Corporate accountants need to be convinced that cloud is secure, not just IT, says CIO

Julian Burnett, former House of Fraser CIO and Sainsbury's CTO explains that confidence is growing in both public and private cloud, and that a tipping point is coming

Trust in the cloud is increasing every year, but it's accountants, and the purse-string holders - and not just IT - who need to accept that cloud is worth investing in.

That's the opinion of Julian Burnett, former CIO of House of Fraser, speaking at Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit in Manchester.

"Confidence in cloud is growing every year," said Burnett. "Can we be sure that it's secure, well this is cloud providers' business. They'll go out of business very quickly if it's not more secure than we can create ourselves. But it's the accountants who really need to get it. We have almost daily discussions and debates with them around cloud security."

Burnett said that a tipping point will come in the next couple of years, where more workloads and services are operating off than in-premises. He argued that this will bring in shift in required skill-sets towards people who can work in a "multi-cloud world".

"Skillsets are becoming really quite a challenge for us all. In previous roles I brought in teams of specialists, and put in career development and training to allow people to get involved in cloud. We'll be spending about $300bn on cloud by 2020, and probably the fastest growing element will be security-as-a-service."

He argued that cloud will become ever more ubiquitous because of its low set-up costs.

"Economics will push us further and faster, to the position where cloud is the default choice. I wouldn't be surprised if most CIOs are looking to go cloud-first because economics are driving that."

He added that Chinese cloud provider Alibaba will be increasingly seen as a valid option for enterprises.

"Alibaba is coming. I got offered their services a month ago, and it was a third of the price of my heavily discounted Microsoft Azure package. If you've got workloads that you'll tolerate being in Alibaba, then do it, the service will be no better or worse than others."

Earlier, Burnett had warned of the dangers of being locked in to one cloud provider.