Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 07

26 / Canadian Government Executive // February/March 2019 ers. For example, we recently helped an airline reduce annual costs by using ma- chine learning to predict weather patterns and map the best routes. That’s a huge win for them. For most organizations though, exploiting the full capabilities of AI and machine learning are still a way off. It’s im- portant to build a solid and secure founda- tion first to ensure your organization can leverage these new tools effectively. You are heavily involved in working in highly regulated commercial industries like finance, aviation, healthcare and oth- ers. Can you share some of the lessons from those industries that can be applied in the public sector? We’ve been working with enterprises in highly regulated industries for almost a decade now. These organizations are highly security-conscious and risk averse, not unlike most government agencies. De- spite that, many have successfully adopted cloud or have started their cloud adoption journey because they have no choice. In or- der to survive and compete with smaller, more nimble start-ups that are “born in the cloud,” larger enterprises must adopt the same tools and technologies. Governments may not have the same concerns regarding competition, but they do have to contend with the expectations of their citizens. Many of them, particu- larly younger ones, are consuming ser- vices online and increasingly through mobile apps. Deploying those services securely and cost effectively in the cloud requires an entirely new mindset. For regulated industries, we ensure compliance, security, governance and op- erational readiness requirements by build- ing a secure and compliant cloud founda- tion that has an opinionated pipeline for application development. By adopting an everything-as-code approach, configura- tion and maintenance can be automated to eliminate human involvement and human error. This virtual data centre becomes the foundation on which the organization’s entire cloud journey is built, from a single workload, to 10, 100 and beyond. The same foundation and pipeline ap- proach can be applied to the public sector where security and compliance policies are paramount. Again though, cloud must be viewed as more than just a technology solution, but one that encompasses people, tools and processes across the entire orga- nization. Q: Your company is also doing some public sector work in Aus- tralia. Can you share some of the learning outcomes that Canada can adopt? Australia has been on the cloud journey a little bit longer than Canada. They’ve cen- tralized their IT services and put many ap- plications into the cloud. I think there are efficiencies and scale that can be realized here if there is a co- hesive strategy around how IT services are delivered to and by Canadian government entities. Globally, more and more organizations are looking at in-sourcing because they want to control their IT destiny. This, com- bined with the fact that cloud providers are offering more complex services as a commodity that they can operate on your behalf, means that internal teams need to recruit for different skill sets. In a highly competitive market for cloud talent, the public sector needs to consider how to at- tract that talent and how would it would actually staff a Cloud Centre of Excellence, for example. There is also a significant shift in how internal IT teams are being organized around cloud and modern DevOps prac- tices. For example, we see organizations moving towards smaller teams delivering end-to-end rather than focusing on large teams and throwing people at a problem. It’s about taking a step back and thinking about what the cloud adoption strategy is: why are we embarking on a cloud initia- INTERVIEW