Former Service NSW CTSO Michael Cracroft joins Deloitte

After departing Service NSW earlier this year, former chief technology and security officer Michael Cracroft has joined accounting and consulting giant Deloitte.

The professional services firm has appointed Michael Cracroft as a Director for Cyber and Cloud in its Risk Advisory Services practice. Cracroft has spent close to the past 20 years in various IT-related NSW government public service roles, departing his most recent role in March. His appointment comes amid an increasingly heated battle for the cloud consulting market space.

Cracroft commented on his new role in a post to LinkedIn; “My passion for enabling positive change and transformation sits at the apex of supporting organisations and teams to manage cyber security and digital transformation and in this role, I look forward to sharing my experience and insight to scale and support more people, businesses and ultimately communities to navigate the opportunities and challenges we all are facing.”

A Bachelor of Science graduate in Software Engineering from the University of Central England, Cracroft in 2002 began work as an IT expert for the Ministry of Energies and Utilities in Sydney, before steadily climbing the ranks and moving between departments, including senior stints in the NSW Department of Water and Energy and Department of Industry. He was appointed Service NSW CTSO in the back end of 2018.

Cracroft described Deloitte’s capability in the emerging cybersecurity and digital transformation domain as compelling, and said he looked forward to working with a team including Deloitte Cyber Strategy & Data Protection partner David Hawks; Zack Levy, Lead Partner for Cloud Engineering; and Deloitte Australia Cyber leader Ian Blatchford; who shared his excitement with Cracroft joining the cyber and cloud practice in return.

“Deloitte is thrilled to welcome Michael to the team,” Blatchford told online ICT industry news platform iTnews. “Michael’s in-depth cyber and cloud experience within NSW government will be of great value to our clients in their journeys to secure and modernise their environments. Michael will be working with a broad range of organisations to help them manage the ever-increasing cyber risks they face in a connected digital world.”

Cloud consulting

Bubbling away for a number of years now, cloud-consulting-related M&A activity has in recent months reached fever pitch, both globally and in Australia, a market which BCG previously tipped to surpass the $11 billion mark by as early as 2023. Recent activity includes Capgemini’s purchase of IT consultancy Empired for $233 million, while Accenture also picked up CS technology earlier this month, as part of its $3 billion Cloud First strategy.

For Deloitte’s part, the firm acquired Melbourne-based Oracle CX Cloud implementation specialist Ekulus Consulting for an undisclosed sum in September of last year, adding to earlier local cloud capable purchases made over the past few years; The Terrace Initiative, CloudinIT of New Zealand, Mexia and CloudTrek.

Meanwhile, the firm set out last year to train 4,000 of its consultants in advanced cloud computing skills in partnership with Amazon Web Services.