Madoc Batters likes a problem. As head of cloud and IT safety at Warner Leisure Lodges, he’s inherited a giant activity – main the UK lodge chain on a digital transformation journey, together with shifting the enterprise to the cloud to construct a platform for long-term innovation.
“I gravitate to vary – that’s what introduced me into the place,” he says. Beforehand head of the cloud centre of excellence and operational safety at vacation operator Haven, Batters assumed his place at Warner in February 2024.
“I’d already taken Haven by means of a digital transformation, standing up all of the AWS infrastructure, getting the groups prepared and placing the organisation in place operationally. I like pushing firms ahead technologically with what they will deploy and their capabilities.”
Batters is finishing the same transformation at Warner. His workforce is coming to the top of a giant on-premise IT to cloud migration. All the corporate’s apps and providers are being moved to Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
“We’ve received about 100 completely different functions and providers that have been dwelling on-premise. We’ve been shifting these workloads over for the previous yr now, and we’re attending to the top of that course of,” he says. “Throughout the subsequent three months, we should always have completed all that on-premise to cloud migration.”
Shifting to the cloud
How’s that transition going? To this point, so good, says Batters, outlining a sequence of points acquainted to any IT chief who’s led the same large-scale digital transformation initiative.
“A few of these on-premise machines have been sitting there for 30 years. Each time you progress one thing, one other bunch of know-how runs out from beneath the rock you’ve simply lifted, and also you’re untangling a spread of organically grown techniques launched over time,” he says.
“We’ve had previous bits of kit that won’t have been turned off or examined, or they’re operating on previous software program variations. This transformation course of offers us an amazing likelihood to re-factor older techniques. There’s by no means a boring day. We’re at all times working at excessive pace.”
He offers an instance of the replatforming work in progress: “We’re putting in a brand new reserving system from a 3rd occasion. As an alternative of migrating our legacy system, we’ll sundown that know-how after which put our new reserving system reside. That system is because of go reside this yr as nicely.”
Batters displays on his first yr within the position and says the large achievement has been establishing the cloud capabilities and pushing full-steam forward with the transition to on-demand IT. He says one other success has been establishing an inside safety observe at Warner and implementing a brand new method to networking to help the shift to the cloud.
“We’ve redefined our entire method. We’ve gone with a Microsoft-centric stack for safety. We’re additionally utilizing infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] specialist Alkira, which suggests we’re bringing our networking in keeping with how we ship our cloud sources,” he says.
“That method means we’ve moved from a conventional, long-winded change administration system to a distributed, asynchronous change paradigm. Now we are able to ship change to networks and safety on the identical tempo as within the cloud.”
Shifting safety left
Batters says there are two key elements to his safety technique. One is end-user compute. Along with implementing a Microsoft-focused stack that makes use of Defender for endpoint safety, Sentinel for analysing web visitors and Microsoft 365 for productiveness, he’s bolstered IT safety consciousness by offering cyber coaching for individuals throughout Warner.
“People are often the weakest level,” he says. “For those who do get hit with some points, that’s often resulting from an motion by one of many workforce by accident. So, the coaching is about making certain everybody is aware of what they need to and shouldn’t be doing and supporting them as greatest as we are able to in that space.”
Batters says the second core aspect of his technique focuses on infrastructure safety. He’s a “huge believer” in “shifting left” with safety, a observe that strikes testing to the start of the event course of. Warner makes use of a mixture of in-house and outsourced builders and is eager to create an enterprise-wide method to information safety.
“What we attempt to do is safe by design. Safety is a workforce sport. Shifting left is like rising the dimensions of your safety workforce. For those who give capabilities and help to the builders, it’s nearly like they turn into a part of your safety workforce,” he says.
“The extra individuals concerned in safety from the beginning, the higher. So, we have now static code evaluation in our pipeline. We floor any points within the infrastructure that they’re seeking to construct throughout the cloud. They will take care of these points earlier than something’s deployed.”
“Safety is a workforce sport…the extra individuals concerned in safety from the beginning, the higher”
Madoc Batters, Warner Leisure Lodges
Batters says shifting left successfully is greater than standing again and admiring your work as soon as the technique is established. Sensible digital leaders take a proactive stance and guarantee vulnerabilities are tracked and traced. He says the purpose is to scale back administration and dangers.
“There’s a lot noise in safety. When there may be an precise subject, we’ll increase it routinely. We use the Wiz cloud safety platform and plug that perception into our pipeline. We’ve got Wiz in our again finish and a single pane of glass for safety,” he says.
“We’ve got connectors going into our cloud and on-premise techniques. And we’ll increase tickets routinely. The groups can have a look at these points and make modifications, and any considerations are closed down routinely. That method takes away a few of the administrative burden for the groups.”
Constructing robust community capabilities
Batters says his IT organisation is concentrated on creating the technological foundations for the enterprise, enabling the lodge chain’s clients to have the very best experiences.
“We’re the platform workforce, and we ensure that all of the guardrails and the bottom infrastructure are set as much as permit the stream-aligned groups within the enterprise to work on prime of these techniques and providers,” he says.
Networks are a key aspect of this infrastructure. One of the crucial necessary foundational components is the corporate’s relationship with Alkira. The networking specialist’s end-to-end platform connects customers and branches to a number of clouds. Batters says he’s been in search of this as-a-service method for a very long time.
“I’ve labored in networks for a few years,” he says. “I labored at BT in 1997, so I’ve received an extended legacy working in networks and know the way issues are carried out and deployed. I used to be conscious the pace of innovation inside networks was nowhere close to as quick because the cloud. I’ve at all times wished networks to catch up.”
Batters says that’s the place Alkira’s as-a-service provision is available in. “The know-how might be deployed with infrastructure as code,” he says. “And I’m very code-first for our cloud infrastructure. It’s all deployed as code utilizing Terraform. After I noticed Alkira, I believed, ‘Nicely, that is precisely what we’re in search of.’ As a result of it’s deployed as code, we are able to plug it into our pipeline and add all the opposite instruments we have now.”
For instance, advanced modifications to firewalls and different safety settings that may have taken weeks earlier than can now be sorted in minutes. Batters says the mix of cloud, safety and infrastructure-as-code makes it simpler to roll out improvements to front-end providers to motels shortly and successfully.
“Our use of know-how is all about giving our clients an amazing expertise throughout their quick breaks at our places across the UK. We’ve got a number of methods to allow these experiences. One is clients have apps that they will use to e-book actions, like spa days, golf, eating experiences and exhibits,” he says.
“We even have a web site and a direct reserving system. We wish to have the ability to give one of the best experiences we are able to throughout all these platforms. We’re additionally rolling out Alexa [devices] in our lodge rooms so clients can see what’s taking place, order issues to their rooms, examine completely different occasions which might be occurring, or e-book time slots.”
Empowering workers to make choices
Batters says his precedence for the subsequent yr is to complete off Warner’s cloud migration. That course of shall be adopted by a interval of refactoring to make sure the on-demand providers and networks are in the very best state and operating optimally.
As with safety, the refactoring will contain shifting left, this time utilizing FinOps, an operational framework that helps organisations handle their cloud spending. “One of many key points with on-demand IT is value,” he says.
“Once we deploy issues into the cloud, FinOps will inform us precisely how a lot the transfer will value earlier than we make it. We’re empowering the engineers. We’ll get them to revisit what they put in earlier than and get them to undergo and see what we are able to refactor.”
Batters says this proactive method to service administration is the important thing to success for a contemporary digital chief. IT chiefs should allow their groups, giving builders, operations specialists and safety workers house to innovate. That course of should embody exploiting rising applied sciences, resembling generative synthetic intelligence (GenAI).
“You want guardrails in place,” he says. “However you’ve received to let individuals innovate. Give your groups entry to safe GenAI. In the event that they don’t have entry to a service you’ve created in your inside groups, they’ll experiment themselves utilizing a software like ChatGPT. That method creates the danger of individuals utilizing company-confidential data for his or her prompts.”
Batters additionally likes to empower his workers. As an alternative of dictating what individuals ought to do, he’s keen for workers to become involved in decision-making processes. Profitable IT chiefs create various groups with a spread of expertise which might be assured sufficient to make large calls.
“Being a digital chief now isn’t about directing from the entrance of the ship,” he says. “It’s about enabling individuals to make clever choices primarily based on information they will acquire from as many locations and other people as doable.”
