7 Steps to Cloud 9

Many organizations are talking about SaaS, PaaS, and LaaS or rather anything-as-a-service for known benefits, but the decision making is very slow when it comes to adoption of cloud. There are some reasons that the CIOs are not fully convinced yet. Deepening our understanding on the present scenario, is that SaaS solutions have seen some resonance with the big enterprise customer, but the penetration is minimal. The packaged cloud solutions are great and have market potentiality, but CIOs will adopt cloud only if it solves their business problems and fits into their existing IT ecosystem.

CIOs deciding about the cloud transformation and considering the solutions available in the market, realize that there are gaps in what is being offered. Following seven ways can help in instilling more confidence among CIOs:

• Extensions for the core offering: A legacy of IT application portfolios is that no IT solution can exist as a Silo. The traditional solutions are required to work with each other and the expectations from the SaaS services are no different. So, even in the selection of a SaaS service, importance must be given to the APIs and web interfaces support for these solutions. Weightage should be given to the additional extensions offered by the partner network.

• Integrating framework and services: Looking to the extendibility of the SaaS solutions and the gap if it still exists, then there are solutions and services available in the market that will integrate any standard based solutions. Services like Boomi and Informatica Cloud can integrate any kind of SaaS services, on-premise applications, databases, flat files, file feeds, and social messaging sites etc.

Enterprise Service Bus vendors can also be used to develop a custom solution for peculiar integration requirements of enterprise customers.

 

• Supporting mobile devices (BYOD): Bring your own device is an accepted policy in most organizations. The IT department is measured by the devices it supports and manages to extend the same stringent security policy to mobile devices as to in-house desktops. The SaaS services are faced with increasing demand to be device aware. The SaaS service can be accessed from a desktop, laptop, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android phone, windows phone or Symbian device. Cloud applications are expected to be aware of which device and browser it is being accessed from and render accordingly.

 

• Provisions for social computing: When services are going to be provided on the network and we at the other end consume services from the web, then it is a fair assumption that the providers will like to promote the services and users will like to provide a feedback. The customers looking to buy these services will look for referrals and ratings for these services online. SaaS services will need to provide a platform for the users to form a community. Either the platform should be part of the service or there should be provisions to use the social platforms already available. Integration of social computing will help both the providers and users. The mutual benefit to both providers and users will help to create meaningful services for the users and will result in increasing the user-base and revenue for the service.

• MDM, Big Data, and Analytics: On-demand subscription based services is going to encourage many users to adopt cloud services. These cloud applications and users in result will churn out terabytes of data. The unstructured data once consolidated and analyzed can shape the future of the organization in terms of shaping their products, messaging, and delivery in the market. This will bring them closer to the needs of the consumer and innovate ways of packaging and flexibility, which can provide an edge in the competitive landscape. Big data offered as a cloud service with analytics should be able to provide meaningful reports to understand and have 360 degree view of consumers and providers. Hence all the benefits of MDM and big data in service creation, service promotion, customer service, loyalty programs, shelf displays, and customer retention should also be applicable in the case of cloud services.

• Cloud service broker: A mix of cloud service providers hosted on public or private hybrid cloud environment, providing services over the network to cloud service consumers-creates a complex infrastructure and monetization setup. The challenges are for the IT administration team to manage this complexity. IT team will like to work with a platform to aggregate these services from different vendors, to provision and de-provision services for all the users, manage the licenses, raise support tickets, and track these to resolution from a single window.

IT team will administer accountability and resource optimization with the help of features of chargeback. One single bill for all the services to a department and consolidation of licenses at the organization level, will bring in a lot of clarity and simplicity to finance department.The cloud broking platform is extremely useful when it comes equipped with a configurable catalogue of services.

• Governance: A cloud service will only provide maximum value once it becomes a part of the IT service delivery, tied to business goals and objectives of the organization. This is essential not only for highest levels of service delivery to be maintained, but also because of security and compliance requirements. Organizations adopting processes for service strategy, service design, service transition, and service operation will be able to tie in the services to the business goals. The processes for supplier management, service level management, service catalogue management, and availability management will provide greater monitoring and controls necessary for running the service to expected levels of quality of service (QoS).

To summarize, cloud adoption is at a critical inflection point and as solution providers spearheading this change, we should make the transitions as comfortable as we can for diverse customers. We have moved ahead of the initial skepticism and understand the benefits. But to make it easier for the enterprises already with a large complex to adopt cloud services, there is a need to provide a well-integrated cohesive solution with all the components, so that it becomes an integral part of organization growth and roadmap for achieving success.