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Cloud Transformation – Untold Story

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DQINDIA Online
New Update
cloud computing

By: Piyush Somani, MD & CEO, ESDS

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Piyush-Edited

In the increasingly dynamic business environment, business leaders need to constantly innovate to drive agility and stay competitive. To achieve this, business leaders need to focus on their core competency and effectively leverage technology as a catalyst for growth. In the past few years, cloud computing has introduced ‘disruption’ and caught everyone’s fancy. Cloud has indeed experienced phenomenal growth all over the world and has forced CXOs to adopt a “Cloud first” strategy. However, before we proceed further, let’s look at the following trends on cloud.

  1. Are CIO’s under pressure from their top management or their customers to consider Cloud adoption?
  2. Have the majority of big IT enterprises failed to move on Cloud?
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If the answer to both the questions is yes, then there is a dire need to revisit how cloud has been traditionally implemented. It’s a known fact that, majority of the SME’s, Banks, Telco’s and enterprises with their ERP setup have either failed to explore cloud, moved back to the traditional in-house setup or implemented other forms of managed IaaS. With cloud Computing becoming the top flavor among CIOs, large cloud service providers continued their transformation into becoming specialist cloud provider. This push started forcing the CIO’s to think about Cloud.

When eCommerce Cloud became everyone’s Cloud: Cloud computing and grid computing started gaining popularity when large ecommerce firms made their in-house developed cloud platform available to other organizations. This ecommerce cloud was built on the concept of horizontal scaling on infrastructure level, specifically built to cater the large volumes of traffic on their website.  With this ‘ecommerce cloud’ gaining popularity, new players entered the arena and continued to develop IaaS offering using horizontal scaling solution very aggressively. Startups and enterprises continued modifying this cloud architecture and made it similar to a large ecommerce website. However, many of the startups & enterprises failed, as they never got desired performance, as their business requirements were drastically different from the eCommerce players. This cloud platform was never built for the SME’s, Banks, Telco’s or the enterprises as they needed more in-memory compute power along with enterprise RDBMS. Poor managed services offered by the top cloud service providers was another major reason behind failure of some Enterprises in adopting this load balancing Cloud.

Cloud Redefined: Vertical auto-scaling is an ideal solution for in-memory compute processing required by large enterprises and startups. This feature helped customers to borrow resources dynamically from the cloud in real-time up to hundreds of cores and TB’s of memory to complete the intensive workloads. Once the usage was over, the resources are pulled back automatically by the cloud in minutes. The vertical scaling transforms the highly commoditized business of IaaS into a utility model and delivers  “pay-per-consume” model in contrast to the present “pay-per-use” model.

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Delivering tangible benefits: With the ‘pay-per-consume’ model, the auto-scaling feature offers proportional utilization for only the resources consumed and makes customers pay optimally during peak business season and help save significantly in the off-season period. This process actually results in savings of 70-80% of their IT infrastructure investment. Additionally, even during extreme peak workloads, the in-built intelligence in the cloud migrates the virtual machines in real-time across new hosts(Nodes), offering scalability and high availability.

Unlocking the IT Infrastructure sizing myth: Today, resources are overprovisioned by an average of 10 times across the industry considering 5-year growth and degradation in hardware performance. The Vertical auto-scaling cloud and the “pay-per-consume” billing system completely eliminates the need for sizing. Through auto-scaling cloud, customers can avail extremely high performance compute at significantly lower cost.

Paradigm Shift of Cloud: Previous generation Operating Systems were static in nature and were not adaptable to infrastructure changes, they lacked agility and that’s why Horizontal scaling (load balancing) was the only option. Vertical auto-scaling solution is the next generation Cloud technology which brings agility to applications and Operating Systems. Many of the Operating Systems providers have now started supporting Real time changes in CPU, RAM, HDD & Kernel with no need for reboot or schedule downtime. These new generation features are completely transparent to applications and are improving overall performance & uptime of the systems.

As CIOs embark on their vision to enable business transformation, they have the opportunity to redefine their cloud strategy and navigate new business opportunities. While cloud computing provides very exciting and newer opportunities to innovate, if not implemented strategically it can act as a roadblock for organizations in their growth. CIOs who are willing to make this shift are best poised to play a lead in delivering value-driven IT strategy.

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