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Open Cloud practice is the way to go

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DQINDIA Online
New Update
cloud future

By-Anuj Bhalla ,VP & Global BU Head, System Integration & Product Business, Wipro

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Anuj Bhalla-Wipro

In today’s changing world, cloud is a dominant technology and an automatic choice for clients across all verticals. Banks, media houses, retail firms, and even telcos are jumping onto the cloud bandwagon to gain competitive edge in their domain. A media company can leverage cloud to deliver content at a much faster rate with a very less cost of ownership while a bank can process more without pre-owning processing power and by just buying it.

While there are many reasons why an enterprise might want to adopt cloud computing, the most important ones are identified as business performance resourcing, rapid go-to-market, business agility, and cost reduction.

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Hybrid Cloud remains the preferred strategy

There’s still a lot of uncertainty and skepticism around thecloud, particularly among technology professionals who have deep expertise with or attachment to on-premise computing. Security is the main reason that refrains customers from adopting cloud—extremely security conscious or conservative clients have been hesitant to move their data and workloads into the cloud. Now, with the underlying technology behind cloud services available for deployment inside organizations, a new model of cloud computing is gaining visibility in businesses: The hybrid cloud. It is a logical middle ground being adopted by customers as they try striking a balance between hav-ing computational and storage resources on premises or offloading it to the public cloud.

Moving to a hybrid model accomplishes several goals: It allows you to retain sensitive data behind your firewall while taking advantage of the lower cost and flexibility of the cloud. The demand for expertise to provision the optimal cloud offerings for enterprise business and technical requirements is rapidly increasing as organizations are adopting cloud computing. This has led to the emergence of Cloud Services Brokers (CSBs), who serve as the intermediary between cloud providers and cloud consumers that assist companies in choosing the services and offerings that best suit their needs.

A major trend these days in cloud computing is DevOps, a methodology for application development and lifecycle management that involves tight integration between the development and operations sides of computing. DevOps will enable businesses to shorten cycle times, optimize resources, as well as enable faster detection, faster root cause remediation, resilience, and hypothesis-driven process. By using the power of repeatability, DevOps transforms how IT and your business functions, facilitating speedier deployments and easy reversal if a rollback is deemed necessary.

By vastly improving the quality, speed, and efficiency of software deployments, IT will become more responsive to business needs, being effective where it matters. As public cloud computing gains greater adoption across enterprises, there’s an increased level of spending occurring on infrastructure-related services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Gartner predicts that IaaS will achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41.3% through 2016, the fastest growing area of public cloud computing. The research firm predicts that PaaS will achieve a 27.7% CAGR through 2016, with cloud management and security services attaining 26.7% in the same forecast period. Software-as-a-Service’s CAGR through 2016 is projected to be 19.5%.

How Open Source is influencing the cloud wave

As Clayton Christensen has articulated well in his book, ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma,’ market disruption is always driven by the low-cost technology that becomes “good enough.” Eventually, the low-cost technology becomes the market leader. All the buzz and excitement surrounding OpenStack always boils down to one answer: Cost and freedom of choice!

The thought of having a free cloud platform to host applications is extremely appealing, when compared to expensive on-premise alternatives, such as VMware, or public cloud platforms, such as AWS. However, the fact that OpenStack lends itself to integration with automation tools like Puppet and Chef for workflow automation means that the potential business implications of Open- Stack with respect to application deployment and operation are much greater than what Linux ever promised. Although OpenStack is one name, it is more like a project than a product. The components from this project can be combined to create a product giving enough chance to a system integrator to play a crucial role of designing the right solution for the customer environment.

hybrid-cloud open-source open-cloud
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