Building Blocks

Cloud computing has moved ahead from the threshold of adoption. The first phase of the technology, ie, creating awareness of cloud technology has been executed by the cloud vendors and providers successfully; now India is in the second phase, ie, the adoption phase to reap cloud benefits. It is at the early stages of adoption and is yet to pick pace. From the past one to two years, cloud technology in India has picked up baby steps from crawling.

Let us look at some significant parameters which can handle pain points and make its adoption happen successfully. To have a successful cloud model and to maximize its benefits—planning the migration process and striking right balance between agility, efficiency, security, compliance, and integration is imperative. And yet organizations have a few lingering concerns such as security, policy compliance, interoperability, and privacy.

Cloud Adoption

While different industries are migrating to the cloud at different rates, enterprises across all verticals are actively considering some form of cloud deployment, with many looking at a mix of all three options-public, private, and hybrid. Many verticals are considering moving towards private cloud deployment to consolidate IT operations in disparate units into a private cloud.

Industry consensus that healthcare, education (for e-learning), manufacturing, telecom, BFSI, retail, IT, ITeS, SMBs, and government are some of the sectors increasingly turning to the cloud to simplify IT and to improve business competency as they have realized the advantages of adopting cloud technologies. Organizations are implementing cloud for non mission-critical business applications while they prefer to maintain mission critical data in-house.

Cloud adoption in SMB segment is higher than in large enterprises. Many cloud services are primarily aimed at SMBs and at consumers rather than large enterprises as cloud services fail to provide levels of reliability, manageability, and support required by large enterprises.

The other prominent reason for low adoption in large enterprises is that the cost advantage for large enterprises is not clear as for SMBs, since many large enterprises can reap the benefits of significant economies of scale in their own internal IT operations. However, some large enterprises use some cloud applications for managing travel, expense reporting, hiring and staffing, employee benefits, web conferencing, and social media solutions.

A few common cloud services include project management, IM, online back-up, voice communication, marketing, email, web conferencing, and file sharing. Enterprises want a single source, diversity of business functions and a spectrum of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Healthcare is seeking the cloud assistance in telemedicine, patient record management, and hospital productivity. SMBs in retail sectors are adopting cloud based applications such as mobile based CRM solutions.

Government is betting on cloud for majority of its e-governance projects. Manufacturing will leverage the cloud by using enterprise applications like customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for field, sales, inventory, and supply chain management. Sectors for which IT is not a core business will witness demand for SaaS based cloud services. BFSI has seen traction in adoption of new technologies, in the area of cloud and virtualization.

“Large enterprises is a wait-and-watch game because they already have existing applications in their own data centers or own IT environment not all of them will be willing to move mission critical applications on to cloud. From SME perspective things are a little different. Many SMEs have a business which is cyclical in nature like food processing, government export companies, manufacturing companies, etc. They have a business model which is seasonal, at a certain point they would need more manpower; for them to put in-premise or on-premise to put IT resources would not be viable. They tend to migrate even the mission critical apps on to cloud,” says Sunil Lalvani, director, enterprise sales, RIM India.

Dhruv Singhal, lead, cloud computing, Oracle India points out, “Over the years, the benefits of cloud have become more pronounced and several organizations have started embracing the model for their own data centers. Maximizing the cloud, however, requires a thorough understanding of IT and its business drivers. Most IT organizations are exploring the benefits of cloud computing within their own data center. Whether it is faster provisioning, on demand access, agile resource scheduling based on policies, or chargeback rules to ensure business accountability and more control over the environment, IT must move from reactive to a proactive and predictive approach for data center management.”

Towards Setting the Enterprise's Cloud Strategy

The journey to cloud has many paths-starting the journey with a clear understanding of the expected business outcome is important for a successful cloud deployment. While defining the cloud strategy, organizations should address multi-tenancy, public-private cloud usage, roles and responsibilities, governance, globalization, workload policies, standards, integrations, leveraging existing systems, and a virtual image repository.

Industry consensus that organizations should have clarity about the reasons for migrating to the cloud. It is important to understand the applications that organizations want to move to the cloud. Organizations can start by moving non-critical applications to the cloud in order to get a sense of the cloud environment. Also, the integration level that this application has with others which may not be on the cloud is also significant as it can then hamper day-to-day operations.

“Cloud is not a 'one-size-fits-all' proposition; the right approach depends on your enterprise's needs and priorities. Different service and deployment models can be adopted to match the requirements of applications across the business. Security, compliance, reliability, control, and quality of service are few of the factors that enterprises need to consider while adopting a cloud strategy,” says Rajesh Rege, senior vice president, data center, virtualization, and cloud, Cisco India & Saarc.

Virtualization is a key enabler of cloud computing but managing clouds is another crucial element. Managing all virtual machines and clusters is quite complex, especially with self-service, multi-tenancy, metering for billing/chargeback, and other requirements of cloud computing. To reap the full benefits of cloud computing, enterprises need to choose the right management solution.

Dhruv Singhal, lead, cloud computing, Oracle India says, “Organizations belonging to the financial and public sectors deal with sensitive information, and security of this data should also be on the top-of-the-mind for CIOs in these organizations. It is imperative for enterprises embracing the cloud to take an approach where security pervades the entire architecture rather than being bolted on as an afterthought. Enterprises should not only look at products with best-of-breed security in their respective categories, but also the ones where security mechanisms are well integrated, enabling ease of deployment, ease of change, and high reliability.”

Organizations should have more visibility into heterogenous virtual environments; it can be managed by underlying virtualized resources via a single user interface and API infrastructure. This will enable enterprises to allocate and de-allocate virtualized resources as well as load balance and monitor cloud efficiencies. Enterprises need better capacity planning and cost savings from virtualization to realize the true value of cloud computing.

Maximizing the benefits of cloud computing requires thorough understanding of IT assets and relationships between various infrastructure components, high level of automation and mitigating security and compliance risks. In addition, it is imperative for enterprises embracing the cloud to not only monitor and enforce controls such as 'who is the user' and 'what is the user allowed to access in a cloud environment' but also to ensure that such compliance is cost-effective and sustainable in the long term.

“Converged infrastructure platform is gaining traction. We cannot get cost benefit without the virtualization. And organizations have to optimize power and cooling. Networks should also be optimized and virtualized,” says Santanu Ghose, director, business critical systems, HP India. According to Rajesh Rege, senior vice president, data center, virtualization and cloud, Cisco India & Saarc, “Companies can ensure effective compliance by putting together a detailed policy for employees and other users. Besides, effective end-point security and a thin-client model (where all the information resides on the cloud, rather than on an individual device) can minimize instances of data theft or inadvertent loss of data.

Security controls for cloud is similar to that of the security controls of an IT infrastructure. However, since the cloud is a platform that is shared by other users as well, these users can be potential entry points for viruses and malware. Security compliances can help create a protection for the data saved in the cloud. Cloud homogeneity can also make security auditing simpler and help organizations demonstrate that legal and regulatory compliance have been met.”

Cloud is not a simple self-service layer on top of existing IT automation. Resources must be pooled and modeled in an optimal way, before they are offered for self-service consumption. The self-service aspect must be backed by comprehensive mechanisms for managing elasticity. Finally, resources must be metered, to enable a pay-per-user paradigm, just like the ones in any subscription based service-be it cellular minutes, or streaming digital media.

In order to succeed, modern enterprises should look for a comprehensive cloud solution that can help them get total cloud control and allow them to manage the complete cloud lifecycle.

Sumanth Tarigopula, director, global delivery-India, HP Enterprise Services advises, “Cloud management is key for true cloud offering and sustenance. Handling availability, provisioning, load balancing, allocations/re-allocations, Security, IAM and continuity of business is the key to success of any cloud implementations. Cloud management is the ability to operate and monitor single or multiple cloud instances, including IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, as well as underlying server or application instances. It's about keeping things working and under control while leveraging cloud-based resources, as well as monitoring core subsystems and making sure they all work and play well together. Enterprise should focus on hybrid public-private cloud offerings-enabling 'cloud bursts' for on-demand capacity and business continuity.”

Cloud adoption is driven by mobility and mobility appliances. Referring to mobility applications Sunil Lalvani, director, Enterprise Sales, RIM India mentions, “It is imperative to have a user-friendly interface for mobility applications. Enabling workforce through mobile applications is picking up big time. Many organizations have ahead and integrated mobility apps on personal devices as well. In this scenario, mobile device management tools is likely to migrate to cloud in the next one year.” He adds that annual audit is a good practice to know about the key learning and also further upgrade the applications as per the requirement.

The Warning Bell

There is a lack of standards for security and for managing service-level agreements (SLAs) which can help to ensure compliance with government regulations. Cloud providers should provide capabilities to guarantee compliance with IT policies or facilities for auditing compliance. The other concern is to secure integration of business data generated in an external cloud with existing data stored within internal environment. There are not clearly defined methods to validate the SLAs always. Increase in bandwidth is very critical for cloud services, a cloud model requires more touch points. In many countries, bandwidth is still expensive.

Although cloud computing brings with it umpteen opportunities, yet some ifs and buts need to be addressed effectively. The fundamental issues are networking, security, and real-time characteristics. Until recently, networking has witnessed ignorance both from usage and virtualization point of view, which actually exacerbated the impact of network latency and bandwidth on the performance of cloud based applications.

Telecom is an infrastructure savvy industry. Though the industry is infrastructure ready, the cost of networking is the single most important cost factor for cloud computing infrastructure compared to the cost of computation and storage. This, at times or at least in the initial days, eats away the economical benefits of cloud computing.

Besides, telecom networks have to ensure multiple quality of service requirements and it needs to supported and resolved in the context of cloud computing infrastructure. Networks should focus on QoS, placement of computation and interaction between computational instances. Network performance is a top concern.

It is needless to say the importance of security. And it is identified as one the biggest hindrances for the adoption of cloud computing. Security, which is pivotal, would be inherently weakened due to the malware attacks, malicious employees, and denial of service attacks. It is paramount to resolve security issues through technology rather than contractually, and provide the level of security in telecom networks. It is important to build secure-by-design infrastructure.

Security threats need to be mitigated, else multi-tenancy could lead to new attack opportunities and also unauthorized access. Good policies around business continuity plan around data loss and security should be ensured. There are mechanisms in cloud to overcome some of the security challenges in private and public cloud. From the architecture perspective, they can look at hybrid cloud-how well it can be designed to use the benefits of public cloud.

According to Matthew Leonard, director, cloud computing product management, and hosting product management, Tata Communications, “Companies must internally address any technology, business process, or security concerns they may have before considering a migration to cloud computing. Once they have made that decision, they should choose the right service and deployment method that best suits their business. Finally, they must select a provider with the experience, reliability, and expertise to make their move to cloud computing a smooth and productive experience.”

In India, the demand for cloud computing is picking up-the foundation for cloud growth in India depends on the extent to which data centers are being built-solid government support, a favorable regulatory environment, and an effective broadband/IT infrastructure are critical for cloud development and weakness in any of these factors will curtail development.