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Mat Clothier, CEO and Founder, Cloudhouse: “Change for the sake of change and rushed modernisation will only increase risk”
Digital transformation has become a near-universal priority, but the reality behind the spend tells a more complicated story. While enterprises continue to invest heavily in cloud, AI and modernisation initiatives, many are struggling to maintain control over the very environments they are reshaping. In practice, the pace of change is often outstripping the governance needed to manage it.
For Mat Clothier, CEO and founder of Cloudhouse, that imbalance is something he has seen play out across more than two decades in enterprise IT. Having founded multiple organisations focused on delivering IT solutions – and starting his first venture while still at the University of Plymouth – Clothier has built his career around helping organisations simplify application delivery, virtualisation and distributed IT management. That background shapes his view that the industry’s rush toward “the latest and shiniest” technology often comes at the expense of operational discipline.
In this exclusive interview, Clothier explains why “change is constant, but control is variable,” how rushed modernisation can backfire, and why approaches like containerisation may offer a more pragmatic path forward, allowing organisations to modernise without losing grip on cost, complexity or control.
Enterprises are investing millions in digital transformation. Why do you believe operational control hasn’t kept pace with that change?
There’s currently a huge pressure to modernise at all costs and implement the latest and shiniest product, especially when it comes to AI. This can create a mindset of ‘let’s adopt this platform and use it for everything’ even if the proper groundwork and foundations haven’t been laid for its use. Using the technology is given greater importance than establishing operational control and governance for its use.
Naturally, this creates a lack of oversight; it can lead to rushed projects and upgrades. This forced modernisation actually increases risk before it reduces it, as it contributes to more unmanaged change, and this subsequently makes it harder to establish control.
You’ve said “change is the constant, control is the variable.” What does that mean in practical terms for today’s IT leaders?
Change is always ongoing and a critical part of an enterprises’ IT capabilities, security and operations. How you control that change, however, is in an organisations’ hands, and the level of control often determines the outcomes of a project.
Control is visibility, scale and confidence. It involves how you secure and modernise existing applications, how you monitor IT estates for change and maintain an audit-ready log evidencing this change, how you keep infrastructure up-to-date with the latest innovations and operating systems.
A lot of industry is focused on how you replace applications and put shiny new ones in. But controlled change can mean making the best of what a company already has and living with daily change in the most effective way possible.
Why is the gap between change and governance becoming such a critical risk for organisations right now?
The most common cause of risks such as outages, downtime or audit failures is unmanaged change. Most weeks there is a news story about a major company suffering a cyberattack or outage. More often than not, the root cause is a lack of visibility over change, or a small routine upgrade gone wrong. Again, because there is such a rush and pressure to integrate the latest technology, this increases the likelihood of these failures taking place, especially when the necessary governance and oversight isn’t in place.
The financial, reputational and operational fallout from these incidents can be severe, and that’s why the gap between change and governance represents such a critical risk.
What needs to change for enterprises to move from reactive to real-time visibility over their IT environments?
Most failures that take place could’ve been prevented by visibility and control. There are some things IT teams know they want to change and need to know it happened, and so they actively manage these configurations. But then there are other changes they don’t know about – which they really needed to be aware of before or as they happened – and this results in crippling IT failures.
Instead of relying on process and other teams retrospectively informing IT of any changes happening, enterprises need an evidence-based way of building real-time visibility over their IT environments. This hinges on using technology that can continuously monitor systems for changes like configuration drift, automatically detecting and flagging any discrepancies as they take place.
Regulatory frameworks like FCA, SOX and DORA increasingly expect organisations to demonstrate continuous evidence of control, not just periodic audit snapshots, so gaining these capabilities has become especially pressing. It also requires a shift in approach and seeing change as a proactive activity to manage and oversee, instead of something to note after it has taken place.
Cloud migration was supposed to reduce costs. Why are so many organisations seeing the opposite outcome?
There’s always a gap between what a company’s apps were originally written for and what the latest capabilities are. The second they’re finished, they’re inherently out of date, because the underlying tech keeps marching forward. The first wave of cloud migration involved getting applications into the cloud and away from the data centre. It looked like a great idea on paper. But as many companies have struggled to fully harness the benefits the cloud can bring in terms of scalability, cost optimisation and agility, it has become incredibly expensive.
That’s because while organisations migrated to the cloud expecting savings, they lifted and shifted their virtual machines (VMs) without optimising. The result of this has been bills that are higher with the cloud than they were with on-prem. One key issue is vendor lock-in. As apps are tied to their server environments, if the supplier raises its prices, there’s nothing you can do but pay more – otherwise your systems will go down.
So, in order to gain more flexibility, scalability and reduce costs, enterprises are looking to convert their VMs to containers – an IBM study found containers can reduce server costs by up to 75%. However, because this conversion process is too hard to do at scale, organisations end up overspending on cloud compute instead. Therefore, what’s needed is an easier way to unlock these benefits and modernise in the cloud without having to refactor or recode the apps.
What role does modernisation (particularly containerisation) play in regaining control over cloud costs and infrastructure complexity?
There’s a fundamental tipping point with apps in a business. There are applications where an IT team and/or its provider are continuing to actively develop them, and the apps are always living and breathing. It’s then up to IT teams to harness the best tech and capabilities of the current time.
But then there are also apps that are stuck in a time capsule; they do the job they were designed to do at the point they were designed to do it. They keep delivering value to the business, but the underlying tech, like the operating system or cloud server, moves forward – and that’s how cloud costs can increase and infrastructure can become more complex.
Without modernising, these apps reach their end of support or continue to run on outdated infrastructure and therefore become security and operational risks. Modernisation is essential. However, traditional modernisation processes can fail to capture the specific dependencies of the apps tied to the original operating system – in other words, to maintain the metaphor, the time capsule the app operates in.
The latest containerisation techniques, on the other hand, offer a great solution. They can capture these OS-specific dependencies and move apps onto modern operating systems without recoding them, thereby allowing them to run on the latest tech as it evolves. So rather than having to rip open the time capsule and rebuild it – an incredibly expensive and resource-intensive process – modernising in this way helps companies get the most from their apps as they exist today, in the most modern capability that their infrastructure, hyperscalers and so forth provide.
Cloud desktops are often seen as the future of the digital workplace. What’s holding organisations back from fully realising their value?
Cloud desktop adoption is stalling not because of infrastructure, but because of application delivery. For example, companies investing in AWS WorkSpaces are finding that the desktop experience is only as good as the app experience. But currently, getting apps to users is still manual, slow and stuck in a ticket queue.
Manual app packaging can take around four to eight hours per app, and large enterprises could easily have over 500 apps, so you can see how the lead time and labour cost can become eye-watering quickly. What’s needed is a way to automate the full pipeline of getting and packaging apps into these workspace environments.
If you could give one piece of advice to CIOs and IT leaders trying to balance rapid change with control, what would it be?
Always have a purpose for change and maintain visibility over your IT estate and any changes taking place. Change for the sake of change and rushed modernisation will only increase risk. At the same time, stalling critical application and platform change will create this risk too, so don’t bury your head in the sand!
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