The developers at credit reporting giant Experian plc write code
without any idea whether it will ultimately run inside the company’s
data centers, a rented space known a colocation center, in the cloud —
or all three. And that suits Chief Information Officer Barry Libenson
just fine. Libenson, a veteran CIO who joined Experian three years ago, has been
on a campaign to make the boundaries between the company’s captive
infrastructure and its global network of service providers as permeable
as possible. Two years ago, it began using containers, the lightweight
software environments that allow applications to run unchanged across
many platforms. It also standardized on the OpenShift container
management platform developed by Red Hat Inc. Most of all, Experian mandates that applications don’t contain any
native components for a particular cloud provider, and he’s more than
willing to accept the typical 10 to 15 percent penalty on developer
productivity that use of a standardized platform extracts. “I’ll trade
that any day for the flexibility it gives us,” he said. Experian is on the leading edge of a shift in thinking that has
triggered the largest redefinition of enterprise data centers in their
50-year history. Thanks to a confluence of new technology developments
and a renewed focus by enterprises on information technology as a
competitive weapon, CIOs are ditching captive infrastructure in favor of
an array of more diverse and flexible options.Read the article over siliconANGLE here.
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