Cloud computing future of all business IT infrastructure: Dr. Christopher Richard, G7CR

G7 CR Technologies is a leading global information technology, consulting and cloud services company. It was founded in 2012 by Christopher Richard, a leading global industry technology expert. The headquarters are located in Bengaluru, India. The main motto is to “Create Value for Our Customers.”

Here, Dr. Christopher Richard, MD & Chief Cloud Architect, G7CR Technologies, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What is the role and significance of cloud computing amid Covid-19?

Dr. Christopher Richard: Covid-19 situation has forced us to explore a new way of life. It is to note that governments, businesses and all of us have turned to technology as a solution and accommodate the new normal. Cloud plays a major role in keeping up with the speed and efficacy that the current situation demands. Coming to how is cloud significant:

Scale – Government and businesses are building applications to combat the spread of Covid-19 and enable work from home options. They are also building few smaller mobile apps to track visitors. You can develop a small application for contact tracing or a nationwide app but you need the hardware required to support millions of users in a day or even minutes. Traditional datacentre setup will take at least a month for the procurement and logistics. But, cloud makes it happen just in minutes.

Availability – In the interest of safety of employees, businesses are moving towards work from home option and managing privately-owned datacentres calls for huge investments in automated systems for temperature control, redundancy and data safety. Cloud providers are able to make this all happen with simple dynamics of volume.

AI/ML capabilities – This area is a key pillar in answering some of the crucial business, economical and medical research questions. Cloud providers today have built in AI/ML capabilities, backed by high performance compute and graphic-enabled machines.

Today, we have use cases of ISVs building solution with face recognition capability to detect if individuals are wearing masks, gloves and if they are maintaining social distancing.

The bottom line is, we now have a need for speed in technology advancement. And, this can only be achieved with Cloud. Cloud has already played a major role, including G7CR in itself, by helping businesses move over 7,500 user desktops to cloud in less than 30 days to facilitate work from home option and will continue to play a big role in helping to redefine the new normal.

DQ: How should companies deal with cloud security threats?

Dr. Christopher Richard: Cloud is a fundamental generation shift, much like mainframe to PC, PC to the client server, client server to enterprise and enterprise to cloud, and this calls for overall strategic change. While this is not new for some enterprises, it is new to most of them. The security threats on the cloud could be very similar to the ones you had or did not have on-prem, but the tools available and the ways to mitigate them varies on the cloud.

The first change on a traditional security experts is to drop the “I know it all” attitude as you will never be able to know the cloud, it simply changes and enhances at a very rapid pace. So, the best one can do is, to learn on the job.

The threat landscape is constantly changing and cloud providers while cannot nullify all threats or attacks, they are constantly putting the necessary engineering behind the cloud to make it more costly for the attacker and to make it not so lucrative for them. Some research has tried to peg the cost for the attacker and how much they need to spend on attacks.

I have listed a table on recent findings of cost of various types of attacks:

* 0 days price of attack ranges from 5000$ - 35000$

* Loads (compromised devices): 0.39$ - 0.89$ for PC and 0.82$ - 2.78$ for mobiles

* DOS (denial of service) average price: 1.05$ per day

* Proxy services (evade IP detection) price: $100 per week for 100,000 proxies

* Ransomware 66$ upfront or 30% of the profit

* Spear phishing service 100$ to 1000$ for every successful account take over

* Compromised accounts 150$ for every 4 million accounts.

Cloud OEMs continue to shape their strategy by focusing on making these costs continue to increase for the attacker and will definitely make cloud more secure and therefore reduce the threats on the cloud.

DQ: What are the measures companies should take to mitigate them?

Dr. Christopher Richard: Companies need to adopt to the changing paradigm and adapt a security posture where the perimeter is no longer your datacentre alone. The new perimeter isn’t defined by the physical location(s) of the organization, it now extends to every access point that hosts, stores, or accesses corporate resources and services.

Interactions with corporate resources and services now often bypass on premises perimeter-based security models that rely on network firewalls and VPNs. Organizations which rely solely on firewalls and VPNs lack the visibility, solution integration and agility to deliver timely, end to end security coverage.

Today, organizations need a new security model that more effectively adapts to the complexity of the modern environment, embraces the mobile workforce, and protects people, devices, applications, and data wherever they are located. This is the core of Zero Trust.

DQ: Has there been growth in cloud computing business, triggered by the Covid--19 pandemic?

Dr. Christopher Richard: There has been definitely an unprecedented growth in cloud computing business, triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic and it is an obvious reaction to the situation. Business are now ready to accept and try things away from traditional ones.

The companies that had their servers on prem, landed up spending more ensuring their key people were able to reach these servers while they worked from home. This growth has seen crunch on resources at many cloud providers DCs and the good news is we now see a huge number of organizations opening up conversations on using cloud.

DQ: What are the challenges faced during the implementation of cloud computing?

Dr. Christopher Richard: If we are talking about specific challenges faced, while doing implementation during the Covid-19, it has been mainly two-fold -- the huge demand and the need for speed. Organisations need things moved in lightning speed to ensure business continuity. This left little time to let alone planning, it was even implementation without time to pause and think. This, while ensured that things got done fast, it also came with support issues that lasted for days to solve the issues that were created in speed.

DQ: What will be the post lock down scenario?

Dr. Christopher Richard: Mature organizations have already made decisions that the way of working will change and are already re-organizing themselves to align with the changes in work, workflows and processes. Post lock down, these organizations will focus on how to continue the minimal infra at office and also minimal people in office.

While this happened on lift and shift during Covid-19 lockdown, organization leaderships will now sit down to make this more structured and process driven and work out changes to make this Covid-19 change a permanent and graceful one.

DQ: How has been the hiring during Covid-19 and  lock down period?

Dr. Christopher Richard: While most organizations with long term strategies, would have continued their hiring process and found ways of doing this even during the lock down, some would have paused to catch their breath and then continue. But again, this comes with adaption that is required to be able to convert the hiring process life cycle to go fully digital. We at G7CR hired during this period and it was a great learning to interview, select, on-board, orient and train the new hires remotely.

DQ: How has cloud computing helped many sectors like telecom, retail, heathcare, SMEs, etc.?

Dr. Christopher Richard: The future of all businesses IT infrastructure is definitely cloud computing. It is a valuable adaption across sectors and across business verticals, unless the organization is operating in the past. Telecom, SMEs, start-ups, retail and healthcare have already been reaping in the benefits of cloud adaption even prior to Covid-19 lockdown.

While telecom, apart from direct benefits of using cloud for their own needs, have seen in-direct benefits of revenue growth from bandwidth consumption in datacentres and users who now need connectivity.

To SMEs, the greatest help is the IT infrastructure, with no capital cost, pay as you use and easy adaption. The retail segment will benefit from cloud by using the scalability of cloud to host the on-line shopping carts and health care can benefit significantly from quick and easy implementations of AI and ML on cloud.