‘The Biggest Impediment To Cloud Adoption Is Cultural'

The migration from traditional, on-premise hardware and services to the cloud isn’t easy for legacy companies, but it’s increasingly important, says Phil Hassey, CEO, capioIT.

- Varsha Meghani

Cloud is changing all of business and society on a fundamental level,” said Ginni Rometty, chairman and CEO of IBM, while giving the keynote address at the InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas in March. An annual affair by the technology giant, this year saw industry experts come together to better explore how businesses can disrupt and transform using cognitive and cloud-enabled technologies. On the sidelines of the three-day conference, Forbes India caught up with Phil Hassey, CEO of capioIT, an Australia-based advisory firm that helps organisations understand emerging technologies in emerging markets. Edited excerpts:

Q Cloud adoption is no more a matter of if, but what and when. How do you see it accelerating, especially in the Asian markets?

I started as an IT outsourcing analyst years ago. For me, cloud is just an extension of that technology. I remember thinking, probably eight years ago, “Is cloud an evolution or a revolution?” It’s an evolution for sure, but it’s evolving quickly. Nowhere do I see discussions not having a cloud element to them. When organisations are investing in new technology, every piece of that conversation is about the cloud. In Asia, in pretty much all the markets, security is not an inhibition anymore to adopting cloud technology. The security that a regional bank in India or telcos in Taiwan offer is nowhere close to the security that Microsoft, IBM or AWS [Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of online retailer Amazon] have. So security is not an issue anymore. The only real impediment is legislative requirements about where data is to sit or the structure of that data.

Q But transitioning to the cloud requires change across all levels of an organisation and that’s not easy…