Q&A with Chris Drumgoole on Cloud

As we start to wrap up 2013, cloud veteran and senior vice president of Verizon Terremark Chris Drumgoole reflects about enterprise cloud adoption in 2013 and where the cloud will take businesses in the year ahead. In addition, he talks about one of the best cloud deployments in Verizon Terremark’s history.

1. Where do you see the greatest opportunity in cloud services? In your perspective, what industries offer the most potential?

The greatest opportunity lies in making cloud technologies better, faster, and more cost effective. This will allow businesses across sectors and geographies to put more applications in the cloud without sacrificing control or performance.

In terms of industries, organizations in finance and healthcare see great benefits in adopting cloud. Financial and banking institutions have the ability to grow by eliminating fragmented systems while retails can ‘burst’ into cloud environments without deploying any additional infrastructure. This does not only translate into cost savings but it’s also a smarter way of doing business in general.

2. There is a lot of buzz around who is adopting cloud within the enterprise. In your perspective, who is better suited to embrace the cloud, the business lines or IT organizations? What are the advantages for each?

It is no surprise that IT and various lines of businesses have long lived in disconnected worlds. The best cloud deployments we have seen involve both IT and lines of business working together towards a common goal. This approach almost always results in accelerated growth, improved customer service, and innovation around the business, which is the definition of success. I believe teaming up is becoming more popular as I have seen an increased number of IT organizations leaving behind infrastructure management and focusing on becoming strategic counselors to the enterprise.

3. What are the most compelling cloud deployments Verizon Terremark has executed?

We host about 700 websites for a global nutrition, health and wellness company, including over 100 corporate sites and their primary e-commerce solution. In addition to the large scale, this deployment is interesting because we go beyond Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and support Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with an end-to-end support that consists of a dedicated global service management team and cloud security. This comprehensive solution led to a 20% cost reduction for this organization.

4. The cloud is an ever-evolving phenomenon, what are the advantages of being a pioneer in the space?

First, we’ve seen it all! Second, we have been able to improve our offerings across the board because we have deployed extremely complex environments and we have been able to learn and improve our systems and expertise. In fact, Verizon Cloud was designed based on the information we have gathered from our enterprise customers throughout the years, and we developed a fundamentally different platform that is more scalable, higher performing, and more flexible to meet the needs of the enterprise today and well into the future.

5. Where do you think the cloud will be a year from today?

We are going to see more virtualized infrastructures and advanced software-controlled environments. In addition, I foresee an increased focus on application performance and speed as enterprises and providers alike realize that in order to house mission-critical applications, consistent and deterministic performance is non-negotiable. Lastly, I think Big Data and its analytic tools will grow even bigger and will be applied to industries beyond e-commerce sites.