With nation-to-nation conflicts coming to light with the increasing adoption of cloud services and international hosting, finding ways to resolve these problems is gaining its own share of the industry within the companies that provide these utilities.

Greg Hanson, VP of Business Operations, EMEA, at Informatica Corp., joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about various aspects of the cloud market, including international data-transfer obstructions and the return of old mistakes.

Borders for data

Singled out early on by Hanson were the challenges with international deployment of cloud, with Middle Eastern countries, Germany and Russia singled out as particularly problematic, though he felt that advances were gradually being made to clear up the difficulties on these fronts.

Hanson noted that one of the issues complicating these matters was entangled in the laws each country has regarding data transfer and handling, and the further issues that arise from accessing storage centers hosted in one country from within the borders of another. “For us, on the data side specifically, I think one of the barriers to the adoption of cloud is … specifically about regulatory, and a lot of the SaaS vendors, including Informatica, generally have data hosted out of North American data centers,” he explained.

Finding room for growth

Hanson also felt that advances were being made across the board for businesses to connect more with the cloud and its utilities. “My perception is every business in three to five years is going to be what I call a hybrid organization, that has to adopt both cloud and on-premise in order to retain competitiveness moving forward,” he said.

Hanson also touched on some of the ways that addressing specific issues was resulting in new business enterprises: “We’re starting to see specific partnerships emerging around solutions,” he said, with efforts to develop a “common analytical framework for a specific use-case” driving a number of these projects.

Premise and cloud syncing

“Still a large proportion of our business in EMEA is on-premise-led,” Hanson noted, “but the fastest-growing part of our business is the cloud side of things. So we’re doing both, helping people shift with their digitization strategy in the movement to cloud, while supporting them in that journey by providing all the relevant integration quality mastering, masking, security services that they need on-prem as well.” He also felt that Informatica being “the Switzerland of data” was drawing customers who were anticipating the need for changing environments in the future.

Looking at the cloud-using market as a whole, Hanson identified one problem that was making a comeback. “A lot of the mistakes of the past in terms of the integration world are being made again with cloud, and I think it’s because if you look at the cloud adoption side, you’ll find that a lot of cloud adoption is being driven by line of business managers rather than IT,” he said.

While Hanson felt that the space of leveraging platforms is “very bright” for Informatica, with new connectivity and operational tools being developed, he acknowledged that there were still problems in the infrastructure and implementation of the cloud with many companies. “I don’t see much in the way of standards and interfaces to kind of help that commonality across different software applications in the cloud,” he said. Despite this, he was optimistic about the future, saying, “It’s data that’s the differentiator moving forward.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Informatica World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE