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GE CTO On Moving 9,000 Apps To the Public Cloud
StewBeans writes: The Wall Street Journal recently published a special report on the staggering growth of the hybrid cloud, citing research from multiple sources, including survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year. The article said that, "CIOs are demanding a way to combine the best of the cloud with their own localized data centers. Few companies or organizations are willing or able to move all of their IT to the public cloud." GE is apparently one of those few companies, because the CTO of Cloud for GE recently wrote that they are moving the vast bulk of their 9,000 applications into the public cloud. In the article, he explains how they came to this counterintuitive decision, their strategy for moving so many apps to the cloud, and why he's more optimistic about the public cloud versus hybrid or private.
survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year
Gartner reports that enterprises they surveyed "have plans". Just roll your eyes and walk away.
Given GE's M.O., I think it's safe to assume that the predominate reason for this move involves some sort of tax dodge.
They're large enough and have enough of a cloud presence that they carry weight. Smaller companies moving to the cloud aren't going to get level of service they're expecting. Unless they pay for it of course, and then they'll find out running it in house would have been cheaper.
I love browsing private cloud data. I hope they upload more of it to check out.
*any hacker anywhere
That way it will be easier to ship all of our IT responsibilities to India or China and not need any Americans involved. That entire cost center will be cut by 75%. What's not to like?
What's that? Corporate espionage?
Nah, they'll be paid well for their standard of living so they won't break the chain of trust. And besides there will be an iron clad contract in place, our lawyers will crush them in court if they do any monkey business.
Such a worrywart! C'mon over here young man and pour me another brandy!
This is a win for CTOs who have inherited their predecessors' stingy "make it work a little longer" budgetary process. Now they have the ultimate trump card of "the upgrade is to migrate", and they save all the hardware capital costs to do so.
Any company that has 9,000 apps is bloated and broken. GE is a financial services firm, so they make money by doing nothing, which keeps them bloated and broken and very profitable. No one should even bother to listen to them.
Lance Weaver is the Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at GE Corporate. ... Lance holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Truman State University.
"This interconnection oriented architecture means we contract with colocation facilities where we can place our inspection tools and GE services into dense meeting areas of the multi-cloud environment. These are places where you find many cloud providers under one roof and we can place our services, inspection and data sets within them to obtain cloud agnostic, high speed adjacency."
"Another factor in making our journey to public cloud successful is our self-service (or what I call opt-in) approach, which allows business units to choose the services they wish to consume. People will naturally gravitate to high value, frictionless services"
"Running inside a public cloud environment, you're able to consume unlimited capacity as needed. Today, we scale up and down thousands of times in a day while we handle peak loads or run experiments."
"We support approximately 9,000 applications at GE, and our enterprise IT efforts right now are focused on moving the vast bulk of them into public cloud. This may sound like a counter-intuitive strategy, but here is why it’s a great fit for GE."
MBA's bless 'em.
"In our environment, like many others, we ran the bulk of our applications on-premise in private cloud and highly-virtualized environments. Yet we were still dealing with the challenges of demand spikes without sufficient capacity. We had the desire to burst out to external cloud to solve these problems by leveraging a hybrid cloud. "
So you didn't add capacity internally, you bought it externally, and thus lost the biggest advantage of using your own servers: control and security. Worse you made the system more complex as they had to cope with some servers in the public internet.
Worse still, you're using misleading MBA speak. There is no such thing as 'private cloud'. You ran these apps on servers YOU controlled, then you moved those apps to servers controlled BY OTHER COMPANIES ACROSS THE INTERNET. Hopefully you put in the fallback plan for if the company fails, and take regular backups of your data on their servers to make sure you still keep it. What happens when the spotty youth they hired hands your app data to his frat friend? Because while internally the network admins forced security, you lost that when you lost control of your servers.
"However, if we were able to burst out to the external cloud to support our applications then why were we running the applications internally at all? This insight gave us a new perspective on the importance of public cloud in any strategy"
Having pissed away the advantage of having your own servers, what the hell, lets set ourselves up with a third party supplier and hope they won't screw us over... that's a plan right? It says here in "MBA World" that "all good MBAs are leveraging the cloud"!
CLOUD!
I spent all last week hearing about the damn cloud and Oracle OpenWorld. And the company that I work for has their heads in the cloud now. It will be interesting how all the datacenters in the world are consolidated into these cloud providers. They are just making sweet targets for terrorists around the world...
Karma: Bad
You would think that a company like GE would be big enough to be able to have their own private cloud infrastructure.
bash$
Well you see, the CIA is planning to move its email system into the cloud. And really John Brennan, CIA director, was just testing the water with his AOL email account.
Now that he's seen how successful 'the cloud' is, the whole CIA email system will be moved to AOL.
.
I guess it is better public relations for corporations to lay off IT workers when apps are "moved to the cloud" than when the "datacenter is being outsourced".
My personal opinion as a customer, GE is currently awful at supporting their SW. They require extremely specific builds under "FDA regulations" that only limit vendors from patching rather than customers (I.E. they certified SQL Server 2005, it is 2015 and you want to run SQL 20012? Nope, we don't support that even though the legislation says customers are allowed to update base systems). If a GE cloud goes live we can expect to be deploying HIPAA compliant applications on SQL 2012 in 2019 based on current "certification" requirements.
Further, they are already big enough to espouse a "my way or the highway" attitude around their medical products. They may try to use that as leverage to force huge organizations into the cloud, but quite frankly, HIPAA is scalable legislation and no cloud solution to my knowledge has met huge organization requirements for audit trails on data center entry and physical access.
So, go ahead and push this agenda GE... It may finally be the one thing that finally causes the big players to break your medical divisions back.
I'm a proponent of the cloud when it makes sense, and think that companies should implement a private cloud for their own internal applications. I'm not so sure about a company putting everything out on the public cloud, nor whether the migration will complete. The article says they're 350 apps in, with 1000 targeted for the end of the year. In enterprise IT, an "app" can be anything from the crown jewels to Bob in Accounting's hosted Access database or Excel macros. I'm assuming they're starting with the Access database. :-)
The thing I don't like about the public cloud is the real possibility for permanent vendor lock-in, IBM mainframe style. Prices are low now, but when all the competitors are driven out and the cloud bubble bursts, Amazon and Microsoft are going to slowly turn the prices up. Assuming the cloud provider isn't a security basket case, secure environments can be designed. But, this is GE we're talking about. I guarantee they're wallowing in outsourced-IT mediocrity and managing a massive bloated system. GE was the archetype for the 60s-style conglomerate, so I'm sure they have huge amounts of duplication. They probably have 30 SAP implementations and 20 Oracle ERP systems from the various divisions, acquisitions, etc.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. Just don't forget, big company CIOs, that the public cloud is being subsidized by the latest round of VC funded web startups and phone apps. When that bubble bursts, expect vendors to make their money back in other ways...
master, it is our destiny.
Back to the future, sort of. GE was an early timesharing user, building what we would now call a "private cloud" based on a several datacenters in the US and elsewhere. Eventually started selling spare cycles and access to various software tools to others, so it became sort of public. Interesting system - I used it in the deep dark past.
Every piece of equipment between you and your data gets to vote continuously on whether you're going to be able to run your business. And all have veto power!
First, any executive that utters the word "Cloud" is a moron. A CTO, CIO, etc who utters the word "cloud" is a fucking moron. "Cloud" is a marketing word for other people's servers.
Second moving Enterprise applications off of the company's servers is stupid and reckless. Security, accessibility, up time, backups, integrity, etc. are in the control of a company that makes its living by cutting corners and economizing. And if any of them are defense related, probably illegal.
Third, this moron "executive" is probably just trying to reduce head count and infrastructure costs, looking toward the next fucking quarterly results and doesn't intend on being around a year or two from now when it all comes crashing down.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Cloud means not-your-servers.
So you are not storing data in "clouds" you are storing data on not-your-servers. For GE ok whatever. They can buy servers and call them clouds if they want to. Of course.
Don't believe the cloud hype because they named not-your-servers "clouds". When data is run on not-your-servers you accept risks. If you think that's cool because "c'mon guys, everybody is doing it"... look at big corporations. For a business those are calculated business decisions. For home users... ask Jennifer Lawrence about not-your-servers.
I work for a company that has to support several CRAPTASTIC GE medical apps. They can't keep the software running in a very limited Windows environment where the clients run on very specific support versions of Internet Explorer. They're planning on moving apps to the cloud where the clients might end up running on anything from Chrome to IE11? LAUGHING OUT LOUD. Not a snowball's chance in hell!
The ability for our business to access "The Cloud" is determined by Time Warner Cable. So, no.
I don't respond to AC's.
Why? The Payroll, and generic business stuff should have already been outsourced to someone like IBM. As for their products, it should be some computer that costs thousands of dollars, controlling some engine, or turbine, which costs millions of dollars. Hell, give it its own computer with Linux or BSD on it. So what if the Desktop Environment is crappy. Who cares, as long as it is reliable. What would GE be doing, where operating servers is a significant part of the cost of something?
I worked at GE on the same team as the Author a decade ago at the Toaster Division...err Consumer and Industrial.. Back then the company had distinct silos as to business units and it was a major pain just to move sites from one silo to another, we were directed to reIP and rename everything on a annual basis.
Teams in each division spent months changing IP schemas of whole divisions because of an accounting change. We brought in new companies and spun new companies on a yearly basis. I think we spun out to another GE division and brought in the same plant 3 times in 4 years. . We had ITIL, We had SixSigma, We had 3+ ticketing systems and we had some real TPS reports.
GE the IT provider now seems to provide data center services for the unregulated parts enterprise. I am sure there are some holdouts at GE Healthcare and GE Turbine/Energy/Aviation running something on local iron. Also no manufacturing plant is going to release the process control to the other side of network. Putting everything on a VM is nothing new for GE. Putting disparate systems in the same data center, no big deal. Putting two divisions under one roof. If you datacenters, their own IT, their data. look at their history GE built their own brand of mainframes just to account for their own enterprise. They finally have divested themselves of owning their own corporate jewels, the information is everywhere, the information is nowhere
The data that runs the company is in other peoples hands, not my cup of tea but GE has long gone past sensible and risk adverse. Seeing that the IT and network infrastructure is treated as a both a commodity and a infrastructure redefines IT role. At least they are no longer playing with IT as a profit center.
"GE recently wrote that they are moving the vast bulk of their 9,000 applications into the public cloud."
What would any company need with 9,000 applications. Would lead to much inefficiencies and insecurities as there's no was to predict how emergent bugs would lead to security violations.
sell your GE stocks, me thinks.
Why? So they can influence you by putting a stupid idea in your heads since you're the techies that will validate it. Dumb move, don't do it. The very fact they're up to trying to puppeteer your type means it is NOT working for them so they resort to typical business "this is the best thing since sliced bread: everyone jumping on the bandwagon and you'll be left behind" mind control bullshit marketers use. Do not believe the hype. Hype means something is not selling on its own merits so the brainwashing bullcrap is put out and it's all lies from paid for 'experts' at Gartner, the joke of the fucking industry for decades. Haven't enough cloud failures like Google at your recent sporting events not shown you that many piece distributed crapshoot is not up to the task?
Ooh look, a link to enterprisersproject.com. It's almost enough to make you think there's a shill around.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Moving the 9000 aps anywhere is the wrong solution. They should not have 9000 aps in the first place.
I work at a steel mill and the IT Director is moving every single app and service into the cloud that she possibly can. Office365, AS400, Plex, Exchange, everything. The only server we'll have left on-site are file and backup servers plus whatever the few remaining local apps are that we need.
I'm reading between $10K and $50K on cloud per year and you might as well have your own servers, this true?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Another sound technical decision, from the company that built the Fukushima nuclear reactors.
OK, if I am reading it right these CoLo hubs is GE putting all their eggs into one basket. Are they setting themselves up for a single point of failure?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Light bulbs
Jet engines
Turbine generators
Until recently kitchen apliances
I think that they are into a little more than financial services
Everyone who says cloud is executive MBA BS probably spends more time looking at perl scripts than balance sheets. If you think the DC is cheaper than cloud, you must ask yourself three questions: 1. Cheaper by how much? 2. How much capital must I invest to save that? 3. Where could I invest my money instead and what would that investment return? Even if you are excellent and can run your DC as optimally as Amazon (you can't), you still make lousy margins on your DC investment. The opportunity cost isn't worth it. The MBA's realize that a dollar invested in your low margin DC is a dollar you didn't spend purchasing a high margin business.