Market View 09

Tom Moran

Senior Lead Technology Strategist

and Sustainability Strategy Lead

Market View 09

Tom Moran

Senior Lead Technology Strategist and Sustainability Strategy Lead

We are working to optimise that infrastructure while ensuring that it is future ready to take on the workloads created by things like AI and machine learning.

What would you say are the biggest challenges facing the cloud industry today?

It is hugely challenging to optimise the utilisation of cloud infrastructure and the emergency of DevOps created new questions around who controls and owns various aspects of the infrastructure. We are working to optimise that infrastructure while ensuring that it is future ready to take on the workloads created by things like AI and machine learning.

Application modernisation is also a huge challenge because many legacy apps are not easy to migrate to cloud, or potentially the economics of hyperscale public cloud don’t make sense.

Third, we are challenged by the emergence of digital workplaces and immersive experiences, where we have seen enormous change in recent years and accelerated change during the Covid pandemic. We now have a landscape of distributed applications and distributed users, which has fundamentally changed security, where identity is now the perimeter.

When building cloud strategy what are the key priorities and objectives?

For many organisations, cloud is an enabler of efficiency, through agility and scalability. When organisations need to deal with a rapid scale of change, the benefits of cloud technology and the economic model of cloud makes a lot of sense.

The business landscape has been transformed by the cloud. Today we see start-up companies that wouldn’t have existed without cloud infrastructure. These businesses doing amazing things with AI and ML wouldn’t have gotten off the ground because they wouldn’t have been able to access the funding needed to build the infrastructure they needed.

Cloud strategy should be built around the idea of taking advantage of flexibility and agility while realising there’s no one size fits all approach, and even while embracing the potential of cloud we need to remember there is still a place for some of that traditional IT discipline, processes and skill sets.

Today we see start-up companies that wouldn’t have existed without cloud infrastructure. These businesses doing amazing things with AI and ML wouldn’t have gotten off the ground because they wouldn’t have been able to access the funding needed to build the infrastructure they needed.

We want to drive innovation and the ability to leverage automation, AI and ML to improve the way we run our business and make the platform available to customers.

How should business leaders evaluate technologies to maximise the potential of the cloud to drive innovation?

The evaluation of new technology in our organisation is tied to two objectives that are competing in some ways. First, we want to achieve scale and better performance in our infrastructure. Then, we want to drive innovation and the ability to leverage automation, AI and ML to improve the way we run our business and make the platform available to customers.

Lumen Technologies has a mission to connect the world and further human progress by connecting people, data and applications. The global company provides a range of network services from metro connectivity to long-haul data transport and edge cloud, security and managed services.