British Gas, the UK’s largest retail gas company and, increasingly, a force in connected homes, is slowly shifting towards the cloud and will “at some point” go all-cloud, says British Gas IT architect Chris Patten.
However, he added, “that will take some time”, but is being driven by multiple new initiatives and the desire of business units for more control and autonomy.
Patten was speaking at Computing’s recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit 2016.
“We have different stakeholders that have got different ideas about the reasons why they want to move to the cloud. I represent ‘mode two’ – the people who want to innovate and build, so we are interested in agility and want a bit of autonomy.
“Other people want to reduce their operating costs, while others want something that will scale because they have an engineering reason, like Connected Home, to move to the cloud. So, gradually, we are all moving in that direction.”
However, that shift is somewhat disjointed, with some parts of British Gas and its owner Centrica, moving faster than others.
“One of our challenges is that we have no single cloud journey. We have people in Connected Homes who have workloads that are very compatible with the cloud,” he continued. The Internet of Things (IoT) platform built to support the Hive connected homes initiative runs largely in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
At the same time, though, Patten admitted that there are parts of the organisation that are very anti-cloud, and often for perfectly valid reasons. “British Gas has got 12 million or so customers and we need to look after that customer data. There’s a lot of workloads that we are very reticent to actually move to the cloud,” he said.
At the moment, he continued, British Gas is very much in a “mixed stage” of its almost-inevitable journey towards the cloud. “It makes for very interesting times because, depending on who you are talking to, we are asked about very rudimentary ‘why should we move to the cloud’ questions all the way to how to gauge ‘spot instances’ to reduce operating costs?
“So it’s very diverse at the moment.”
