Gearing Up for Growth, The Cloud Way

With economies, countries, and organizations across the globe surviving the recessionary phase and coming back to normalcy, it is now time to gear up for the growth. Organizations across verticals and industries have to leverage upon different opportunities that come their way. With cost savings and RoIs being important keywords for CIOs across any industry, cloud technology is considered to be a viable proposition for them. However CIOs believe that cloud has to be promoted as a technology rather than a marketing initiative by the vendors. These debatable topics were of high interests for the CIO and IT heads who attended the Mindlance event in association with Dataquest at Bengaluru. The theme of the event was Gearing up for Growth.

Reality v/s Hype

Group editor of Cybermedia India, Ibrahim Ahmed in his welcome note stressed on the fact that there are a lot of vendors who are talking about offering cloud services. Cloud certainly is an in-fashion statement these days. The journey to cloud has already started in India. As per few market reports, the cloud market in India as of 2010 was $135 mn including different cloud platforms such as SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. The market is expected to reach approx $1 bn in the next 5 years. Some of the sectors that are seeing a lot of action have been telecom, IT/ITeS, retail, and even government.

To demystify this entire cloud area and the technology behind it, Kamal Sharma, global CIO, Mindlance spoke on some real ground issues in the cloud model and that there are certain hindrances which can either be reduced or completely eliminated with effective usage of IT. There is a huge role for IT to play for the next phase of growth. We are now seeing CEO or other business heads asking a CIO for business growth. The biggest growth for us has come in the past 1.5 years though we have been in existence for more than 10 years now. This has been possible only because of IT and cloud model being aligned with the businesses contributing well in terms of revenues to the organization, says Sharma of Mindlance. Continuous assessment programs will also ensure value to the business according to Sharma. Some of the key components that were identified by Sharma within his organization that changed the overall business for the company were completely refreshing the email infrastructure by going for a cloud model, an in-premise cloud approach for RIM services, hybrid model for unified communications, and a hybrid cloud approach for business critical application. With cloud deployments there were significant strides made by the company in terms of revenues in a span of 7 months which were not been achieved by the company in the past 10 years.

Microsoft which was also a part of the event focused more on the data center virtualization and the private cloud. There are key steps for CIOs while moving to a private cloud. According to Microsoft, there has to be a proper assessment and planing which is critical while moving to the cloud. Secondly, all hardware needs to be virtualized. IT assets also needs to be managed in a centralized way. Virtualization offers CIOs to drive down costs, increase IT efficiencies, and enable business agility.

Challenges

Where does India stand on the status of standardization? What is the flexibility you are getting out of the cloud services? How will I ensure my CFO on the RoIs and the reliability of the pay-per-use-model. One of the CIOs proved a point by saying that evolution of cloud services is still a debatable topic as there are no standardization and no security management. There needs to be a standard body for governing the risks in cloud services. However vendors believe that there still are no industry standards because standards will have to emerge from the benchmarks which are yet not there for cloud services. Once benchmarks are set for cloud services, there might be standards for cloud model as argued by vendors.

Another CIO went a step ahead and argued that the terminology hosting might have come from technologists, however the term cloud surely has come from the marketing people. Vendors often push their products to the CIO however what is more important for the vendors is to make the CIOs understand about the technology of cloud and its benefits rather than just pushing their products and ending up in a rat race.

Conclusion

The immediate future for cloud seems to be a hybrid model. Concerns such as security and standardization will continue to grip the vendor community, however there seems a ray of hope for the vendors as well as the CIO community to well accept the cloud modeleither private, public, or a hybrid model.