That’s how BP began, the company’s chief information officer told the Cloud World Forum 2013 in June, according to Computer Weekly. Dana Deasy explained the company’s “cautious and calculated approach” to the London forum for utilizing cloud computing, which mixed public and private cloud services and in-house IT.
Picking a cloud provider was difficult because BP was looking for the best solution for every feature, and no single provider could offer that, Deasy told Computer Weekly. BP’s IT team selected nine cloud service providers to provide a mix of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). BP uses a virtual private cloud provided by Amazon Web Services for IaaS.
Measured by revenues, BP was the fifth-largest company in the world in 2012. The company’s IT infrastructure includes 90,000 PCs, 57 petabytes of data and 17,000 servers, and IT services provided by 3,500 employees and contractors and 7,000 staffers from managed service providers.
One of Deasy’s challenges was discussing with his chief financial officer the “parallel running costs” that would be necessary during the move to the cloud, according to TechRepublic. “That’s always a difficult and challenging conversation to have,” he said.
Another challenge is communicating to IT staff how the cloud shift will affect them, such as moving from direct IT support to brokering cloud services, Deasy said.
Read the Computer Weekly story here, and read the TechRepublic story here.