Three Approaches To A Cloud Journey

<div>To date, IT has brought significant productivity benefits to organisations by automating key business processes and driving efficiencies Traditionally, a lot of what IT departments did was focused on managing systems, including PCs, servers, storage, and networks.<br /><br />Today, the role of IT is starting to look very different. Organisations are looking for the next level of productivity and business agility by improving collaboration and knowledge sharing. They are looking to better connect their employees, teams, business partners and customers to each other. This is changing the nature of data into highly distributed, largely unstructured information. The infrastructure is moving virtual within the company or turning into an external cloud. Instead of focusing of physical systems management, the role of IT is transforming into more information-centric tasks with governance, policies, risks, and controls. The question here is how does cloud fit in?<br /><br />There is a lot of hype around cloud computing, and for a good reason.&nbsp; The promise of cloud computing, or the promise of delivering highly agile IT as a service, is astounding. As IT is delivered as a service, organisations can improve their agility and can respond better to market opportunities and threats.<br /><br />While there are many reasons for the emergence of cloud, such as broad network access and an ever-improving network infrastructure, proliferation of new endpoints, changing consumer and business expectations, one of the most important enabling technologies for cloud is virtualisation. The emergence of storage and computing virtualisation has become integral to the promise of cloud. While the latest Symantec 2011 State of Cloud Survey found that in India, interest in cloud exsts, here&rsquo;s a look at the challenges that customers are facing, which are making them cautious about adoption:<br /><br /><strong>Misaligned expectations</strong>: Cloud is fuzzy and poorly defined. Cloud projects are even less well defined. Many gaps exist across organisations, within IT teams and in the market, leading to unrealistic expectations and hence the &ldquo;failure&rdquo; of cloud projects.<br /><strong><br />Unprepared IT Organisations</strong>:&nbsp; For success in building your own cloud, you must, for example, not only be highly virtualized, you also must be highly automated with the ability to do charge backs.&nbsp; Many IT organizations have a siloed approach to cloud, with cloud initiatives being separate from regular IT operations.&nbsp; While cloud is different in many ways, in an ideal world the management of cloud should be included within existing policies, tools.<br /><br /><strong>Compliance:</strong> For many companies that are publicly traded or regulated, compliance plays a major role in their approach to cloud.&nbsp; The ability to complete prove compliance to regulations with compelling audit and reporting often holds back organisations from moving to the cloud.<br /><br /><strong>Data Access Control:</strong> Finally, &lsquo;security&rsquo; is often the top cloud concern cited by IT.&nbsp; When you dig deeper, it is usually concerns about who will have access to my data, and what assurances can be implemented to make sure my information is kept out of the hands of the wrong people. <br /><br />The reality that we see is that most companies today use many clouds, depending on what is right for them. To gain confidence in your cloud, one must understand the patterns of success for cloud and implement strategies that support the pattern befitting each company and your situation.<br /><br />Organisations can choose from one of three options, depending on their business and requirements: they can consume cloud services, build their own clouds or extend their existing environments into private clouds.<br /><br />When consuming a cloud service, organisations are looking to transform complexity to simplicity.&nbsp; Organisations should look for ease of use and ease of getting started. A typical cloud service will also have a low starting point, and be capable of scaling on-demand as your requirements change.&nbsp; Another important and often overlooked requirement is a company&rsquo;s Service Level Agreements and the type and quality of customer support. As organisations outsource much of the IT function, they will want both certainty of performance and the ability to quickly get help when they need it. In India, the highest interest for cloud is in the consumption of cloud services, particularly around email continuity, antispam and backup, across organisations of all sizes.<br /><br />When organisations are embarking on a cloud project that &lsquo;extends&rsquo; their IT to leverage third-party clouds, they want solutions that work seamlessly with their existing policies and investments.&nbsp; Cloud should not be a silo but rather be treated as a continuum that also includes physical and virtual environments.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />When organisations build a cloud service, they are looking to transform their existing assets into a highly agile infrastructure. We live in a heterogenous world, and hence organisations will need support for a large swath of applications, hardware and operating systems.&nbsp; The reality of IT today is a variety of platforms and systems such as Windows, Solaris, Linux and your solutions should embrace that reality. Furthermore, solutions should be independent of platform lock-in; don&rsquo;t paint yourself into a corner by picking a solution that represents itself as a &lsquo;cloud-in-a-box&rsquo;.&nbsp; With virtualisation being a key enabler of cloud, organisations will want solutions that embrace VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM and the like. In India, we typically find ISPs, telcos and IT/IteS players interested in building their own cloud.<br /><br />Regardless of which of these three approaches an organization chooses for its cloud initiative, one must remember that the potential benefits can only be reaped with security, uptime and scalability. Organisations must evaluate vendors on their ability to provide desired levels of service along with these three attributes, and those who can support them throughout their cloud journey.<br /><br />(<em>Anand Naik is Managing Director, Sales, India and SAARC of Symantec)</em></div>