Cloud vendors should welcome DORA regulation, says NTT Data chief technology officer
Cloud vendors should welcome the introduction of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in 2025, said Michael O’Reilly, chief technology officer, NTT Data Services Ireland.
Speaking on a recent TechFire webinar where an audience of IT professionals, O’Reilly discussed the burning question: “Do you have an open relationship with your cloud partner?”
“Vendors are proud of the services that they’ve built over over time and I think if people think back to the early days of cloud where it was pure compute and pure storage plays and providing infrastructure as-a-service and offering ‘five-nines’ of availability that has matured significantly since those early days and the vendors have brought in a massive amount of capabilities,” he said. “They want to prove that you know that they can run the type of workloads that you would normally run on-premise. This oversight from the regulator is going to help establish that standard and make the journey to cloud a little bit more transparent. It may not be as easy but it will bring a lot of transparency to overall adoption.”
Going to the burning question of how to handle vendor lock-in O’Reilly noted that the needs of customers and vendors change over time.
“With cloud vendors things will change. You look at the way they determine their support issues. If you look at the traditional model you know a new version of a software product or a hardware product has so many years of a shelf life and then quite a long afterlife,” he said.
“Shorter shelflives give vendors the opportunity to say ‘hey we’re bringing functionality but we will change this and it will evolve over time, which means you need to deal with that’. They’re quite open about that and that’s fine. The key is to keep an eye on when you decide ‘you know what we’re going to jump ship now’ because we have a better way of doing things.”
O’Reilly was joined by Bank of Ireland principal architect for core banking Ronan Hughes to discuss the challenge of vendor lock-in at a time when companies are still making decision about whether to stay on-prem, embrace the cloud completely or adopt a pragmatic approach of holding back applications and data.
“We have a number of applications on private cloud and one of the reasons we’ve taken some stuff back on-prem as well is to have the ability and the effect of business resilience and continuity so that we are not 100% dependent upon cloud for any core category one our category two services,” said Hughes. “What we have is an element of ‘dual running’ where we have the ability to run certain systems on-prem and in the cloud, as well, with our preference being that they should always run on the cloud when available and when pertinent. But if anything went wrong in the event of an outage or a vendor dispute or a problem from a technology perspective, we have the ability to own them and contain them ourselves internally.”
O’Reilly noted that control plays a big part on what stays local and that applications and data do not have to be stored and used in the cloud.
Hughes shared his experience where too many applications were migrated to the cloud and had to be brought back in-house. “We have a number of applications on private cloud and one of the reasons we’ve taken some stuff back on-prem as well is to have the ability and the effect of business resilience and continuity so that we are not 100% dependent upon cloud for any core category one or category two services,” he said. “What we have is an element of ‘dual running’ where we have the ability to run certain systems on-prem and in the cloud, as well, with our preference being that they should always run on the cloud when available and when pertinent. But if anything went wrong in the event of an outage or a vendor dispute or a problem from a technology perspective, we have the ability to own them and contain them ourselves internally.”
Sustainability sells
On the subject of sustainability O’Reilly noted its increasing importance as a differentiator in the cloud market. “We have a very strong sustainability and energy consumption is key to that with an initiative that our parent company in Japan runs that looks at how to maintain and deliver much more efficient energy at the right cost the right sustainability level for for our our customers and that feeds into not just what we do for a customer but also into the communities that we serve, and the planet we live on. It’s something that everybody is taking seriously.”
“Connection to the grid isn’t easy to get and it’s quite expensive, so you have to live within your existing consumption,” added Hughes. “As we expand our operation and move to the cloud there are huge considerations around that… In the last three months we have switched off some large pieces of very old kit, so we managed to get rid of them that’s been on the estate for 40 years. The day that we switched it off we saw an 8% saving in our electricity footprint.”
Returning to the topic of lock-in in his conclusion O’Reilly said: “Vendor lock-in is not a new thing, it’s been around a long time because it’s evolved.” He argued that the same process is common to all technology but the important thing is to “understand the roadmap, understand how it helps enable your business you know help you build better decisions into your strategy and recognise that if things change you can deal with that because you’ve got a plan and you understand how you approach it and you’ve got that open relationship with your vendor.”
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