The growth of cloud technology is dependent on skills- Raffensperger

Ron Raffensperger, Chief Technical Officer, Huawei IT data center solutions, sales, speaks to BusinessDay’s JUMOKE AKIYODE on the essential need for training and skill development for advanced cloud concepts. Excerpts…

Africa is embracing the cloud technology very fast, as shown in the number of Data centers springing up, do you think Nigeria has got the right skills to handle this development?

Skill is the real challenge and it’s not just Nigeria, it’s virtually everywhere and so the galaxy program is a good example. As part of that program, we have helped the government set up training and educational classes, in other countries we have actually established our own training centers but usually what we want to do is to work with either government or educational institutions to provide the training on these advanced cloud concepts because it is typically just not there. The growth of this in the future depends on having the skills to be able to use them and that’s an area where we think we can help. We have a whole series of programs where we do Huawei certified data center architects, certified cloud skills and things like that.

How do you think the requisite skill for cloud technology can be achieved here in Nigeria?

I think that the key is to find the folks that have the base skills. It is not necessarily the technical skills, it is more about problem solving skills and creativity. We are seeing a change from needing to be maths major to be working in IT to more of you need to be a creative thinker. So the key is to find those people and to provide the training opportunities and we need to do that with partners. In Saudi Arabia we’ve done a lot of work with a training institute there that has training centers all over the country to be able to provide those kinds of training, utilizing some of our cloud infrastructure. So the key is finding the right local partners.

How would you assess the uptake of cloud technology in Nigeria?

What separates what is happening in cloud in Nigeria from some of the western countries is its role in trying to improve the GDP to be able to improve the services that are provided to people. So historically, if you look at the west, cloud grew out of the need of large enterprises and the need of some brand new public services like Google, and Facebook. But what we are seeing in Africa and clearly in Nigeria I that governments have seen the opportunity for cloud as something that can help to start new kinds of business relationships but also to help provide new services. The differences that we see in Nigeria is that the government views cloud as a way to improve services to the citizens but also to be able to provide a foundation that new kinds of businesses can be built on because one of the challenges has been how do you take smart kids that are coming out of school, particularly in western schools and give them the incentive to come back to Nigeria to build particularly a service oriented or new intelligent kinds of businesses and it is not like in the US when you start a new business, you automatically decide you’re going to set up with Amazon  or Google cloud on how to do your IT. Having historically been here, and not really seen those type of companies down here, so the government and the telco operators want to take the place of that. They want to be able to fill that void and provide new kinds of services here locally.

What advantage does cloud technology have for small, medium enterprise and big businesses?

For small businesses, the opportunity from cloud is to not have their own internal IT. You don’t want to find a place in the back room to stuff a small cabinet with a couple of servers and some storage disks and all sorts, it is really painful and stressful because it always has to be updated and the environment is never that great. So the advantage for small businesses is to take advantage of cloud base services that can come from many different places. For medium and large enterprises, cloud becomes a way to have more efficiency internally. Cloud in general is all about how to get more efficient, how do you help people to get the capabilities they need at a lower price and much quicker time. At the small end it’s someone else owns the cloud, at the large end, it is let’s build our cloud and everything else is kind of in between.

What measures have you put in place to counter cases of data breach and security lapses or disasters?

That is one of the key things. Security is like an onion, there are a lot of different layers and you have to build it up a piece at a time, you start with the physical security and how to keep people from getting into the data center, all the way up to how do I figure out if somebody has been sending emails that should not have been sent. There are a lot of capabilities that we have built into our cloud infrastructure that can help address those issues. At the end of the day, one of the biggest challenges is the users. How do you keep them from clicking on the link that they shouldn’t have. Some of the latest attacks have actually been people that send emails that look like they came from a genuine company, claiming to be the IT department but actually are not. What we are trying to do is work with some of our partners and capabilities around big data to be able to actually look at all of the log files and the network traffic and see abnormalities and try to show people that something strange is happening. So we are working with a number of large banks in China and some of the telecom operators that are doing public private services. So it is always a challenge as you keep going forward. The other thing is around the ability for government and regulators particularly in banking and government areas have rules about this kind of information about citizens has to stay in this locale and so as we have built our cloud infrastructure, we have made it easy for people to set up this kind of information has to stay in this geographic part of the cloud but the cloud overall can be in many different places but it all looks like it is part of one infrastructure and you as the IT people can say this kind of database has got to stay in this geographic area.

Which cloud would you recommend to customers, public, private or hybrid cloud?

The Large customers are all going to end up in the hybrid cloud; it is only a question of when. This is because there are certain capabilities, let’s take for example a bank, if the bank wants to do marketing campaigns and one of the things they want to do is to take the Facebook and Twitter comments because a lot of large companies now are interested in what they call sentiment analysis, they need to know what people are saying so that they can respond and with this kind of analysis, you don’t want to have to build up your internal IT structure to take all news feeds and do all these analysis because it’s not done constantly, its only done sometimes, so you want to be able to take advantage of the flexibilities and the economies of scale from the public cloud to do this sort of analysis because you’re only doing it occasionally. For things that you are doing constantly, and are critical to your business, it makes a lot of sense to have that internally in your private cloud. So I think that all businesses of any size are going to end up in hybrid cloud because they are going to want the ability to be able to burst out of their private cloud into a public cloud to be able to utilise a lot of resources on a short period.

Is Huawei planning to introduce cloud service solutions?

We are not providing cloud services; our role is to provide the platform and infrastructure for people that want to do cloud services. So like our traditional customers like MTN, Etisalat, as they build public cloud services to offer to Nigerian companies, we want to provide them with that infrastructure. As an example, in Nigeria, the government through the galaxy program is offering some public cloud services and Huawei has provided the infrastructure for that. So our role is to help our local partners to provide the cloud services that companies in Nigeria want.

JUMOKE AKIYODE