It seems unlikely that a career could pivot from the forest to the data center, but it can and, in the case of Tony Scott, can do so very successfully.

Scott is quite active online, sharing his thoughts regularly on IT issues and how CIOs should be looking at their businesses. It makes it quite easy to perceive his passion for the topic, not to mention his manifold experience over the years. What is not immediately apparent from his online persona is his passion for the outdoors - and how his career took a pretty drastic pivot just as it was about to kick off.

Having worked on projects that took at-risk young people out of inner-city environments and into the natural world, Scott was pretty certain that he wanted to work in parks and recreation administration. But “midway through college, I realized that probably wasn’t going to be the final destination of my career,” he tells DCD, chuckling.

Since that pivot, Scott has held CIO roles at General Motors, The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, VMware, and the US government - just to name a few of his career exploits.

Beating the mainframe

While at the University of Illinois, Scott began rethinking the trajectory of not just his career, but his life. According to him, his roommate at the time was something of an insomniac and would spend night after night rattling on about how much of a nightmare the Midwest was. Eventually, Scott was convinced to head to California, where he began working at a theme park.

This was sometime in “the late 1970s or early 1980s,” and at the time Scott still hadn’t made the move into IT. But, while at the theme park, the axis shifted.

“The IT guy at the park said to me one day, ‘Tony, there’s this new computer out called Apple 2 that I think we could write software on, and that would be better at predicting attendance at the theme park, and scheduling labor, and a bunch of other stuff.’ At the time, that was all done with a mainframe,” Scott says, adding that, at the time, he didn’t know a thing about software.

“The IT guy said: ‘I can teach you to write software, but you know the business better than anybody else.’ After about 12 weeks, we had come up with a program that was beating the mainframe, and that got me hooked.”

There was, of course, a period between this moment and the succession of CIO roles. Scott mentions a few startups that he kicked off, including one that could manufacture floppy disks “faster than any other technology” at that point. “That was a great business until there was no need for floppy disks anymore,” he says.

Entering the Magic Kingdom

Eventually, Scott ended up at The Walt Disney Company as the global CIO, holding the role from 2005-2008. Naturally, a lot will have changed since he was there, and what he describes provides an interesting time capsule. In the early 2000s, the entire Disney group was operating out of one data center located next to Walt Disney World in Orlando. “It no longer is, but that’s a whole different story,” Scott says. DCD was intrigued.

“We had a huge IT incident where lightning struck a flagpole outside the data center and fried a bunch of the electrical equipment in the data center,” Scott says, able to laugh about it 20 years on. “We had to failover to our backup data center. There was no operational disruption - but it was a huge event for the IT staff, and we made a decision right after to, well, invest in data centers outside one of the lightning capitals in the world - Orlando.”

These days, Disney has a pretty varied IT estate. In 2021, the company launched a data center (DC3) in The Woodlands, Texas, that centralized several facilities across New York, North Carolina, Las Vegas, and the Los Angeles area. At that time, the studio also had DC1 and 2 in Bristol, Connecticut. DCD has contacted the company to see if those data centers are still in use, and if that is now the company’s full IT infrastructure footprint.

Disney adopted a private cloud model in 2015, and in 2021, the company was using HPE technology for its internal cloud workloads and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the Disney+ streaming service.

While serving the Magic Kingdom, one of the major projects Scott had to deal with was the launch of on-demand streaming on ABC Television, a part of Disney. Today, this would seem like a given, and at the time, Scott says Disney saw it as “a big opportunity.” He explains: “ABC Television was one of the properties of Disney, and we were one of the first companies to start offering the streaming of our hit TV shows the day after. We had a show called Desperate Housewives that was super popular at the time, and it was a big deal that you could go on your computer and catch up on what you missed the night before.”

Of course, this necessitated a different approach to IT. Suddenly, a whole new business model has entered the game, in the form of the nascent cloud computing market.

“The Internet existed, but there was no real cloud,” Scott says. “At the time, it was just content distribution networks (CDNs), and all of this sort of thing had to be invented along the way. When you are a pioneer in a space like that, you start to realize all of the business issues as well as the technology issues that have to be solved for a thing to happen. A lot of the models that we have today were really developed in that 2005 time frame. It was a time of really intense change.”

While CDNs still play a key role in managing network traffic today, most streamers rely heavily on cloud computing providers. Disney+ is based on Amazon Web Services, as is Netflix, having moved in 2016. In 2008, Scott departed for Microsoft, the first of many “poachings” through his career.

Refreshing core infrastructure

If you look up Tony Scott on LinkedIn, you immediately know what he stands for. He shares lengthy opinion posts at least weekly, and a recurring theme among them is a strong cloud-positive approach. Explaining his philosophy, he says it comes down to “a few things.”

One is a belief that “a constant refresh of core infrastructure and keeping things modern is of value, and gives you a leg up - as opposed to sweating assets until they break.” Scott explains: “The cloud really gives you the opportunity to do that, because you can swap out pieces at a time and refresh them without having to do a complete lift and shift.”

His time at Microsoft as CIO saw the firm move its internal systems to its own Azure platform. On the cost of cloud, Scott says: “Moore’s law is still pretty good. I can run workloads today and, assuming they stay the same, half the cost in three years or so. Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that?”

The cost-benefit is something often proffered by cloud providers, though, as with anything, it is heavily caveated.

Cloud computing costs can quickly ramp up, and increasingly, we are seeing headlines of companies reducing their reliance on platforms like Azure.

Zoom notably said in 2024 that it was looking to decrease its dependence on cloud computing services, and software firm 37signals has widely publicised its own exit from AWS, claiming to save millions in storage and compute costs.

Beyond costs, Scott sees further benefits to the cloud. “Because of cloud architecture, you can build in reliability and redundancy in a way that’s harder to do now,” he argues. “You can do it in your own private cloud, but that fundamental architecture really lends itself much better than the classic older mainframe models we grew up with.”

Having experienced a redundancy-related “incident” at Disney, this is understandably a key concern for Scott. “I get asked all the time what keeps me up at night. And my answer is always one of two things: One, human error. In 99 percent of cases, somebody fat-fingered something, or pushed the wrong button, or was really tired and had been working on something for 20 hours straight. “The other is where there is a single point of failure that hasn’t been recognized. The flag pole thing, for example. We had just no idea, but had we known, we could have prevented it. The cloud enables you to ameliorate and guard against some of those things.”

While Scott toots the cloud horn, it’s important to remember that no system is perfect. Or, at least, it is up to the enterprise to put redundancy measures in place even when workloads are running in the cloud, as a string of high-profile outages in recent months have shown that a cloud server going down even for a few hours can have big implications.

Big government

Scott’s most recent CIO role perhaps represents the apotheosis of his career: CIO of the federal government. He was the third-ever federal CIO, holding the role from 2015-2017, before stepping down with the entrance of the Trump administration.

Understandably, the federal CIO role is pretty unique. Rather than handling the IT of a single organization, you are instead dictating the IT approach of a nation, with the job falling under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). “It has two real responsibilities,” Scott explains. “One is the management authority for establishing what the rules are in the metrics for how the government will evaluate IT. For example, guidance around open source technology or cybersecurity requirements. That’s important because we were spending a billion dollars a year on just IT in the civilian side of the federal government, and then another two billion dollars in defense. It’s a lot of money, and you need some frameworks for it."

The other side of the role is managing the budget. “Every year, Congress has to pass an appropriation and authorization - two separate votes for everything the government does in IT. Over the years,” Scott says, “that has become a very complex process.”

In times when Congress cannot agree to a budget before October 1 - or the beginning of the Federal Government’s fiscal year - the government falls into either a continuing resolution or even a shutdown. At the time of interviewing Scott, the US was in a government shutdown for this very reason. It was eventually resolved after 43 days, making it the longest in US history.

Scott says: “When Congress has done its job, then money is set aside for whatever they propose to do, and they come back to the Office of Management and Budget and the Federal CIO part of that office, and say, ‘Here's specifically what I'm going to propose to do with that money that's been authorized and appropriated. Do you agree?’ With the OMB’s blessing, the agency can go do that particular project. So it's a very powerful role.”

It is this responsibility that made the role so very special to Scott. With so many agencies reliant on not just the OMB, but him as an individual, he tells DCD that it was “certainly” the highlight of his career. As he surmises: “You are dealing with things every single day that matter. It can literally be life or death.”

With his CIO days behind him, Scott has shifted instead to a CEO position at Intrusion, a network security company. Instead of making the IT decisions, he is now helping other organizations to ensure they have secure IT networks and, of course, helping the masses on social media see the wood from the trees.