A CIO at The Top of His Game: What’s His Superpower?

As CIO of Net3, a leading cloud service provider (CSP) in the U.S., Ryan Walker has a big vision for how information technology (IT) moves a business forward, increases efficiency, and connects people with desirable outcomes, such as 100percent availability. Over the past two-and-a-half years, Walker has built a world-class team of highly proficient, forward-thinking IT professionals who share the vision that he has for the technology stack that the company runs. Together, they have managed to turn the IT and hosting infrastructure into a strategic asset that is mission-critical to the cloud-based services that drive the business, which includes backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings.

One of the distinguishing characteristics that differentiate Walker among CIOs is that, while most CIOs rarely think much about the storage of data, workloads, and applications, Walker is one of the most storage-savvy CIOs in the CSP industry. He puts storage on an equal playing field with networking and compute. He took it upon himself to reinvent the CIO position by mastering the business and technical value of storage, which he is quick to say is “essential.” As a result, he has been able to ensure 100percent availability, reinforcing Net3’s cloud service offerings without compromise.

Instead of following the common path that many other cloud service providers do to offload storage to one of the big three public cloud providers, Walker had the foresight to opt for on-premises storage. He wanted better control of storage, and he knew he could only get it from an on-premises, enterprise storage solution. He also understood the finer points of flexible consumption of storage to better control costs and dynamically adjust to fluctuating business needs. By taking the time to enhance the way he maneuvered with storage as a CIO, he realized that storage would be his “superpower.

  ​Changing to stable, predictable and flexible storage gave our sales group more confidence in what they were selling as a service to be solid for the customers that they were selling to 

When he started his career decades ago, he had no idea he’d be a storage-savvy CIO today. Walker got his start in tech by selling computers in retail stores as a teenager. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and raised in Chicago, he was always the kid that friends and neighbors turned to for help repairing their PCs. He also learned how to understand bigger computer systems when his father would bring home “retired” systems from work. He learned to “think bigger” (fast-forward to today: multi-petabyte bigger).

Residing in Atlanta, he has come a long way to rise-up to being a cloud services-centric visionary CIO who has a strong handle on enterprise storage infrastructure, as well as networking and compute in a perfect trifecta. Now, C-level executives and customers turn to him for rock-solid IT infrastructure solutions. Walker is unafraid to roll up his sleeves, consider enterprise storage as a strategic decision (not a tactical transaction), and boldly take on a challenge, with the right team of people, to not only fix an IT problem but also evolve the infrastructure, so he can proactively prevent problems and deliver peace of mind.

Following is the interview we had with him.

You have demonstrated as CIO that you are a change-maker and even a Mr. Fix-It. Can you give an example of how you turned things around by making the right IT decisions?

When I joined Net3 in January 2022, the company was having serious existential issues with uptime. My predecessors had chosen technologies that were not well vetted. There were regular disruptions. Net3 was shedding customers because of it. I was brought in to create a positive change across storage, networking and the compute stack in the data center. I showed the company the benefit of going with industry standards. Storage was given the importance that it deserves from a CSP.

Changing to stable, predictable and flexible storage gave our sales group more confidence in what they were selling as a service to be solid for the customers that they were selling to. It gave our support team the opportunity to focus on onboarding new customers, not putting out fires. The impact of new storage with triple redundant active-active-active architecture was huge.

Since the underlying IT super-structure is so important to your company’s business, how do you approach choosing the right technologies for your enterprise’s IT infrastructure?

We had to be strategic with the technologies we were going to adopt and implement to have a strong, strategic business impact. To implement a best-in-class approach, I selected Cisco for networking and compute, and I chose Infinidat for storage. Cisco and Infinidat work very well together. Everyone knows about Cisco, but as far as Infinidat, we weren’t theoretically buying storage just to buy storage. We were buying excellent storage because the company had experienced the pains of buying bad storage from another storage vendor.

When I evaluated all the storage arrays on the market, I discovered that Infinidat offered true innovation. It was eyeopening. Aligning with a genuinely innovative solution provider gives us a competitive advantage, while other service providers squander their storage with big name, storage sales machines that are called “storage arrays” but are using the same underlying technology from two decades ago.

With Infinidat, I knew we were getting a storage array that was built better from the ground up, guaranteeing 100percent availability. That’s how I knew it was right for our organization. When we needed to ‘up our game’ to deliver always-on availability and exercise more agility to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations, Infinidat saved the day. We wouldn’t be where we are as a company without Infinidat.

At this stage of your successful career, how are you giving back to help prepare and raise up the next generation of IT leaders?

One of the things that I’ve been involved with every summer since coming to Net3 is mentoring a group of high school students. I got the opportunity through one of the partners of Net3 to work with the Governor’s School of Science and Mathematics in South Carolina. The high school students are tasked each summer to work with tech professionals, to conduct a research project to answer a question and formulate their findings in a compelling way for a final presentation later in the year This summer our focus was to understand our sustainability impact and how much CO2 productionNet3 offsetsby utilizing virtualization for our BaaS and Iaas offerings. The students got to learn all about the fundamentals of virtualization and some of the math behind it. The end result was enlightening to me. My hope is that the students were at least made aware of some options as they start to move into their own careers and that their final presentations are compelling to their audience.

What advice would you give to peers to help them thrive?

The advice I’d give is to make your job in IT about the people. It’s not just about the technologies, no matter how interesting they are. Technology is meant to empower people and enable a business to solve customer’s problems. This is how value is created. A career in tech cannot just be about the bits, bytes, and knobs. I understand the fun of dabbling with technology and new technologies, but to progress in IT, you need to be able to relate the technical capabilities with people’s needs and how it equips them to do their job and accomplish their goals for the good of the organization.