Author: yntra yntra

Five mantras to unlock maximum benefits from your cloud deployment

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Cloud is at the center of every organisation’s digital transformation journey, even more so in the pandemic-disrupted business environment, also widely known as the ‘new normal’. While most organisations have adopted cloud in some form before the pandemic, the trend has been accelerated on a much larger scale in recent times. However, the business outcomes from cloud deployments often vary for different organisations. At the same time, some organisations may not even get the desired benefits — or even negative outcomes — from the cloud. This leads us to one of the most burning questions for IT and business leaders — How can one technology yield different results or no results for different organisations?

To find an answer to this, organisations need to deliberate on the following two questions:

  • What are the business outcomes to be achieved?
  • What’s the best way to approach cloud deployments?

Only when these fundamental questions are addressed, and the myths around cloud are busted, it can be realised that cloud as a technology is not an issue. Instead, it’s the way organisations approach and deploy the technology that defines the business outcomes. Thanks to all the hype around cloud, organisations often have much higher expectations from cloud. However, like every other technology, cloud is meant to address business-specific challenges; it is not a single solution for all enterprise IT needs. This realisation holds even greater emphasis as businesses today operate in a highly dynamic environment.

Let’s discuss what organisations need to ensure to get the best out of their cloud deployments.

Clearly define business objectives:

Before even considering cloud, the first step starts by defining the business objectives to be achieved. Once the outcomes are clear, the next step involves exploring cloud use cases and determining if they can help achieve the desired outcomes. Well-defined objectives coupled with the right use case will help you measure success and lay a clear roadmap.

Identify what needs to go on the cloud:

Identifying the right workloads to run on the cloud is crucial for achieving the best performance. While some applications might be ready to migrate to the cloud, some applications could need modernisation, whereas some applications could also require replacement. However, not all applications need cloud migration. Assess your application portfolio and identify mission-critical, business-critical, customer-facing, and non-critical applications. Key considerations include response time, latency, downtime for each workload.

Unlike born-in-the-cloud companies, traditional organisations have legacy infrastructure, wherein a lot of investment has been made over the years. This infrastructure could still be utilised for many business applications. In a nutshell, getting the best out of your legacy infrastructure and combining the use of cloud is the key to successful digital transformation.

Systematic deployment of cloud is critical:

Once the applications have been identified, the next crucial step is approaching cloud deployment the right way, in a structured manner. Prioritisation of applications to be moved first is the next important step. This is followed by understanding architectural requirements. Data centers have been the core of enterprise IT infrastructure and continue to remain so, and most organisations have an existing data center-centric network architecture. In such scenarios, a lift-and-shift approach leads to inefficiencies on various fronts and increased costs. Re-architecting network and security is imperative for a well-planned transition, especially in an era of distributed workforce wherein data and applications are accessed from remote locations through endpoints and networks that IT teams have little or no control over.

Securing your cloud environment:

Security is generally cited as an area of concern in boardrooms discussions on cloud adoption. Whether an organisation is part of a highly regulated industry or not, no business can afford a cyberattack in today’s digital economy and security evaluation becomes paramount in any cloud project. In the cloud era, security is a joint responsibility of customers and cloud services providers. While evaluating cloud services providers, some of the key considerations include identity and access management, automated threat detection tools, backup and disaster recovery.

Deployment is not enough; cloud management is crucial:

Your organisation has successfully deployed cloud, but what next? It is essential to keep the cloud environment running seamlessly at all times. In traditional organisations where IT teams used to manage everything on-premise, lack of cloud-native skillsets can lead to manageability and operational complexities, thereby impacting performance. Furthermore, in a business environment that’s defined by customer experience and innovation, monitoring and managing cloud infrastructure can affect your IT team’s focus on applications and innovation. Having the right cloud service provider with complete skillsets and management capabilities can ensure seamless operations and relieve your IT teams from cumbersome tasks, especially in a multi-cloud hybrid environment.

According to IDC, more than 60 percent of Indian organisations plan to leverage the cloud for digital innovation in the pandemic-disrupted era. As a result, India’s public cloud services market is expected to be worth USD 7.1 billion by 2024. But while organisations turn to promising technologies to enhance business outcomes, the key is to carefully identify business needs, constraints, and objectives. With this, coupled with elaborate planning and a tailored approach, businesses can get their cloud deployment right and achieve optimum results.

Source: https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/five-mantras-to-unlock-maximum-benefits-from-your-cloud-deployment-11108572.htm

Why adopting Hybrid Cloud architecture is becoming a norm in the enterprise world

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For the last decade or so, cloud computing has been the focus of CIO and IT decision makers’ conversations.  The pandemic that began in 2020, worldwide, however, has been an inflection point for organizations, large and small, across sectors, fast-tracking adoption of digital and cloud-led technologies, ensuring only companies who adapted to this pace of digital transformation will survive. Remote working has seeped into the mainstream culture and more than a year later, work from home seems to be here to stay. In such an environment, business leaders need technology platforms and tools enabling businesses to operate efficiently without disruption.

Cloud technologies are at the heart of this change, as security conscious businesses look for newer and emerging avenues to accelerate their digital transformation, while securing prized and sensitive business information and workloads. As per IDC Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker, India’s public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), touched $1.6 billion (INR 11,680 crore) for the first half of 2020. Furthermore, it states that the overall India public cloud services market is likely to reach $7.4 billion by 2024 (INR 54,020 crore), growing at a CAGR of 22.2 percent for 2020-24.

The exponential rise in data, however, demands the computing and processing needs of cloud architecture be elastic for data deployment models. This is where a new model of cloud computing comes to the rescue: Hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines a dedicated Compute instance or private cloud hosted in service provider DC or at captive datacenter with a public cloud, allowing data and applications to be shared between them.

Hybrid model is here to stay

As per a recent survey by IBM Institute of Business Value (IBV), hybrid cloud adoption among Indian businesses is expected to grow by 49% with the average organisation using nearly six hybrid clouds. With the increased full hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale, businesses can derive 2.5 times the value compared to a single platform, single cloud vendor approach. In a nutshell, when computing and processing demands increase beyond an on-premises datacenter’s capabilities, organisations can use the cloud services to complement its existing capabilities, instantly scale capacity up or down, avoid time and cost of purchasing, installing, maintaining new servers that they may not always need.

In the coming years, Indian enterprises that are ready to bet big with an appetite for risk, will see returns from the hybrid cloud infrastructure, which is secure, interoperable, open, and free from vendor lock-in. In fact, organisations are already achieving business transformation by leveraging hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology. According to Gartner, majority of the large and midsize organisations have adopted an approach to IT that’s build on hybrid multi-cloud i.e. on-premises cloud combined with more than one public cloud.

With market dynamics shifting, partly due to the ongoing pandemic crisis, customer experience will ultimately define the brand-consumer relationship. And with a hybrid cloud infrastructure, enterprises can mine unlimited, unstructured data and run business analytics on them, especially in the retail sector. For example, India’s online retailer Myntra has been using its cloud and AI data to analyse customer preferences during the last year or so. With this, Myntra has been able to help brands by providing insights on what consumers really want, in addition to helping them move stocks quickly during the lockdown.

From an organisation-employee perspective, what we are currently seeing is a culture where every action and decision is rooted in remote working. Organisations must keep employees, where they are, while keeping them safe. Therefore, tools such as work from anywhere cloud services such as Desktop-as-a-Service/Virtual desktop infrastructure and Network-as-a-Service became must have services amid COVID-19 crisis. They also enable enterprises to align their workloads, on-premises or on cloud that is in sync with latency issues, regulations, data sovereignty and legacy data systems. In other words, for companies looking to build on their digital strategy centered around maximizing existing on-premises investments, an effective multi-edge hybrid approach by keeping the business objective and operational efficiency same is more important than ever.

Colocation providers can help accelerate your Hybrid Cloud strategy

Today, companies no longer want to deal with maintaining and operating a captive data center due to heavy upgrading costs and security concerns. Migrating to highly scalable colocation data centers is emerging as a customer preference.  Additionally, customers are not just looking for rack spaces but an end-to-end solution provider who can take care of all their IT needs such as cloud, network, security, etc.

As enterprises pivot to hybrid cloud architectures, data center service providers, particularly with colocation services, are now using innovative ways to integrate their platforms with hybrid models. Global data center operators are investing in developing an ecosystem of solutions that enable clients to assemble and deploy hybrid cloud solutions on top of their traditional infrastructure.

Sensing the underlying opportunities, most of the leading data center players are developing an architecture that can evolve over time and scale up in response to newer market needs. Today, they offer public cloud as well as provide seamless integration and migration services with the likes of AWS/AZURE/GOOGLE/ORACLE cloud. And with the help of innovative models like ‘Everything-as-a-Service’, these service providers are not only serving large enterprises and cloud operators with their robust infrastructure but also offering managed services to SMEs, SOHOs, and Start-ups.

In conclusion, for businesses looking to take back power in their own hands, by custom designing their own IT infrastructure, with a practical approach realigned with their past, present, and future in mind, it’s worth making an investment in the hybrid cloud architecture.

Opinion: How govt’s focused approach is making ‘Cloud Vision for India 2022’ a reality

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Cloud is not just a lever for controlling costs, but also a huge catalyst or transformational agent for being the foundation for enabling quick adoption of emerging technologies such as AI and Blockchain.

India is an aspiring and incomparable nation when it comes to digital ambitions and scale. Landmark projects like Aadhaar, the Aarogya Setu app, or DigiLocker, are just some of the examples of India’s digital prowess.

Given the scale at which government departments operate, cloud is the perfect platform for accelerating e-governance initiatives. From a policy point of view, already a series of initiatives have been taken to ensure that India has a strategic advantage concerning the cloud.

The Government of India has announced GI Cloud (now called ‘Meghraj’) – an initiative to ensure optimum usage of IT spending by the government while simultaneously giving the impetus to improve the adoption of e-governance initiatives using the cloud. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has created a reference architecture to guide government departments to build their cloud deployment architecture with recommended components and activities.

The National Digital Communications Policy 2018 envisions establishing India as a global hub for cloud computing, content hosting and delivery, and data communication systems and services. It aims to do this by enabling regulatory frameworks and incentives for promoting the establishment of international data centers, content delivery networks, and interconnect exchanges in India.

Similarly, the National Data Center Policy, which aims at making India a Global Data Center hub, promotes investment in the sector, propels digital economy growth, and enables provisioning of trusted hosting infrastructure to fulfil the growing demand.

The potential of the cloud

In India, cloud computing has ensured the success of national initiatives and schemes such as Swachh Bharat Mission, e-Hospital, National Scholarship, My-Gov and e-Transport. One of India’s most landmark initiatives, the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) uses a multi-cloud architecture to ensure scalability. Today, the GeM serves over 50,000 buyer organisations and has a listing of over 19 lakh products and more than 80,000 services.

NIC’s SaaS-based service, S3WaaS, has empowered district administrators to create, configure and deploy scalable and accessible websites without much effort and technical knowledge. Another successful example is DigiLocker, a cloud-based platform for the issuance, sharing, and verification of critical lifelong documents or certificates. With more than 57.13 million users and 4.27 billion issued documents, DigiLocker has proved to be one of the biggest success stories of cloud in the government.

Last year, understanding the critical importance of the cloud in providing the foundation for enabling the growth of emerging technologies such as AI, India’s national policy think-tank organisation, NITI Aayog, suggested the creation of an AI-based cloud computing platform called AIRAWAT (AI Research, Analytics and Knowledge Assimilation).

Similarly, the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), announced last year that it had gone fully digital with the launch of a unique cloud-based and AI-powered big analytics platform. All project documents and correspondences related to NHAI will be stored in a cloud-based data lake, which is linked with GIS tagging and a unique project ID, so that project data can be retrieved easily from any location.

The Indian Railways has given the responsibility of deploying open source Hospital Management Information System (HMIS), an integrated clinical information system, for its 125 health facilities and 650 polyclinics across the country for improved hospital administration and patient healthcare, using a cloud platform.

Emerging use cases of cloud

With the cost of providing compute and storage capabilities coming down drastically, it makes much more sense for government departments to leverage the cloud. The other big reason is the quick pace of adoption for emerging technologies such as AI, ML, Big Data Analytics, or IoT.

In India, many states have proactively taken several pro-cloud initiatives. For example, the Government of Maharashtra in 2018, became the first state to unveil a public cloud policy. Looking at the benefits of cloud-based storage, the Government of Maharashtra mandated its departments to shift their data storage requirements to the cloud.

Similarly, in October 2020, the Government of Telangana announced that it was making it mandatory for all its departments to deploy their existingor new applications on the cloud except for those applications that contained sensitive or confidential data.

Another classic example is Smart Cities, wherein various state governments are leveraging cloud and other digital technologies to provide next generation services to citizens. Madhya Pradesh was the first state to launch India’s first cloud-based Common Integrated Data Centre, Disaster Recovery Centre and Integrated Control and Command Centre (ICCC).

The ICCC is enabling the Madhya Pradesh state administration to monitor and administer multiple city civic utilities and citizen services across seven cities in the state through a central cloud. Now, other states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Telanagana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh are following the suit.

These examples highlight why the move to the cloud is now essential or critical for government departments. Due to the capacity constraints, there are instances where the state data center has faced challenges in scaling up and meeting the requirements in a time-bound manner, which has led to poor application downtime and poor user experience.

Key trends that government departments should look out for

Today, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it imperative for accelerating digital delivery of public services. This has put immense pressure on government departments to quickly roll out new platforms or initiatives. With support for emerging technologies such as AI, ML or Blockchain, the cloud is the perfect platform for testing out new innovations.

The cloud is also a proven platform for automation – a critical need in government departments today, as they grapple with challenges related to skilled manpower and scaling up to meet public demand for services. For example, AI-powered chatbots can answer common queries easily, while RPA can be used to automate routine tasks.

The pandemic has also made remote working a reality now. This is applicable to the government sector too, as it also needs to give government employees the same flexibility as given to employees from the private sector. The cloud is perfect for giving employees secure and reliable access to government applications and data.

The cloud allows government departments to acquire resources based on actual requirements, with the capability to increase or decrease computing resources as per demand. Globally, and in India too, government departments are increasingly feeling challenged in containing costs and providing the required infrastructure.

For instance, the state-owned Bank of Baroda has become the first public sector bank to consider Work from Home policy for a section of its employees. For Bank of Baroda to leverage staff resources better, the cloud will prove to be an excellent platform for creating flexibility without significant corresponding investments.

This flexibility opens up several possibilities – one can think of organisations such as Income Tax which receives huge load for filing returns in the last few days of the deadline given by the government. There are many such examples of departments across the government, which receive seasonal demand spikes. Another notable example is the dedicated web portal called Co-WIN (COVID -19 Vaccine Intelligence Network) which has been launched recently.

This is a complete cloud-based IT solution for planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the Covid-19 vaccination program in the country. While we keep hearing about technical glitches in the Co-WIN platform or the portal getting crashed (when millions of people recently rushed to register for the COVID vaccination), one cannot deny the fact that without the cloud, an initiative of this scale and size would be unimaginable.

As the above examples show, the cloud today is not just a lever for controlling costs, but also a huge catalyst or transformational agent for being the foundation for enabling quick adoption of emerging technologies such as AI and Blockchain. Today, the question for government departments is not why you should adopt the cloud, but when and how fast you can use the cloud to your advantage.

India Enterprise Cloud Survey 2020

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The first edition of the India Enterprise Cloud Survey provides the latest trends and insights of Indian Enterprises journey on cloud adoption and usage. While the cloud has taken center stage today, it has been around for quite some time now. The COVID crisis has fast-tracked this and has been a serious reminder to design IT systems in a way that allows for agility, resilience, and efficiency amid disruption and fast reformation of organisational boundaries.

The external VUCA environment has been demanding an IT platform that supports businesses to innovate amid disruption, which has been relatively gradual. COVID has undoubtedly changed the pace. This research report provides exciting insights by leading CIOs and IT Heads of large and mid-sized enterprises across multiple industries.

Key Highlights of the research –

  • Cloud is mainstream today, catalysed in a big way by COVID as 77% of the enterprises plan to implement their enterprise cloud strategy over the next 12 to 18 months
  • 63% of the Indian enterprise see cloud as the key mode of infrastructure hosting in 2022 as compared to 37% in 2020
  • India Cloud Spending to grow at 15 to 17% in 2021, twice the rate of 7 to 9% at which the overall IT spending by enterprises is estimated to grow

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The India Enterprise Cloud Survey

The India Enterprise Cloud Survey reveals insights on cloud computing adoption by leading CIOs & IT Leaders across Industry.

A cloud-first approach to data protection

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The year 2020 saw a spike in cybercrimes across the world. Rising unemployment forced many to turn to criminal activities. Cyberattacks increased exponentially, especially business email compromise (BEC) attacks like phishing, spear phishing, and whaling – and ransomware attacks. These attacks have resulted in data and financial losses. With most employees working from home, the threat of data theft and data exfiltration looms high.

Today, the risk of storing data on-premise or on endpoints is higher than ever. That’s why organisations are taking a cloud-first approach to data protection. This article discusses the inadequacies of on-premise, legacy infrastructure for data protection and explains why more organisations are adopting modern cloud architectures.

Threat vectors looming large

According to a report by the Group-IB, there were more than 500 successful ransomware attacks in over 45 countries between late 2019 and H1 2020, which means at least one ransomware attack occurring every day, somewhere in the world.  By Group-IB’s conservative estimates, the total financial damage from ransomware operations amounted to over $1 billion ($1,005,186,000), but the actual damage is likely to be much higher.

Similarly, in the final week of the US Elections, healthcare institutions and hospitals in the US were impacted by Ryuk ransomware. The affected institutions could not access their systems and had to resort to pen and paper operations. Life was at risk as necessary surgeries and medical treatments were postponed; patient medical records were inaccessible. Healthcare is a regulated sector and hackers know healthcare data’s value: this includes X-ray scans, medical scans, diagnostic reports, medical prescriptions, ECG reports, and lab test reports.

Today, employees across industries work remotely and log in to enterprise servers to access data. In this scenario, data exfiltration is becoming a massive challenge for organisations. A study by IBM Security says the cost of a data breach has risen 12% over the past five years and now costs $3.92 million on an average.

The crux of the issue is that data exfiltration and data theft can severely tarnish an organisation’s reputation, erode its share price, breach customer and shareholder trust, and even result in customer churn. Stringent regulatory standards and acts like HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, Brazilian LGPD impose stiff fines and penalties that have historically made companies bankrupt or put them in the red.

Indian companies doing business with organizations in the US, Europe or elsewhere, will need to comply with the regulations defined by those nations, at an industry level. And if customer data is breached, they will be liable to pay the penalties imposed by those regulatory bodies.

India’s forthcoming Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 (which is close to being passed into law) is expected to impose similar fines as GDPR. The bill aims to protect the privacy of individuals relating to the flow and usage of their personal data.

Legacy infrastructure may not be able to comply with new regulations being introduced in an increasingly digital world. In fact, legacy could up the risk for data loss, and hence, organisations must move away from legacy infrastructure and take a cloud-first approach to data protection.

Legacy infrastructure is expensive, insecure

An organisation needs scale to succeed in today’s highly competitive business environment. Adding new customers, introducing new products and services, and timely response to market demand requires agility – to support all these the infrastructure should be able to scale up on demand.

Scaling infrastructure on-premise requires colossal investments and the TCO may not be viable in the long term. The shortage of in-house skills is another challenge. CIOs are under tremendous pressure to deliver value. The only way to scale is to embrace disruptive technologies like Cloud, Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Blockchain.

Traditional data protection tools offered by legacy infrastructure are inadequate to protect data in distributed environments, where employees work outside the perimeter, and to secure it from sophisticated attacks like ransomware.

At the same time, the introduction of new services and innovation by enterprises results in an exponential increase in data that gets generated from multiple sources like customers, partners, employees, supply chains, and other places. And much of this data is unstructured, which poses additional data governance and management challenges. Industry regulations mandate that this data be stored for a certain period, and copies of it need to be maintained.

Some governments insist that data must be stored on servers in their country (data residency). For instance, the Indian Personal Data Protection Bill will regulate how entities process personal data and create a framework for organisational and technical measures in processing of data, laying down norms for social media intermediary, cross-border transfer, accountability of entities processing personal data, remedies for unauthorised and harmful processing.

In such a scenario, it would be expensive for an organisation to store its growing data on-premise, as legacy infrastructure is inadequate to protect this data and comply with new data protection laws. Cloud environments are more suitable as cloud service providers ensure compliance.

For all these reasons, businesses want to break free from the shackles of captive data centers and embrace a cloud-first approach for rising data protection needs. To do that, they are moving away from the investment-heavy and legacy approach to a cloud-first approach for data storage and protection.

A cloud-first approach

Forrester predicts that 80 percent of organisations are extremely likely to adopt a cloud data protection solution, as more and more businesses are going in for cloud-first strategies. This is due to critical data loss with on-premises infrastructure, lack of security and scalability, and increased spending in legacy hardware and software altogether.

As enterprises face increasingly stringent compliance regulation, cloud data protection solutions help deliver enhanced privacy capabilities for them to keep pace with all of today’s dynamic business demands and needs.

For instance, enterprises scale up their operations globally, their infrastructure can extend to multiple clouds. This results in server sprawl and siloed data, posing additional data management solutions. This is where, they need to adopt Cloud Data Protection and Management solutions that can manage and protect these sprawling environments. These cloud solutions can also secure an increasingly remote workforce and bypass stalled supply chains and traditional data centers’ limitations considering the unprecedented pandemic situation.

The cloud also offers robust resiliency and business continuity – with backup and recovery tools. Storage-as-a-Service provides a flexible, scalable, and reliable storage environment based on various storage technologies like file, block, and object — with guaranteed SLAs. Furthermore, it allows end-users to subscribe to an appropriate combination of storage policies for availability, durability and security of data that can meet various expectations on data resiliency and retention.

Backup & Recovery as a service offers an end-to-end flexible, scalable, and reliable backup and recovery environment for all kinds of physical, virtual, file system, databases, and application data. This solution further extends the richness of backup capability by using agents to interface with and do data transfer or image-based method with a combination of full and incremental backups. This combination provides an extremely high level of protection against data loss as well as simplified recovery.

Today, organisations understand the value of cloud data protection solutions, which is much more secure than traditional hardware-based architectures. They are adopting platforms to protect data where it is being created — in the cloud — from anywhere with on-demand scalability (object storage), robust compliance capabilities, and industry-leading security standards.

While cloud migration efforts have been underway for several years, it has been dramatically accelerated this year. A remote workforce, growing ransomware threats, and questions about data governance have significantly accelerated the demand for a cloud-first approach to data protection.

How can CIOs drive digital transformation by maximizing the value of Cloud?

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The year 2020 will go down in history books for many reasons. One of those is that the business world is more distributed than ever — customers, partners, and employees work from their own locations (and rarely their offices) today. What does that mean for businesses? The consumer touchpoints are different today, wherein supply chains and delivery networks have changed. This is where organisations have to find new ways to deliver value and new experiences to customers.

In response to the pandemic, business organisations had to fundamentally change the way they operate. They had to transform processes, models, and supply chains for service delivery. To sustain business and remain competitive in a post-COVID world, they had to challenge the status quo and make a lot of changes.

Digital is no longer an option 

When the global pandemic gripped the world in March this year, organisations with three to five-year digital transformation plans were forced to execute plans in a few months or days. Either that or they would go out of business.

A new IBM study of global C-Suite executives revealed that nearly six in 10 organisations have accelerated their digital transformation journey due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, 66% of executives said they have completed initiatives that previously encountered resistance. In India, 55% of Indian executives plan to prioritise digital transformation efforts over the next two years.

This calls for new skills, strategies, and priorities. And the cloud and associated digital technologies will strongly influence business decisions in the post-COVID era. Organisations need to have a full-fledged cloud strategy and draw up a roadmap for cloud migration.

To achieve this, the leading-edge companies are aligning their business transformation efforts with the adoption of public and hybrid cloud platforms. For many sectors, remaining productive during lockdown depended on their cloud-readiness. Operating without relying too heavily on on-premise technology was key and will remain vital in the more digitally minded organisation of the future. In a way, we can say that with the right approach, strategy, vision, and platform, a modern cloud can ignite end-to-end digital transformation in ways that could only be imagined in the pre-Covid era.

To deliver new and innovative services and customer experiences, businesses – be it large corporates, MSMEs, or  start-ups – all are embracing disruptive technologies like cloud, IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, big data analytics, etc., to drive innovative and profitable business models.

For instance, introducing voice interfaces and chat bots for customer helpdesk is a compute intensive task that requires big data analytics and artificial intelligence in the cloud. This enables customers to just speak to a search bot if they need help in ordering products on an e-commerce website. They can also order the product just by speaking to voice bot like Siri or Alexa, for instance. The same is applicable for banking services. Voice based interfaces are enabling conversational banking, which also requires processing in the cloud. These services simplify and improve the customer experience and provide customer delight. But to introduce such innovative service requires an overhaul and transformation of traditional business processes – that’s digital transformation.

Solving infrastructure & cost challenges

Cloud computing has been around for ages, but CIOs still grapple with cloud challenges such as lack of central control, rising / unpredicted cost, complexity of infrastructure, security & compliance, and scaling. However, over the years, public cloud technology has evolved to address these challenges.

Central Control: Public cloud offers dashboards through which one can monitor and control cloud compute resources centrally irrespective where it is hosted (multicloud).

Managing Complexity: IT infrastructure is getting increasingly complex and CIOs have to deal with multiple vendors for cloud resources. Infrastructure is spread out over multiple clouds, usually from different vendors. And various best of breed solutions are selected and integrated into the infrastructure. As a result, the management of all these clouds and technologies poses a huge challenge. CIOs want to simply the management of infrastructure through a single window or single pane of glass. Cloud orchestration, APIs, dashboards, and other tools are available to do this.

Reducing Costs: Demands on IT resources are increasing but budgets remain the same and lack of billing transparency adds to it. Public cloud addresses both issues as it offers tremendous cost savings as you do not make upfront capital investments in infrastructure. There’s also a TCO benefit since you do not make additional investments to upgrade on-premise infrastructure – that’s because you rent the infrastructure and pay only for what you consume. The cloud service provider makes additional investments to grow the infrastructure. There are cost savings on energy, cooling, and real-estate as well.

And since usage of resources is metered, one can view the exact consumption and billing on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Usage information is provided through dashboards and real time reports, to ensure billing transparency.

Compliance & Regulation: Regulatory and compliance demands for data retention and protection may be taxing for your business.

Automated Scaling: Public cloud offers the ability to scale up or down to provision the exact capacity that your business needs, to avoid overprovisioning or under utilisation of deployed resources. Cloud service providers ensure that the resources are available on-demand, throughout the year, even when business peaks during festive seasons. And this scaling can happen automatically.

Global Reach: Apart from scale and cost savings, the cloud offers global reach, so that your customers can access your services from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, the cloud’s ability to explore the value of vast unstructured data sets is next to none, which in turn is essential for IoT and AI. Big Data can be processed using special analytics technologies in the cloud.

Agility: The cloud also makes your business agile because it allows you to quickly enhance services and applications – or a shorter time-to-market for launching new products and services.

Then there’s the benefit of control and management. A ‘self-service cloud portal’ offers complete management of your compute instances and cloud resources such as network, storage, and security.  The self-service nature offers agility, enabling organisations to quickly provision additional resources and introduce enhancements or new services.

With all these advantages, businesses clearly recognise the need for transformation and are gradually leaving legacy technologies behind in favour of next-generation technologies as they pursue competitive advantage. Public cloud is critical to this shift, thanks not only to the flexibility of the delivery model but also to the ease with which servers can be provisioned, reducing financial as well as business risks.

It will not be possible for most companies to transform their businesses digitally unless they move some of their IT applications and infrastructure into public or hybrid clouds.

Key considerations for cloud migration

Regulation and compliance are other vital considerations. What kind of compliance standards has your service provider adopted? There are industry-specific standards like HIPAA for data security and privacy. Besides, there are standards like PCI-DSS applicable across industries — and regionally specific standards like GDPR. Ask about compliance with all those standards.

Keep in mind that the onus of protecting data on the public cloud lies with both – the tenant and the cloud service provider. Hence, it would be a good idea to hire an external consultant’s services to ensure compliance and adherence to all the standards. This should be backed by annual audits and penetration testing to test the robustness and security of the infrastructure.

You also want to ensure resilience and business continuity. What kind of services and redundancy are available to ensure that?

Ask your cloud service provider for guarantees on uptime, availability, and response time. The other aspects to check are level of redundancy, restoration from failure, and frequency of backup. All this should be backed by service level agreements (SLAs) with penalty clauses for lapses in service delivery.

WAN optimization, load balancing and robust network design, with N+N redundancy for resources, and hyperscale data centres ensure high availability. But this should be backed by industry standard certifications such as ISO 20000, ISO, 9001, ISO 27001, PCI/DSS, Uptime Institute Tier Standard, ANI/BICSI, TIA, OIX-2, and other certifications. These certifications assure credibility, availability, and uptime.

Do you remember what happened when the city of Mumbai lost power on October 12 this year? Most data centres continued operations as they had backup power resources. And that’s why their customers’ businesses were not impacted by the power failure.

A key concern is transparency in accounting and billing. Ask about on-demand consumption billing with no hidden charges. How are charges for bandwidth consumption accounted for? Some service providers do not charge extra for inbound or outbound data transfer and this can result in tremendous cost savings. Do they offer hourly or monthly billing plans?

Public cloud for business leadership

Enterprises that still haven’t implemented cloud technologies will be impeded in their digital transformation journeys because of issues with legacy systems, slower change adaptability, longer speed to market and an inability to adapt to fast-changing customer expectations.

Companies are recognising the public cloud’s capabilities to generate new business models and promote sustainable competitive advantage. They also acknowledge the need for implementing agile systems and believe that cloud technology is critical to digital transformation.

However, the cloud does present specific challenges, and one needs to do due diligence and ask the right questions. Businesses need to decide which processes and applications need to be digitalised. Accordingly, IT team needs to select the right cloud service provider and model.

The careful selection of a cloud service provider is also crucial. Look at the service provider’s financial strength. Where is your business data being hosted? What kind of guarantees can they give in terms of uptime? What about compliance and security? These are vital questions to ask.

Switching from one cloud service provider to another is possible but not a wise choice due to many technical and business complexity., so look for long-term relationships. An experienced and knowledgeable service provider can ensure a smooth journey to cloud – and successful digital transformation.

Source: https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/view-how-can-cios-drive-digital-transformation-by-maximizing-the-value-of-cloud-8011661.htm

Effective Cloud Strategy for your Business

Posted on by yntra yntra

A decade ago, cloud computing was for enterprises what AI and IOT are these days. Exciting meaningful but still not a part of their world. Today however, we can safely say that cloud computing has become a part of the mainstream enterprise technology world. Gartner predicts that by end of this year, 75 percent of organizations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model. The discussions have now moved from does cloud make sense to our business to what kind of cloud environment is best for us. Cloud is no longer a buzzword but a need for most businesses, and at the same time transitioning to cloud is an expensive affair. In this article, I will highlight few of the things that as a business you should consider before making the move.

Different cloud environments 

There is no one size fits all in Cloud computing. Every cloud provider has a different setup in terms of physical infrastructure, technology infrastructure, functionality, pricing and policies and others. Private, where computing services are offered via dedicated resources over a computing infrastructure hosted on-premise or at service providers cloud but in the dedicated model. Public, where computing services offered by third-party providers over the public internet and hybrid where a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services are used.

Multi-cloud v. Hybrid-cloud environment

While public and private clouds are simple, there are multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures. Although they sound similar, there is a major difference between them. In a multi-cloud setup, enterprises may use multiple public cloud from multiple cloud providers, whereas hybrid cloud solutions combine the advantages of public, private and multi-cloud to deliver the agility, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness to your organization.

It basically means that you are not putting all your eggs in one basket and hence, distributing the risk and getting the best environment for your application as per business and users need. For instance, a business that is spread across geographies and is using cloud services, finding one cloud infrastructure provider to meet all its demands and needs, is a big challenge. For such organizations, a multi-cloud architecture is best suited.

Drivers for a Multi-cloud environment

Another major reason for enterprises to adopt multi-cloud is avoiding vendor lock-in. This means that you will be working with more than one vendor in a multi-cloud setup. When a multi-cloud strategy is adopted by organizations, it provides them with more leverage than the cloud provider. The organization now has the option of transferring workloads between providers basis pricing or differing capabilities.

Other factors like cost savings, performance optimization, a lowered risk of DDoS attacks, as well as improved reliability, make hybrid-cloud a very attractive option for many businesses. Multi-cloud environment is one of the most flexible environments one can go in for.

Challenges of a Multi-cloud architecture

While multi-clouds seem extremely attractive there are some pitfalls to it as well. One of the biggest is the possibility of difficult integration across multiple cloud servers and vendors. Keeping track of all the stakeholders, applications and deployments with multiple vendors and platforms can be a thing of IT management nightmare.

Then there is the entire security angle to it. While the multi-cloud does limit the DDoS attack, it may leave an enterprise vulnerable to other attacks, if don’t plan the organization level security policies as per the individual cloud operators’ measures. So now an enterprise has to be not just aware of knowing each of its many cloud service providers’ security measures and then has to identify the steps needed to secure the gaps.

Strategize your way to a successful multi-cloud, the Yotta way

Before you jump into the multi-cloud bandwagon, it is a good idea to form a strategy. Solid strategies that will help you understand why exactly your business needs a multi-cloud setup. Is it because you want to reduce vendor dependency or is the focus risk mitigation? Questions about functionality, procurement or application portability on this kind of environment need to be addressed clearly before embarking upon this journey.

A clearly defined multi-cloud strategy will automatically lead itself into a successful venture. While there are challenges, there are solutions to overcome them as well, for instance, instead of learning and using new tools, with Yotta’s orchestration layer one can manage and deploy any cloud as per security posture/polices of the organization. Besides, Yotta can also help to move your workloads across clouds by taking the entire responsibility of the migration. If your enterprise is looking to shift to cloud computing or moving to a multi-cloud environment, schedule a free consultation with our cloud experts.