From a enormous company’s perspective, what is it like to be going through the digital transformation? Royal Dutch Shell (commonly known as Shell) is a large integrated oil and gas company that is in the midst of the digital transformation.

Jay Haines, landscape operations and integration manager at Royal Dutch Shell, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Riverbed Disrupt event about the changing landscape of IT.

Good news and bad news in digital transformation

Haines manages Shell’s global IT operations for its infrastructure and applications area. “I’m in charge of ‘bad,'” Haines joked. “If it’s bad, people call me because something’s broke, we need to get something back up and running.”

According to Haines, Shell has such a large scale that it’s like running a bunch of businesses put together. So this makes the digital transformation even trickier.

“This theme of disrupt from a digitalization perspective is to a degree — it’s good news/bad news kind of being forced upon us,” Haines described. “It used to be that a shift worker [would] go into a terminal and enter a shift log, and your proliferation of IT was often very concentrated. Now, with digitalization and laptops and tablets and mobile devices — and pushing the apps further and further into the hands of the users — is really changing the dynamics of IT landscape and what we have to provide and support.”

Big challenges with Big Data

Because of Cloud, cost of storage is cheaper, noted Haines. “But the challenge is getting it in and out,” he said. “So the strategies are what do you do with that data depending on where the data is.”

At the same time, keeping that data secure for customers is a huge challenge. “In the retail space, there are a lot of concerns with security and making sure that we protect the customer’s data,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Riverbed Disrupt.

Photo by SiliconANGLE