- August 11, 2022
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#ITDays: all Eyes on the Cloud
The first event of the year organized by IT One, the traditional IT Days session, took place on March 30th, 2021. Several local and international experts gathered phygitally at PwC’s Crystal Park to discuss the latest cloud trends: the agility it provides, how it can accelerate the transformation of business models and the latest advancement of the Gaia-X initiative.
Master of Ceremony of the day David Foy (Head of International
Business Development - Digital Economy, Luxinnovation) officially launched this
phygital edition of IT Days, and first welcomed Hauke Schaettiger (Partner, Cloud Consulting, PwC Germany). The
expert shared a presentation entitled “Cloud Adoption: Putting the Cloud at the
Heart of Business”. He started: “Cloud is
not a hype but reality: cloud project to make up 14,2% of the total global enterprise
IT spending in 2024, public cloud market sees 35% growth to a total $120
billion globally this year, hybrid cloud to take the front seat with expected
reach pf $145 billion by 2026, etc. All studies show that the cloud business is
huge and that it is growing fast. Moreover, the Covid crisis boosted its
adoption with more and more IT infrastructures now running on cloud services”. As
explained by Hauke Schaettiger, business
as usual is not enough to cope with the challenges of the future, which is
driven by many disruptive trends and more and more demands coming through IT: “cloud therefore allows companies to
accelerate the pace of innovation”. He also discussed security and
highlighted that it must also be dealt within the company as he notably shared
the example of management access right privileges. The expert then shared the
results of a survey led in Germany, with the participation of 100+ IT managers,
on their perception of the cloud: 36% of non-public cloud users are moving
towards the cloud in the midterm, 40% of respondents say it has some importance
and only 61% added it is of high importance. 83% of them said that in 5 years,
it will have high relevance for them. “Cloud
is in the air, put it in the heart of your business”, finally commented
Hauke Schaettiger.
“Promises and Challenges of Moving your data
to the Cloud: Ensuring Data Agility, Security and Sovereignty” was the name of
the presentation given by Olivier Tijou (Regional
VP - France, Belgium, Luxembourg & Switzerland, Denodo). The expert started
with a brief history of the data journey and data consumption. “Data used to be provided by IT, only to be
consolidated in bigger databases. It was mainly about replicating the data in
new storage. Consumers could access this reservoir to use the data. Then, the
volume grew and so did complexity. We used new technology to consolidate the
data in cheaper ways for heavy processing, which led to having datalakes. It
resulted in additional silos of data and therefore only solved one part of the
issues. Tech continued to evolve: all this data became too difficult to manage.
The cloud brings more agility as well as new challenges for Chief Data Officer,
IT Manager and the business: from governance and regulation to access, security
and cost),” explained Olivier Tijou. According to him, if you asked CDOs
and IT Managers, most of them will express their need for a unique way to
access data through a single entry point, for a data self-service and for the
necessity to ensure security. “Moving the
cloud sounds magical: it is more flexible, can be accessed from anywhere and
there are lost costs of operations. But in reality, it can create new data
silos as well as security and latency issues. Therefore, there is a new for a
logical infrastructure which would make it less risky and would finally deliver
the promises of the cloud technology by addressing all these challenges,”
explained Olivier Tijou before advocating the use of an additional virtual
layer that sits on top of physical storage, which helps manage the latter in a
totally transparency way. “You can manage
the image of the data without actually replicating it,” concluded the
expert.
Pascal
Bouvry and Roger Lampach, the co-CEOs of LuxProvide, then took the digital
stage to focus on data storage and data analytics. They notably shared the
MeluXina use case and the bridge between the Cloud and HPC. Roger Lampach first
went over the recent history of the MeluXina EuroHPC, which started back in
2019, with the aims of the European Union to build a huge and leading network
of HPC centers. “MeluXina is located in the city of Bissen. The hardware has
already been installed and we are currently running tests with the goal to be
operational from May 1st. Our overall mission, along with several
other partners, is to empower the data economy in Luxembourg, and to operate a
super computer. The government of Luxembourg is actually taking part in this
ambitious project”, said Roger Lampach. He also focused on the creation of a
competence center, along with Luxinnovation and the University of Luxembourg,
in order to provide adequate training and courses. “The project, entitled CASTIEL,
aims at developing a Europe-wide competency map presenting both available
resources and knowledge gaps across all EuroCC competence centers,” adds the
expert, who briefly described MeluXina’s customer-oriented approach. “It implies being aware of industry-related constraints,
bringing the highest security and certification standards, serve consumers on a
pay per use basis, etc.” he comments. Pascal Bouvry then focused on the
technical side, and on how to bridge the cloud technology and HPC. He
concluded: “five years ago, big data and HPC toolset were opposed, there was a
huge split. Today, at the level of MeluXina, we aim at bringing the best of
both worlds: a software stack, with many tools as well as very advanced machine
learning techniques”.
What if you could store your data in a forest?
This question was raised by Monika
Seyfried and Cyrus Clarke,
co-founders of Grow Your Own Cloud. Monika Seyfried started her presentation by
discussing the origins of GYOC and asked: “what
will it take for Human Beings to see themselves as part of nature once again?
How can we rethink the cloud? What are the repercussions of keeping data in the
cloud? Moreover, systems are growing exponentially as machine learning is
taking over many systems”. As explained by Cyrus Clarke, the experts
started their investigations, as experts and designers, in order to find new
ways to store information. “The oldest
storage in the world is DNA. It seems miraculous and we aim at using nature as
a tech. We worked with plant geneticists to develop several techniques to embed
plants with data. There are three ways of doing it: foliage injection, floral
dip, ballistic impact”, he commented. The two experts went from research to
a tech and created Grow Your Own Cloud, and turned it into a winning research
lab: they combine biotech and data science to promote a new way to store data. Monika
Seyfried and Cyrus Clarke then explained how they were able to open a data
flower shop in Copenhagen to store data in organisms. After one year of
research focusing on how to retrieve data from DNA, GYOC presented its Data
Garden at the SXSW Tech conference in Austin, Texas, which allowed them to
showcase the ability to put data in plants and extract them. “You can take care of your own data, instead
of letting the big corporations do it. It will also reduce carbon emission as
plants actually absorb CO2,” added Cyrus Clarke. The two experts concluded
their presentation by discussing the next steps for GYOC: “after developing a PoC in 2020, we now focus on developing the
research as well as a commercial pipeline. In Q1 2022, we should be able to offer
GYOC as a service. We are moving from conventional ways to store data to the
data storage of the future which uses organisms and focuses on having a greener
way to store data”.
After a well-deserved Coffee Break, the
participants were invited to participate in several series of workshops,
presented by local and international experts. First, PwC gave the floor to
Kevin Lloyd (Chief Technology Officer, Luxembourg Stock Exchange) who shared a
presentation entitled “From CI to DevSecOps: how our cloud migration is helping
us improve software delivery”. In parallel, Julien Varela (Cloud Architect, Nutanix Luxembourg) and Fabrizio Heitzmann (Senior Sales
Manager, Nutanix Luxembourg) explained how to build the foundation of a
Successful Enterprise Cloud.
Then, during the second session, Emily Sergent (Sales Engineer, Denodo)
focused on “Data Virtualization as the Keystone of your Cloud Data Strategy”,
while Loïc Mulder, Technical
Director & Partner, ITS4U, asked the following question: “Why and how
deploy Red Hat OpenShift on Azure?”.
"How could cloud adoption transform the
enterprise business model?" was the question asked during a round-table
moderated by Stéphane Zema (Director,
IT Infrastructure and Cloud, PwC Luxembourg). The discussion brought together Julian Schmücker (Senior Policy Adviser
- Digital Innovation, European Banking Federation), Kevin Lloyd (Chief Technology Officer, Luxembourg Stock Exchange), Olivier Vansteelandt? (CIO, AXA
Luxembourg & AXA Wealth Europe) and Christophe
Gaspard (Head of ABBL Cloud working group, ABBL). Julian Schmücker first explained that the top
priority of EBF was to enable the use of technologies for the financial
institutions so that they can deliver innovative solutions for the benefit of
customers and organizations. “In Europe,
in 2018, 25% of enterprises were using the cloud and 36% expected to use it by
2020. Nowadays, the cloud is not a sideline innovation: banking will move ahead
with it and follow a gradual and strategy approach,” he added, before
focusing on Luxembourg. “In 2019, 15% of
the financial services industry players were using the cloud, but 55% want to
use it in the future. We are definitely moving toward cloud adoption, with the
advent of a multicloud environment,” commented the expert. Christophe
Gaspard confirmed: “a lot of banks in
Luxembourg are now using cloud applications for training and to collaborate.
Moreover, we see that business models are changing as banks are using more and
more data and therefore need to be more agile. Cloud is therefore an enabler as
it allows banks to rapidly increase their capacity should they provide new
products and services to their clients”. The CTO of LuxSE and CIO of AXA
Luxembourg then discussed their latest and current transformation projects
which leverage the power of the cloud. Kevin Lloyd also insisted on the need to
train users and have cloud ambassadors within the company: “it is a cultural transformation for many employees as the cloud is
bringing more agility and it allows us to move forward in our digital journey and
modification of applications”. According to the CIO of AXA Luxembourg, “at the group level, 45% of applications are
already running in the cloud. Our ambition is to have all of them in it by
2025, based on our hybrid cloud strategy. Some legacy applications will be transferred
to a private cloud and others on the public cloud to accelerate the development
of new projects”. He added that the cloud provides a better time-to-market
and it allows us to build security by design within the new applications. The
four experts then briefly discussed the regulatory side and its inherent
challenges, as well as the time it usually takes to file new requests to the
CSSF. Kevin Lloyd then stated: “the next
step is actually using what we have. It takes time to implement new services.
We are moving forward with an enhanced capacity allowing us to deliver faster and
better solutions for our customers”. Olivier Vansteelandt explained that it
was now time to accelerate the transformation using these new technologies, and
to provide new services to clients and agents, around the Salesforce ecosystem.
Rim Doukha (Chairwoman of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 38 national
study committee - Cloud Computing and Distributed Platforms, ANEC GIE) then
took the stage and participated to a fireside chat session, presented by David Foy. The experts first described
the mission of both ILNAS and ANEC, whose main goals, through standardization,
is to improve the competitiveness of companies in Luxembourg, especially in the
ICT sector – with discussions around the topics of AI, Blockchain, IoT, etc. –,
one of the most relevant sectors along with construction and aerospace. The ISO/IEC
JTC 1/SC 38 technical committee focuses on standards and good practices in the
field of cloud computing. As the president of the national committee, she is in
charge of managing and coordinating delegates of the companies, defending the position
of Luxembourg at the international level. Moreover, she ensures that the national
market enforces these standards and that companies use it. “Several times a year, we meet with experts from all over the world to discuss
projects, results and recommendations. We then communicate with the local ecosystem
in order to transfer these messages,” added Rim Doukha, who then encouraged
players active in Luxembourg to join the committee and participate in the
setting of new ICT standards. She concluded: “there are a lot of benefits: they
will notably be able to access all drafts of standards and to participate in
international meetings to contribute to the development of innovative projects.
Standards are everywhere: they facilitate interaction. Experts who participate
can therefore have a global influence”.
The event ended with a round table moderated
by David Foy. It revolved around the
topic of “Gaia-X, the European Cloud” and featured Fabrice Aresu (Board Member of Cloud Community Europe Luxembourg), Witte Wijsmuller (Policy Officer, Cloud
& Software unit, European Commission?, DG Connect) and François Thill (Director Cybersecurity, Ministry of the Economy).
David Foy reminded the audience that Luxinnovation inaugurated the local Gaia-X
hub less than a week ago and then asked the experts to share their definition
of Gaia-X. “The European Commission is
not linked to Gaia-X, yet, we converge towards the game goal that is building
European native cloud and edge computing to reach that next frontier and answer
to news needs. Gaia-X is
actually the flesh on the bone of this new paradigm. Working together with
industry, it could enable businesses to interconnect and invest in this new
frontier, while being compliant with regulations and rules,” first commented Witte Wijsmuller. According to
Fabrice Aresu, the main interest of Gaia-x is the deployment of a cloud
focusing on the security and trust aspects: “its
purpose is to bring complete interoperability between countries to secure
digital transactions. The initiative finds its origins in the worrying
observation that our data become products that are being sold, and it creates a
kind of social dilemma. Gaia-X aims at putting the citizens back at the heart
of the digital world”. François Thill also mentioned the interoperability
and transparent aspect. According to him, joining the hub will allow companies
and especially SMEs to join larger markets: “they
will therefore deal with data for their own benefits and for the benefit of the
European economy, which is turning into a data-driven economy. For instance,
the Government of Luxembourg is providing a national data exchange platform to
understand how to protect and make them available without selling it. We are
talking about controlled access”. “It
goes further than data protection: it’s about the relationship between users,
business and tech providers. Interoperability is the key”, added Witte Wijsmuller.
The experts discussed the recent launch of the Gaia-X Luxembourg hub. “Within our working group, we focus on
finance, identity, and authentication, in order to ensure who is doing the
transaction and to make sure data is not used in an abusive manner. These
use-cases are extremely concrete as they deal with daily issues. Realistic:
means + experts + user case-driven,” explained Fabrice Aresu. Finally, they
focused on the participation of non-European companies: “they are here to listen. The purpose of Gaia-X is not to exclude, on
the contrary, but rather to welcome them to later enforce new standards and
rules in order to protect the citizens. Foreign service providers will
therefore have to adapt their solutions to be compliant. Inclusion is the key
to a good relationship”.
Alexandre Keilmann
Photos: Sabino Parente