Just over a year ago, I joined Deloitte’s Cloud Engineering Group, which helps clients build and connect sustainable cloud-native systems to thrive in the cloud ecosystem. Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about my first year.
I was drawn to this new adventure for several reasons. For one, it represented an incredible chance to further my own career growth by working with an organization that allows me to offer a complete set of solutions and capabilities to meet client needs. And more broadly, the timing coincided with an opportunity to grow Deloitte’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure capabilities.
Given my experience with large, complex systems that drive the business of my clients, I really believe that Oracle has something special with their cloud platform. I’ve spent more than 20 years working with Oracle technology helping clients implement and optimize back-office solutions, namely PeopleSoft. And Oracle’s relentless focus on developing a leading cloud solution at a very competitive price point drew me to spend significant time with OCI, where I’ve helped drive its development as a partner and contributor. In short, Oracle is driving leading solutions to serve its customer base.
IT organizations have had the cloud as a major agenda item for more than a decade, and it’s become clear that today’s commercial businesses and government agencies are quickly reaching an inflection point with the cloud. We’ve only seen the pace of the move accelerate, in part thanks to outside forces like a global pandemic, skills shortages and a difficult economy. Organizations that embrace the cloud can see multiple benefits, including:
- Cost reduction: Organizations are often forced to “find money” wherever possible, and a proper cloud implementation can remove major IT costs, such as hardware and data center expenses
- Increased efficiency: IT organizations are often stretched thin just keeping the lights on, and a move to the cloud can streamline operations while allowing IT staff to work on more impactful and innovative solutions for the business
- Built-in security: With some of the top security talent and technology in the world, the robust security infrastructure built-in by cloud service providers today is unrivaled. OCI, for instance, holds a variety of certifications, authorizations, and accreditations like FedRAMP, so we know security is built into the heart of the system
- Growth driver: CIOs, including those in government, who shift the view of IT from a pure cost center to an innovation center can make a true impact on the mission of the broader organization and enable positive change
We’ve seen these four core tenets prove out over and again. Prior to my time with Deloitte, I spent over a decade working with public sector clients, and I was able to help multiple large U.S. states move their back-office systems to OCI. Each time, the clients got better system performance, lower total cost of ownership and better security options.
Keeping with public sector as an example, Deloitte recently helped the state of Ohio modernize critical security capabilities by leveraging cloud as part of the Innovate Ohio Platform (IOP) initiative. This simplified access to state government systems for both government employees and Ohio residents. In the federal space, we’re seeing optimization as a key driver too. The U.S. Department of Defense is migrating critical business workloads from legacy data centers to Oracle’s DOD Cloud to operate more efficiently by using cloud native services.
The last 15 months with Deloitte made clear the strong commitment to the cloud wasn’t just my own goal, it’s our organization’s as well in unlocking all of the potential the cloud provides. The company has clearly embraced this initiative, putting investments into developing, and recruiting the technical and strategic talent with the experience needed to make this vision become reality.
We made a huge investment in the Oracle cloud space with the acquisition of BIAS Corporation in March of 2022. By combining the skills and technology of our already talented workforce with that of BIAS, we are quickly tackling problems and creating new solutions in this space as we work with our clients to chart their path to the cloud.
Witnessing all of this, it’s been an exciting year for me with Deloitte! The buy-in I’ve seen from my colleagues, our company, and clients to make a significant investment in the cloud presents a great opportunity to help create solutions for efficient delivery of impactful services to customers and constituents. Please reach out to me at cpasternak@deloitte.com if you’d like to learn more about moving your organization to the cloud.
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