Cloud conundrum at Deloitte: An interview with CIO Matt Peers

Deloitte's CIO tells Sooraj Shah of his hope that clients will fully trust the cloud in the next three years

As the CIO of one of the "Big Four" accountancy firms, Matt Peers has to look out for the interests of Deloitte's employees, as well as its clients.

Peers told Computing that Deloitte's customers have been taking security increasingly seriously, and have been asking Deloitte to tailor solutions for them. And the firm has adopted a flexible approach to security, rather than make an effort to lock down an enterprise to the point that productivity drops.

"My team is set up in a way that we do a lot of things in security, but what we're not able to do is just give clients a complete overview of what we do.

"We are quite malleable, but it is impossible to replicate the model of flexibility across thousands of clients," Peers said.

"So we try to strike a balance of ensuring that there is usability in the right places, because people don't want Big Brother watching them on their laptops - so we have certain technologies that we're running on our machines that monitor activity, but you can't have that stopping people from serving clients or making them unproductive," he said.

Alongside security and flexibility, Peers said that all new IT solutions need to incorporate simplicity and should be easy to use.

"I can't put solutions in place that rely on just one or two individuals in the IT function, I have to put something in place that can be supported by any person on any day because our business is 24 by seven," he said.

App happy

Some businesses, Peers said, "get excited about having lots of apps" but only use a very small number of them. He compared enterprises that create too many apps for mobile devices to those who added unnecessary applications to big back-end systems in years past.

For Deloitte, he said, the right app strategy is not to be "mobile first", but "mobile aware".

Peers has also found a workaround for problems with developing apps for iOS, although he believes it is a problem that Apple has worked on fixing itself.

"Apps should be written in HTML5 so that they can work on any device and on a web browser. I also think that the changes that have been made since iOS 7 was launched make a lot of app development simpler; there are a number of incremental features available that will make development in that space easier for people who are doing native development on those devices," he said.

Peers added that the best example of an internal app that Deloitte has developed is one that isn't based on HTML5, but works both online and offline.

"We did extensive research when we launched our reporting app to understand when people would want to complete their timesheet information, and what we found was that people would be doing it in a taxi or on the Underground or on a plane, so we made an app available offline," he said.

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Cloud conundrum at Deloitte: An interview with CIO Matt Peers

Deloitte's CIO tells Sooraj Shah of his hope that clients will fully trust the cloud in the next three years

“There were complexities [with making it offline], which I used as a learning point because it meant that the development is somewhat heavier and required a greater amount of ongoing maintenance; I think that many people get fooled into believing that once you publish your first app in your app store you are done. [But] it is an ongoing process and things change, new versions of phones or tablets come out which you want to take advantage of,” he explained.

As part of the strategy to be “mobile aware”, Peers wants to ensure that the user interface is “super smart” and “super slick”, but to do that Deloitte has had to leverage specialist expertise.

“So rather than going to your traditional development team and saying ‘we’ve got a statement of requirements here for the business, go and develop’, it’s about knowing and understanding how the interface needs to work and you have to get those skills into your team,” he said.

Peers draws on experts from other areas of Deloitte, and also leverages third parties – but instead of working with bigger vendors, the firm works alongside niche organisations.

The result, he hopes, is that people can do any part of their job on any device, at anytime from anywhere.

“If one of our partners or practitioners is on holiday they may just have a tablet with them and they want to be able to get access to our systems using the tablet if they haven’t got their laptop – we want them to be able to do so,” he said.

But instead of a “one size fits all” approach to the tools Deloitte gives its 15,000 employees, Peers believes different solutions should fit different roles.

The firm doesn’t currently issue tablets to its employees, but Peers is evaluating ultrabooks and hybrid laptop-tablet devices, such as the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, for a major rollout over the next 12 months. A major plus point for these devices, Peers said, is their additional battery life, ideal for people who are constantly on the move.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro has also been considered, but Peers is undecided on whether the device can fit into the enterprise.

“I don’t know how the Surface Pro fits in – I think we need a docking station for it, and our restriction is around things like the number of USB ports that are available,” he said.

“I think for a big number of our population, it is perfect as it is a tablet that has the processing power of a PC,” he added.

The firm is keen at looking at products that run the Windows operating system as it is rolling out Windows 8.1 in 2014.

Trusting the cloud

When Peers first started his role as Deloitte CIO in 2011, he felt that the cloud would “definitely happen”, once trust in the model was firmly established.

So in 2014, does he believe that enterprises are still cautious about the cloud?

“We are leveraging cloud services, and I think we will start to use more and more cloud-based services as people’s view on the cloud softens.

“There is a lot of excitement about it; the CFO is excited about it because someone has told him that it saves us money; our service line leaders are excited because people tell them it will mean faster deployment.

“So as an IT function we need to try to deliver what their pre-conceived ideas are,” he said.

But while the company has a cloud-based IT service management solution from ServiceNow and a cloud solution to run its Alumni website, Peers believes that many of Deloitte’s clients are still not convinced that the cloud is fully secure.

“There is still this stigma; the perception of lots of our clients’ security teams is that the cloud isn’t secure and I think cloud providers are going to have to work harder to prove that these things are safe and secure and that we can put data there and worry less about it,” he said.

And Peers is convinced that cloud-based services are just as reliable as on-premise solutions.

“I would view them as being on a par; we would not be looking to move to the cloud to improve our reliability. I think I would get the same level of service but there are a number of things we need to make sure we have in terms of how data is encrypted before we would be comfortable in moving things out to the cloud,” he said.

“I’ve seen very few cloud-based issues first hand. At Deloitte, we run a very good IT shop in that we don’t have very many IT outages, but the odd ones do occur. IT fails, people make mistakes, systems break, particularly when we’re driving through lots of change,” he added.

As for the future, Peers is convinced cloud will feature more prominently in Deloitte’s clients’ plans, and that his firm will respond accordingly.

“People are now thinking about their next wave of investment after holding back during the recession, and I’d be surprised if a large number of organisations are not investing in cloud-based solutions. Once we start to see some of our clients doing it, their appetite will soften on how we do things and how we look after their data – we will not be leading the way, because we are there to serve,” he explained.