Rajesh Awasthi, director – Telecom and Cloud Service Provide, NetApp India, says its cloud strategy is to provide enterprise customers with seamless data management and control in a multi-cloud environment and service providers a platform that is secure, scalable and agile. He shared several tips on Cloud computing to enterprise CIOs.
Enterprise CIO demands
Today, CIOs are moving from being builders and operators of data centers to becoming brokers of application and information services. They are embracing new technologies and service models that deliver IT faster, cheaper, and smarter, while making their companies more responsive and competitive. Public cloud computing is at the forefront of this dramatic shift in IT. Offering predictable costs, faster provisioning, and infinite scale, more organizations are incorporating these cloud resources into their IT mix.
Many organizations are evaluating which cloud environment is appropriate for their business. In this reality, data must travel across multiple clouds seamlessly – from private to public to hybrid models – while, providing IT with the necessary control to centrally manage, govern, and transport data across discrete cloud resources. For better cost effectiveness and business flexibility- enterprises today are combining private and public cloud operations, often described as ‘hybrid cloud computing.’
Tips to enterprise CIOs on Cloud computing
Before setting out to choose a cloud computing solution it’s important to analyze your choices at different levels: Product- Will it help you better meet business goals, Provider: Is the provider a stable company with lots of other customers, and Transition: Do you understand what is involved and the possible interruptions to business during the transition.
Once these parameters are clear, it’s important to choose the right vendor who can provide efficient and easy to use service, and is also able to manage your workloads better.
Availability, security, performance, and customer service are prerequisites to choose the right cloud computing vendor.
Availability
The level of availability an organization need depends on the criticality of the service to the business. To move financial, CRM, or business intelligence systems to the cloud, it’s very important for the cloud service to be highly available. But if it’s a secondary application that is only utilized occasionally and not business critical, such high availability might not be required
Security
The biggest concern about cloud computing is security, which includes the physical security of the cloud environment — where is the data center that houses the vendor’s servers and what is their plan if there is a challenge. But it also refers to the security of the information that the organization’s business maintains. Given that there are a host of new laws requiring businesses to protect personal information of customers, assurances are required from the cloud provider to help protect that data
Performance
With cloud services having matured, and the adoption has progressed in the business community, the expectations for the service performance levels are critical since these services are now supporting a growing number of business-critical systems that make businesses run.
Customer Services
It’s important to measure a vendors merit by kind of technology they use or who their providers are, their disaster recovery plans
Opportunities
Shifting from normal infrastructure to cloud based infrastructure is not a cheap process. It is expensive however, it is a one-time investment. The benefits associated with the cloud deployment far outweigh any growing pains that they experience through the transition. The shift eventually delivers efficiencies and tremendous amount of cost savings.
The Cloud business is evolving to be more than just connecting IT resources and services. The next wave will address the specific needs of vertical industries such as healthcare, education, retail and government. This will result in increasing amounts of data being accumulated from outside the cloud, and the growing need to integrate services and processes will require a wider range of sensors and devices to be linked with an Operator’s Cloud.
Given the nature of the businesses, operators can play a significant role in the evolving cloud ecosystem, ranging from enabling cloud infrastructure to becoming full-service providers of both public and private clouds to aggregators of end-to-end cloud-based applications and services. The success formula in the cloud, however, requires a strong strategy and the ability to assure customers that data sovereignty is a certainty across a variety of customer requirements coupled with a willingness to partner with other cloud players to fill out the offerings that make up those plans. To end, as we see it – now is the time to act and capture the market.
External cloud services play an increasing role in the IT plans of most enterprises.
“To facilitate this evolution to the cloud, we’ve developed a global network of world-class service provider partners that deliver a comprehensive portfolio of cloud services built on NetApp technology,” said Awasthi.
The platform enables dynamic data portability across all clouds and will support extensive customer choice for application, technology, and cloud partner options. The formation of a universal data platform built on NetApp clustered Data ONTAP controls challenges of managing discrete cloud resources. NetApp technology will further integrate its software into existing and forthcoming private cloud, cloud provider, and hyperscale cloud service provider solutions to help organizations optimize IT delivery and harness the speed, flexibility and economics of the public cloud.
The success of Clustered Data ONTAP has been complemented by an ever-growing set of features and innovations through 2013 and the launch of our new FAS8000 series scale-out enterprise storage systems with the new FlexArray virtualization software to virtualize and manage multi-vendor data storage platforms, paving the way for software-defined storage.
Rajani Baburajan
[email protected]
