| | July 20188CIOReviewHow has your IT operating model changed during the last five years?We've shifted to hosting very close to 100 percent of our infrastructure in the cloud. We prefer SaaS, such as G Suite or Workday, followed by managed, higher level services such as BigQuery, followed by open source applications such as Kafka, followed by PaaS-hosted custom applications--and even in those cases, with a high preference for heavy exploitation of an open source framework such as React.This means that we have a much more linear relationship between cost and workloads, so it's much easier for us to meet demand and allocate cost accordingly. We also have shifted a lot of expense from the capital budget to the operating budget, which has some consequences of course. That may in fact be the biggest challenge, but we are lucky to have a progressive and flexible financial organization, and they have been a great partner to us.Our staff is shifting away from traditional IT skillsets towards engineering and a software mindset across the board. The lines are getting blurred all over the place as well, and my most valuable people are generally those who can play two or three different positions. I expect this to be even more pronounced in the future.Can you please share your experience in deploying Google technologies in your organization? What are the challenges you faced during the process?Our first transition was to G Suite for mail, calendaring and docs. There was some adjustment to the new tools, but any resistance was quickly overwhelmed by the power of the collaboration model. People got into it really quickly, even senior executives.By Nick Rockwell, CTO, The New York Times
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