisation had lost millions of pounds of revenue.

"The Perfect Christmas campaign site was running on Amazon, and someone had forgotten to turn auto-scaling on. So I spoke to the AWS UK country manager, he turned auto-scaling on, and a few hours later the site was back.

"But the Sainsbury's website was in-house, and it took over 48 hours to get back, so that lost us a lot of money in trading," said Burnett.