In Four years ago, cloud computing was merely a buzz, and now it is being considered a viable option for companies whose fundamental business predicament revolves around increasing business agility, flexibility and elasticity.
Most organisations, big or small, who intend to adopt cloud computing services, face many obstacles, the biggest of which remains security. Understandably, all IT heads are sensitive about customer information, business data, legal documents, or trade secrets residing outside of the premises.
Most cloud adopters and service providers argue that the potential benefits of the cloud, in terms of reducing capital and operational expenses, are hard to ignore. Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions, India, Verizon Business justifies the promise of the cloud, Cloud computing represents a shift in IT thinking, similar to the just-in-time phenomenon that exists in most organisations, where the IT head can stop tying up capital expenses (CAPEX) in IT systems that are under-utilised.
Anurag Shah, COO and Head of Global Operations, Omnitech Solutions, a cloud service provider, argues that the cloud strategy of any company is defined by the infrastructure that is put on the cloud with a single window strategy, which could address the concern of the top management to stay connected.
While the benefits of the cloud computing model are not in question, the primary concern amongst IT heads is to build strategies to maximise the benefits of the cloud.
Resource Planning is Critical
Most IT heads that IT Next interacted with echoed the need to look at a change management strategy to address the unusual business trends that the cloud brings in. V C Gopalratnam, VPIT and CIOCisco India & Globalisation, who has built a cloud strategy says that it is critical to bring in architectural changes before jumping into the cloud as opposed to delivering point products.
The important aspect of cloud planning is that the IT resources should not be restricted to only keeping the lights on; they must be clued in to understand the business growth plans, the changing business needs and take account of how much is spent on running the business, including maintaining the head counts and so on, says Gopalratnam.
Gopalratnam and his team have put together an enterprise architecture framework to make the environment cloud friendly. We created a concept called BOST (Business Operations, System and Technology) which works closely with business and operations to understand their requirements, says Gopalratnam. According to him, it is the reference architecture and the integrated work culture that allows the IT team to be clued in to various business verticals and work out a strategy around the business models which allows for better scalability, besides helping build an effective service management framework and gain insight into customers core applications, and evolve a standardised framework along with a cloud migration plan.
While the debate rages among various organisations regarding the choice between the private, public and hybrid cloud model (which is evolving), the question here is not about which one is ideal, but which one suits the organisational culture. The question that must be asked here is: what are the best practices and planning involved while opting for the cloud model? With thorough planning and resource allocation methods, the IT team can allow the cloud service providers and vendors to define their strategy for customers. For instance, Santanu Ghose, Country Head, Converged Infrastructure Solutions, HP India, points out that the converged cloud model enables enterprises to incorporate a blend of public, private and managed cloud services with their existing IT infrastructure to create a seamless hybrid environment that rapidly adapts to their changing requirements.
Ghose says, Three factors are critical in the journey to the cloud; these are virtualisation, automation and governance, which will justify the move.
In most cases, the reason for the failure and inadequate RoI from the cloud model is that the companys adoption to automation is slow. What I mean by automation is that the customers do not have appropriate tools to manage a virtualisation project; besides this, they have not conducted a study to gauge the quality of the virtual machines, they have no knowledge of where each machine is residing and have not allocated the quality of services to be provided and poor capacity planning, explains Ghose.
Ghose suggests that the IT heads need to work out the capacity planning around an instantaneous requirement, long-term or real-time basis, depending on their business growth. According to him, the allocation of resources, regarding the creation of a common resource pool, is based on the demand and priority mechanism and the innovation process.
Chella Namasivayam, CIO of iGate Patni, recommends that a due diligence/feasibility study to plan a short-term and long-term cloud strategy needs to be evolved, taking the upfront cost into consideration. Namasivayam finds that the cloud is far more appropriate for small- and mid-level enterprises that have instantaneous needs to migrate certain applications to the cloud, rather than look at a long-term strategy to put critical applications on the cloud.
For instance, Kanaka Durga Bhavani Prasad S, Senior IT Manager, Fifth Avenue Sourcing Pvt. Ltd. has opted to host an email server in a private cloud environment to maintain a 99.99 per cent uptime. The reasons Fifth Avenue opted for a private cloud were the increasing power-related costs and a manpower resource crunch, besides an alarming rise in the maintenance cost of the infrastructure. Prasad has plans to move the ERP applications to the private cloud going by the advantages it offers in terms of lowering TCO.
Rajeev Agarwal, DGM-IT, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) is in a dilemma with regard to the cloud. Being part of the defence establishment, I handle sensitive data and cannot afford to risk the data by putting it on a public cloud; while at the same time, I cannot rule out the private cloud phenomenon, which is also the need of the hour in terms of saving overheads. The interesting twist that Agarwal expects is to see a big push for IT with the new Chairman being more IT-savvy, given that the company works on a Rs 200 crore IT budget, and the cloud has ample room to be absorbed.
Companies such as Cafe Coffee Day are still not convinced by the cloud story and its IT Head Rajesh Verma is studying the market trends carefully before initiating the process.
Best Practices
While appropriate estimations and planning address over 50 per cent of the challenges in a cloud environment, the best practices suggested by industry experts will help IT heads extract the best value from the cloud strategy. For instance, HPs Ghose recommends that IT heads set up a private cloud and encourage usage base charges to their users, be it internal or external employees.
IT heads need to push sufficient usage of cloud services to make it profitable and give it the potential to realise operational costs and make it a profit centre, says Ghose. He adds, The IT team needs to avail services which provide on-demand compute instances or through virtual machines, scalable online storage capacity and accelerated delivery of cached content to end users. Ciscos Gopalratnam also recommends that IT teams develop the ability to increase the demand for cloud services within the company to increase the business agility, flexibility and elasticity.
As a best practice, most experts recommend a collaborative approach with business, and to rope in service owners as stakeholders. Verizons Gupta points out that writing Cloud SLAs in clear terms by seeking the help of a legal entity is also very important to avoid any future litigations.
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