Eskom

Faith Burn has 28 years of business expertise in a variety of sectors, including pharmaceutical, facilities management, financial services, telecommunications, aviation & aerospace, construction, education, services, and mining. She has an MBL from UNISA and an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Johannesburg (formerly RAU). Mrs. Faith Burns has earned CIA (Certified Internal Auditor) accreditation and holds credentials in project management, business continuity management, and computer science that are acknowledged globally. Currently, she serves as CIO of Eskom Holdings.

What are the current challenges that prevail in the cloud space? How are companies moving away from the brick-and-mortar model to the cloud, mitigating their pain points in terms of interacting with their clients or even interacting within themselves?

As a state-owned entity, we are classified under critical infrastructure in South Africa. The biggest challenge for us was to get our technology aligned with the State Security Agency before we needed to be approved. Hence, for us, it was a long and anticipated journey to move to the cloud. To be compliant as any state-owned entity, it is necessary to have data hosted in the country; therefore, data sovereignty is our primary concern, along with information and cyber security. After getting the approval, my first hurdle was to ensure our board that the cloud would be implemented in the most secure manner protecting data sovereignty.

"A cloud move means a cultural change. Because we can't do things in the same way that we do it on-premise and to get those principles clearly defined and adhere to, I think that will be an interesting challenge for us."

The second challenge is to choose a strategic option suited to the needs of a company like ours, which is still in the very early stages of moving to the cloud. We have a very complex environment at Eskom, and I tried to ensure that this shift to the cloud platform can be done with medium efforts and maximum impact. My objective regarding moving to the cloud is to create stability and enable efficiency. Although the environment on my premises is relatively stable, I needed to ensure more mature and efficiency-oriented stability.

Another important consideration is diversification. I didn't want to split up applications that work complementarily and in separate environments. I still want to ensure diversity and not have excessive reliance on a single cloud service provider. Overall I believe that it is an interesting challenge to move to the cloud and do things differently than what is done in the on-premise environment.

What are the measures that you implement to uphold security in your organization concerning the cloud?

As an organization with critical infrastructure, I cannot get much into details, but yes, we are being managed by artificial intelligence that monitors fraudulent activities. As I have seen, there are spaces where such activities are blocked autonomously, and in some, they are done manually. We have many such technologies in place to ensure that security is not only covering the cloud but also the entire organizational environment as well.

How are you tackling the training aspect of moving to the cloud? What are the measures that you're implementing to teach your employees to use the cloud efficiently? 

COVID suddenly forced us to go remote with our activities. That was just before I joined Eskom. We were in desperate need of a remote collaboration tool; this was when Teams came into the picture for us, and in a span of a month or two, we were actively functioning on the platform. Teams helped our workforce understand that technology can be very useful even if they were forced to use it under contingent conditions. In terms of cloud usage, we devised the need for communication in different forms, through email or text. We also devised training slots and focus groups. We organized small three-minute training blocks so that the people could not avoid them. After the training is done, all the questions regarding the understanding of the training could be met with the focus groups. Furthermore, we also maintained communications about the functionality of the tool over email and put up tool kits on our intranet site to ensure smooth learning.

Do you have any advice for our readers regarding adopting the cloud?

While implementing any major change in an environment, it is always important to gauge the needs, uses, and benefits of that change, be it cloud or any other tool. This not only helps to articulate the right type of communication and intervention needed for the implementation of the change but also makes the workforce for whom the change is being applied have their needs catered effectively.