Telefonica 02 UK’s CIO moving organisation to the cloud as part of 2017 agenda

Telefonica02 UK is migrating to cloud to provide “consistent, secure and file stored collaboration” across the organisation, according to its Chief Information Officer Brendan O’Rourke.

The CIO said that the service will be part of Telefonica’s technology strategy and will also see the telecom company roll out Office 365. (See also: Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen Hospital NHS Trust is undergoing a restructuring of its cloud network to keep up with patient demands.)

The cloud service will allow Telefonica 02 UK to help grow its e-commerce platform and cope with user capacity, but O’Rourke admits there have been challenges migrating the technology.

“We don’t want employees to use their local storage devices because it provides a less secure storage and infrastructure than the cloud,” he said. “The adoption and employee education in getting over this change can have a lack of momentum across the organisation,” he said.

O’Rourke, who is currently leading a security initiative, will see Telefonica 02 UK’s employees go through a programme to help ensure they understand the security risks of using the cloud service.

“We have taken it seriously and created videos, online training and internal training sessions to help get everybody up to speed,” he said.

The cloud service will see the company partner with KCOM and will see customer initiatives such as 02 Priority allow the telecom company to use elastic scaling to cope with user capacity, having up to 10 times the amount of people using the application.

Securing the cloud

Telefonica02 UK has ensured it will be secure for its users having regular internal standard audits and penetration testing all of its solutions.

Security remains an issue for telecom organisations with the recent hackings of TalkTalk and Three Mobile which had seen customer’s confidential information at risk in major security breaches.

CIO O’Rourke describes how he is tackling this ongoing issue and how he is avoiding becoming part of the telecom security hackings.

“I think we are all aware of internet hacking and cybercrime and how it is becoming a key issue for every organisation,” he said. “I think it is important as a CIO that we make it very clear to the executive team that we need to educate them on what that is with it going to be specific for every company, and how attuned they are with technology and the security issues.”

Telefonicais part of the UK government security plan with the CIO planning to continually invest and maintain its security standards in 2017.

“We actively run four sponsored programmes in ongoing security both in the network and the IT infrastructure level,” he said. “It is a critical programme for us to operate and a set clear target every year with our goal is to improve our intake and the ability while reaching the standards to entice that,” he said.

O’Rourke, who was previously the CIO at Telefonica Digital, says the future of the UK telecom organisation will be customer focused.

“We are putting the customer first in everything we do,” he said. “We are a mobile business delivering mobile solutions and that’s not just calls, texts and data but also around mobile solutions -whether it’s our mobile advertising business or to other digital products like 02 priorities and 02 drive.  We don’t always succeed like any business but we guarantee that we start there with Telefonica putting that into practice.” (Read next: University of Nottingham deploys private cloud ‘saving time and money’ adn offering more capacity for research projects)