'Too many companies are cloud junkies', says Gatwick Airport CIO

CIO explains his strategy is to minimise the number of suppliers, and keep core processes on-premises

Too many companies are "cloud junkies", using cloud technology when keeping services on premises would make more sense.

That's the opinion of Cal Corcoran, CIO of Gatwick Airport, speaking exclusively to Computing recently.

Corcoran explained that he's happy to use the cloud for many services, but core processes are likely to remain on premises.

"We use cloud in a pragmatic fashion, so we use it for development, testing, resilience, sales and marketing, business analytics, reporting solutions, finance, procurement and HR. But think about what an airport does. It keeps plans, bags and passengers moving. Those are the three core processes.

"The approach is to keep anything which directly related to those processes on premises. We have a huge engineering capability here at the airport, with access to people that know lots about power, air con and resilience [so we don't need to outsource that expertise]. We try to minmise the number of players and providers in this space."

He added that the airport has used multi-tenanted public cloud in the past, but he feels that the strategy relies on too many different systems to be truly reliable.

"For that to work perfectly you need your telecom providers to work well, the path across internet to work, the hosting firm's telecoms to work, and their data centre support and monitoring not to drop. We have had examples where even in the public cloud using dedicated slices [as opposed to multi-tenanted], you can suffer from noisy neighbours, and we just can't have that. Our operations are too important to us, so we need to keep it close. We use cloud for resilience, and we're very pro-cloud, but not for core services.

"Too many companies are cloud junkies," he continued, reflecting on the 'cloud-first' mantra adopted by some IT leaders. "For a new capability then we apply the cloud-first principle, if it doesn't affect planes, bags or passengers. We try to keep it simple."

Giving a few examples, he explained that the airport uses cloud for its data warehousing requirement and for analytics. "But if it's to do with queue measuring functionality, or the airport operating database, which is our key repository of information, I'd never move that to the cloud."

However, he said that security concerns weren't a factor in deciding to keep core services out of the cloud.

"Quite often cloud providers have better security than you could manage yourself. The reason I don't like critical services in the cloud is purely because there are too many players. There are too many hops and skips; if goes wrong, it's very hard to track down which telecom provider dropped the ball."

Corcoran argued that when firms move to large providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, there are often ten or more providers involved in delivering the final services.

"Look at the sheer number of people invovled and everywhere it can go wrong. You need all your providers to be on top of their game all of them time, so it makes more sense to keep critical stuff on premises."

He also told Computing that the airport is looking to bolster its physical security by measuring the brain waves of staff members engaged in certain activities.