'The cloud is public, just like a bus'

Monish Darda is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Icertis and is responsible for the technology roadmap of Icertis' products and solutions. In an conversation with Dataquest, Darda compares cloud with a bus journey. Excerpts...

On the cloud phenomenon...The cloud has brought about real disruption very quickly--where the internet changed the lives of everyone, the cloud is certainly changing it for the CIO! Not that the cloud does not affect us all-- it does, but it makes the CIO's life miserable! Why? Because he does realize that adopting the cloud whole-heartedly makes sense, but it is a little like giving up the car to take the train to work because it is more practical. The metaphor makes more and more sense as we dive deeper, so let us take a quick look at the cloud footprint:

1.The cloud is public, just like the bus

2.It is cheaper to take the bus than taking the car to work; you only pay for the days you travel

3.You depend on someone else's SLAs--of course, they could be better than yours

4.You don't have to worry about maintenance, you get chauffeured so you don't have to drive, and there is an extra bus somewhere in the pool if one breaks down

5.You can leave your laptop in the car while you have a coffee, but you can't leave it on the bus (and you have to take precautions in both cases)

6.You can't stop for coffee when you want when you take the bus either, but you can always take your coffee with you on the bus

7.When you know you will have to stay late, it is better to take the car than the bus. If you have to stay late, you pay much more than your car for a cab

8.You always take the car to the golf club and when going to all the places you go to where no bus has gone before

So, this is the mix of elements that makes the cloud picture. The metaphor is not perfect, but it comes pretty close, and that is the philosophy of the cloud in any case. So let us take this metaphor to its logical conclusion--what do we do with the car, when we start taking the bus to work?

Getting used to the bus-

1.You will get used to the bus very quickly: You are not really losing control moving to the cloud, but you can now spend quality time helping the business than maintaining infrastructure patching, disaster recovery, hardware maintenance can be replaced by resources working on strategic projects you always wanted to do but were too busy to. Your laptop and your brain can now be put to good use on the bus now that you don't have to drive.

2.Maintaining and driving the bus is someone else's headache, and you should be happy about it: The maintenance of your cloud resources is not your responsibility any more--let the cloud provider do it, and try not to think about it. The cloud provider is riding his business and reputation on the smooth running of cloud infrastructure, and that is motivation enough to do the job better than anyone else.

3.Don't throw the car away: Your existing infrastructure is valuable, and you need it. Repurpose your infrastructure to the mission-critical applications and data which cannot move to the cloud for various reasons including security, performance and data movement.

4.Reconfigure your work times to minimize the difference between taking the car and the bus: Narrow down the dependencies on cloud and on-premise infrastructure as much as possible. Remember, we will get to the holy grail of not knowing or caring where our apps and data reside sooner rather than later, so get ready for it.

There are several ways:

a. Virtualization on-premise, so you can move the virtualized machines to the cloud quickly

b. Building or enhancing your applications so that compute and storage are reconfigurable,

c. Building virtual private networks which most cloud providers allow you to do so that onpremise and cloud apps can talk to each other easily and be managed easily

5. Drive the car to the bus stop if it is far away: A hybrid approach can benefit many applications. Leverage your on-premise infrastructure and your cloud resources to balance cost, performance and security.

6. Think about security differently: You can still take that laptop on the bus to work, but you do have to be more careful. More laptops get stolen from cars than they do from buses and trains, not necessarily because buses and trains are more secure, but because people are more careful, and people look out for each other. So take more care of the security of your applications and data than you do when they are on-premise.

7. Buy or rent a fleet of buses if you have 1,000s of people in the family: A private cloud makes sense when you have the scale to justify the management, so that you can bend the cloud to your will. In most cases, you can leverage a lot of your current infrastructure to build your private cloud. In general, the private cloud is an oxymoron unless backed by the needs of very large enterprises.

 

8.Your kids will take the bus anyway, so make taking the bus safer for them: The current generation of business workforce is not going to wait for you to drive them around or agree to wait for years to acquire their driving license - they are going to leverage the cloud. That is what came to pass with SalesForce and the sales person's credit card, and that is what is happening with cloud resources.You cannot stop it, and you should not. Instead, make it safer for them:

a. Educate them on safety and best practices when using the cloud

b. Enable them to do it easily so that they go through IT to use the public cloud instead of

c. Give them platforms that you control (like Office 365, for example) that gives them a lot

d. Remember, you are in the job of enabling business, not inhibiting it. This means being

9. You will meet friends, and make more friends on the bus: This is a huge change in the CIO's thought process. Here is your chance of building apps and sharing data and business processes with the extended enterprise - your customers, suppliers, partners and prospective customers. You will thus help make the business more agile, more inclusive and more efficient and the architecture is more loosely coupled doing it themselves of freedom, at the same time, in a very safe manner less paranoid, and allowing people to take calculated risks that justify returns.

10.You can enjoy great balance between cost, convenience and security when you use the car, the bus and the cab when appropriate: Be pragmatic. The cloud is a powerful tool in your arsenal, and something you won't be able to ignore. Don't ignore it - embrace it wholeheartedly, and make sure the car fills the void where the bus cannot.

In conclusion, as bus services improve and cab costs go down (many people in New York or Mumbai have never owned cars), public transport becomes the most effective means of transport; while also knowing that not everyone lives and works in the city. The cloud is bringing about that transformation today. Do not get left behind, make sure your IT infrastructure adapts and is cloud ready.