IP Expo 2016: Microsoft CTO, Google And IBM Debate The Future Of Cloud

To the future cloud

Panelists discussed a range of topics at the event, including how the future cloud should be architected and one of the most crucial barriers for adoption to date – security.

Humphreys said that although up to this point development of the Cloud has been modelled on the way infrastructure has been created in the past, he sees a new way forward for hosting services.

“What’s the future paradigm? I would like to posit that we see this trend: Infrastructure as Code (IaC), where the moment I’m not plugging in a server, hard disks, physically attaching cables, everything else is an application programming interface (API).

“If you take IaC to its logical conclusion, that infrastructure then is code, you start thinking about how do we write code well. This includes fast feedback, or how do we communicate our intents to other developers. These types of things will be the kind of criteria as to how we judge the Cloud going forward.

“All you are doing is wiring together APIs to create value, so that is writing code. we will start to look at infrastructure and platforms and start to think how do they enable me to deliver code and value and services faster. We won’t think so much of Private versus Public, just where does this workload need to go?

“The paradigm will be less ‘Where is my data centre’, and it will be more ‘It needs to run here for regulatory reasons and compliance’; all the other aspects will be evaluating it as code.”

Overcoming barriers

John Easton, a distinguished engineer and lead cloud advisor at IBM, said there must be a move away from the belief that all data requires high-level security.

“The simple thing to do is treat everything the same, throw loads of tech and resource and people at it, and then that simplifies the proposition – the difficulty is that the underlying infrastructure and the complexity of the people to support that becomes progressively more difficult to resolve.

“In much the same way we have this idea that everything needs to be highly available and resilient, with disaster recovery – no, actually we should design for things failing all the time, but failing gracefully, and being able to support the things that you need to do.

“The real problem with security is that we haven’t actually thought about what we’re trying to secure, it’s laziness on [the industry’s] part.”

Is security still an issue?

McNeill at Google disagreed that security remained an issue for Cloud uptake.

“It’s not really security that’s an issue,” he said. “The question is understanding how the value arises and how the application of these changes our organisations, our business models, and I think it’s those changes which really leads to anxiety.

“What’s really at the bottom of this is an anxiety around a recognition that the world is changing and trying to understand where it’s going.

“We’re working on things that expose our operations infrastructure – people – how we do our operations for customers so that you can start accessing some of the deep operational layers and not just our systems but our processes and our people.”

Quiz: The Cloud in 2016!