When you scratch the surface, almost every company today is a data company, no matter what product or service they are selling. As a nod to this new reality, companies are adding the role of Chief Data Officer to their executive suite, raising their data strategy on the same level as their financial planning.

IBM Corp. is a strong advocate for the CDO role: In addition to Inderpal Bhandari, IBM’s global CDO, each of the company’s main business units also have CDOs.

Seth Dobrin (pictured), Ph.D., VP and CDO at IBM Analytics, recently spoke to Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Spark Summit East 2017 Boston, held in Boston, MA, to discuss the role of CDO and the importance of a successful cloud migration strategy. (*Disclosure below.)

The role of CDO and cloud migration strategy

Dobrin believes there are a few strategic areas that CDOs need to understand within their organizations. The first is to understand the overall cloud migration strategy that serves current needs and anticipates what the business will need in the future. Another is a good data science strategy, understanding how to build deployable data science assets. The next is to have an approach to unified governance, governing all platforms in a way that enables data science. The final piece is how to build personnel, finding the right people with the right skillset and getting them to where they can be most useful.

Regarding his thoughts on cloud migration strategy, Dobrin stressed that it’s important for companies to look at what they need to build to support their information; where’s the best place for the data? While the race has been to the public cloud, that may not be the answer for all businesses. Maybe it would be best to start with a local private cloud; once that reaches critical mass, then maybe start to think about moving data to the public cloud, he explained.

“One driver for hybrid cloud is … you can’t just pick up business-critical assets and move them overnight. It’s a journey,” he explained.

Dobrin firmly believes that the future is in hybrid cloud and that it provides the best of both worlds for a business’ data.

Stay tuned for the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Spark Summit East 2017 Boston. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner at the conference. Neither Databricks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE