Cloud Computing Shifts into New Role at Jaguar Land Rover

Automakers, more than most manufacturers, know the importance of melding innovation with tradition. Maintaining the status quo would leave many a vehicle model in the dust of its competition, as consumers remain on the lookout for something new from a brand known to represent tradition and quality.

When it comes to the technology that powers the Internet of Things, how car enthusiasts connect with their automaker and even how engineers go about designing those latest automobiles, more automakers are gearing up for the trip with cloud computing.

Jaguar Land Rover is now looking to embrace cloud computing to bring more IT efficiency, agility and scalability to its infrastructure.

In the last two years, the car maker transformed its IT from a UK-centric to a globally scaled facility by upgrading its data center infrastructure with virtualization, automation and tools to support a mobile, collaborative workforce.

Virtualization and cloud services has helped Jaguar Land Rover build a robust, agile and scalable IT infrastructure. It has also helped company brass achieve certain objectives – providing an easy-to-use and highly available IT services to its users and engineers who focus on designing and building world-class automobiles.

For Jaguar Land Rover’s IT team, virtualizing its old IT estate was the first step towards cloud computing.

“We are still relatively immature in the cloud era,” CTO Gordon McMullan said, according to an article on Computerweekly.com.

The company is currently busy implementing VCE’s Vblock – the converged cloud platform-as-a- service (PaaS) which integrates compute, network and storage technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware. VCE’s cloud platform is designed for VMware’s virtualization technology.

VCE’s Vblock infrastructure on Jaguar Land Rover’s virtualized data center will act as the car maker’s private cloud. The IT team’s cloud strategy starts with a private cloud and then move on to a hybrid cloud environment by adopting public cloud services.

“Adoption of private cloud, followed by public cloud to build a hybrid IT is a well-known cloud maturity model and that’s our cloud adoption strategy,” McMullan said.

For Jaguar Land Rover, security of its IT infrastructure is paramount given that its intellectual property (IP) assets are critical to the business.

One of the main reasons the carmaker opted for a private cloud service first is for its enterprise capabilities, sophistication, security and integration capabilities.

“I don’t want to be worrying about how to fix the underlying technology,” McMullan said.

The company will use public cloud services to host consumer-oriented applications and workloads related to marketing, advertising and mobile computing.

McMullan and the team are still assessing public cloud providers and are currently focusing on building a robust private cloud infrastructure. “A lion’s share of our workloads will be hosted on the VCE cloud while around 10 percent will go on to the public cloud platform,” he said.

Scalability and agility have driven the company’s move to the cloud. The carmaker is looking to add additional 1,700 engineers and double its supplier-base from 100,000 to 200,000.

Patrick Burke is a writer and editor based in the greater New York area and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting