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CIO: How can you maintain your independence from your cloud provider?

It's a subject that raises a lot of questions! Three CIOs and a supplier discuss their fears and the best solutions for a win/win partnership.

How do you manage the contractual aspects to guarantee your independence?

Pierre Fauquenot, Transitional CIO :

"Having contracts of indefinite duration, with 3 months' notice, in which we pay project costs so that this risk isn't borne by suppliers. That means we can make a decision quickly, and change our minds and go in a different direction quickly too."
"There has to be a balance of power between the two partners."

How do you ensure data reversibility?

NetApp :

"Beyond the contractual aspects, there are real technological aspects to take into account if we want to keep this supplier agility and flexibility."
"NetApp is providing a whole set of technologies that will enable us to create a system of interconnections between different cloud providers, to enable us to move from one provider to another, technically."

Is standardization a source of emancipation in the face of supplier lock-in?

Pierre Fauquenot:

"We see that messaging is moving towards standardization, and today there are 2 major suppliers: Google and Microsoft.
The need is for "digital energy", just as for electricity we want commonplace 50 hertz, stable production, available, abundant, at a reasonable price and with security. How can we achieve this for digital energy?
The problem with suppliers is that they go to technologists in companies, and they don't ask them to do that (they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot...).
It's up to the supplier to be innovative, to take the initiative in standardizing digital energy production, and to go and sell it to the CIO, the CFO and the CEO."

Are new standards like Open Stack a source of independence?

It all depends on whether you position yourself in the private cloud or the public cloud. Today's cloud is a hybrid with a good dose of public.

Doesn't the "multi-hybrid" environment pose additional governance problems? How do you supervise the whole thing?

NetApp 

The key point is that, in the majority of cases today, we are seeing hybrid clouds, i.e. part of the cloud will remain within the company.
The other point is that, today, customers have several cloud providers (one for this application, one for that infrastructure). The reality today is that there is no standard.
We end up with several clouds. 
We are positioning ourselves with technologies that will enable us to create the link, with solutions that are above all "software" oriented, to simplify data management in a hybrid cloud.

Pierre Fauquenot:

Pierre

To govern, you need to measure, to know what's going on, so once you've got the measurements, you can ask yourself what you can do to improve performance. One of today's challenges is to have a grid to know what's going on with suppliers, so we can work with them to improve interconnection.

Will cloud service brokering provide an answer to this?

There are outsourcers who call themselves cloud brokers and say we're not going to sell our storage anymore, we need to sell lots of stuff. It could be up to them to provide the dashboards they're going to use, and to give us access to these dashboards.

The price could also drop.

In conclusion

To remain independent of your cloud provider, you need:
1 . Be able to supervise all my data wherever it's distributed.  

2. Do hybrid cloud and change provider very easily at the technological level and very quickly if I want to.

Customer expresses need within 24 hours

Enrichment of requirements by Infortive experts

Drafting and validation of mission statement

Identify the most suitable Interim Managers in 48 hours

Presentation of interim managers at the client's or Infortive's premises

Infortive's recommendations on candidate selection

Transition manager's ownership of objectives

Defining mission communication

Mission start-up

Mission monitoring by a mission manager and implementation of a mission monitoring schedule

3-week astonishment report and realignment of objectives

End of mission report

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