How a cloud integrator can empower your company

Sundeep Jauhar

Perhaps no C – level position has undergone as many changes in technologies, expectations, approaches and philosophies during the last few years as that of the Chief Information Officer.

During the course of my interaction with CIOs and their teams I have come across common “technology catch-up” concerns & evolving trends, that I believe need to be the top priorities for strategic CIOs.

• As mobile devices continue to proliferate, there is an increasing need to serve the needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts & environments, as opposed to focusing on devices alone
• As mobility & BYOD trends zoom, there is a greater need to move to real timeUnified Communication & Collaboration tools like WebEx, Yammer, Cisco Spark, SharePoint, Box, Salesforce etc to connect all employees, suppliers, distributors & customers in real time across diverse mobile devices & with aconsistent user interface to allow for reduced costs, faster decision making & higher productivity
• Multi-cloud environment solutions (cloud services from multiple vendors, offering different services with varying degrees of support & security) to improve their businesses with new online services, processes & interfaces that will drive growth while reducing costs & increasing agility. This involvesmoving technology infrastructure & applications to the cloud
• Structured & unstructured data analytics to draw intelligence from varied sources & deliver it in real time to enable faster & deeper decision making
• Data security concerns need to be addressed, especially in the face of increasing communication between all kinds of mobile devices & applications on the cloud

Key survey findings of Enterprise IT trends 2015: SMAC conducted by EY reinforce how CIO’s focus is shifting from fundamentals to leveraging digital technologies & opportunities.

• 29% respondents stated plans to increase IT spend by more than 10% from last year
• 54% agreed that social media has been really effective in engaging with customers & enhancing collaboration
• 52% have budgeted for mobility in the current financial year
• 38% categorized analytics as “very important” to their business
• 57% agreed that they are benefiting from investing in cloud based technologies

Agile CIOs are looking to the cloud, not just for flexibility & savings, but to realise it’s truly transformational potential to create new business models & deliver competitive advantage…they are concerned about securing both data & network, about managing hybrid clouds, retaining control, complying with regulation, ensuring end user performance & having access to the right skills… whilst minimising the complexity, risk & cost.

Therefore, enterprise customers need heterogeneous cloud frameworks that support a range of solutions tailored to unique business requirements.

How to enact this transformation to the cloud?

Traditionally, Businesses have had verticalised teams each for data center, infrastructure, applications, telecom & so on. This method of having an IT liaison for the business no longer delivers the desired kind of business value and time & speed necessary for today’s demands. Likewise the challenge with networking & telecom companies in the market today, cloud or otherwise, is the silo approach to delivering solutions.

The perfect cloud environment is one that allows easy & secure consumption of internal services & external solutions. Not so easy in practice, when you think that you might have a whole host of cloud services from multiple vendors, offering varying degrees of support & security.

What’s more, one has to remember that the quality of the user (internal & external) experience depends not on the choice of cloud services alone, but equally on the quality of the company’s telecommunications network. It requires a calibrated & optimized mix of on-premise & cloud based apps & tools to ensure a future proof plan.

We shouldn’t, therefore, underestimate the scale of integration & network know-how required to deliver a great cloud experience.

So once the CIO has decided to move away from the silo approach & has worked out how the cloud can address his specific business priorities, s/he needs to appoint a “Cloud Integrator” to work across every area of his organization & mutually chalk out a cloud strategy that delivers control & choice, flexibility & security, all in one package.

An ideal Cloud Integrator would be one who owns the network, whoowns the data centres & has strong security expertise. One who not only has relationships with all the major cloud providers but also has integrated all their services into his network. And one who hasdemonstrable know-how to make it work at a global scale under a single SLA umbrella.

The Cloud Integrators would allow large companies around the world to connect easily & securely to the applications & the data they need, independently of where they are hosted, whenever they need them, on whatever device they use. They will empower companies to integrate & orchestrate the IT resources hosted on their own private clouds as well as on the Cloud Integrator’s global cloud platform & on the platforms of other leading partner cloud service providers.

Which is why we find increasing number of technology companies, network IT service companies, application companies & global telecom companies including the likes of BT, IBM, Microsoft & AWS busy - either acquiring or partnering with niche technology companies like Box, Adallom, Yammer, Compose, Elemental & Datazen, to establish themselves as the best Cloud Integration service provider in the market.

CIOs who don’t take up the challenge, risk being hit by “Shadow IT” aka  functional departments of the company (say Marketing, HR, Finance or HR) bypassing the central IT to set up independent applications via SaaS vendors. And the resultant risks could be huge. It could lead to breaches from systems that CIO’s did not even know were in use.

So here’s my take on using Cloud Integrators to transform today’s Enterprise – how about sharing your views, along with feedback on the above?

– Sundeep Jauhar is an experienced telecom business professional  with extensive experience in building, turning around ,operating and expanding independent businesses