A networking major, Cisco Systems offers collaboration services and borderless networks along with data center and virtualization or cloud computing.
Rajesh Rege, sr. vice president of Data Center, India & SAARC at Cisco speaks about the emerging challenges of cloud computing among Indian telecos alongside demand across verticals:
What are the obstacles to adoption of Cloud computing among telecos?
While customers agree about the benefits of cloud computing, they have concerns about cost and flexibility, in particular about security, compatibility with existing applications, lack of a migration path from existing applications to clouds, freedom of choice, lack of SLAs for policy-based management, and interoperability.
Though the situation is now changing rapidly, how organizations deploy and manage cloud computing makes the difference. Cisco is facilitating the first step for the enterprise towards a multi-tenant cloud computing solution, with a unique approach towards enterprise cloud computing: private clouds.
How is the demand picking up in India?
In India, the demand for cloud computing is picking up – the foundation for cloud growth in APAC depends on the extent to which data centers are being built.
Data center activity in India is moving at a fast pace- although activity is centered on the lower end of the data centre spectrum.
Government support, a favorable regulatory environment and an effective broadband/IT infrastructure are critical factors for cloud development and weakness in any of these aspects is likely to curtail development.
Has Cloud computing become a tool for cost savings among telecos? How Cloud users are saving? What are their main tools?
Cloud computing fundamentally changes the way that IT services is delivered to organizations. Instead of both owning and managing IT services for themselves, or using an outsourcing approach built around dedicated hardware, software, and support services, organizations can use cloud computing to meet their IT requirements using a flexible, on-demand, and rapidly scalable model that requires neither ownership on their part, nor provision of dedicated resources.
Cloud computing brings some benefits that include reduced cost, flexibility, improved automation, sustainability and core competency focus.
With the adoption of cloud computing enables an organization to reduce its CapEx. For most government agencies and enterprises, OpEx constitutes the majority of spending; therefore, by utilizing a cloud provider or adopting cloud paradigms internally, organizations can save operational and maintenance budgets.
Organizations can attain flexibility benefits via rapid provisioning of new capacity and rapid relocation or migration of workloads. In public sector settings, cloud computing provides agility in terms of procurement and acquisition process and timelines.
Government agencies can reap the benefits of cloud computing in order to focus on its core mission and core objectives and leverage IT resources as a means to provide services to citizens.
Lastly, enterprises can achieve sustainability through leveraging economies of scale and the capacity to manage assets more efficiently, cloud computing consumes far less energy and other resources than a traditional IT data center.
Consumers are concerned about theft and privacy issues, which could diminish their willingness to adopt new services. Is there a better solution? Because cloud computing is a form of outsourcing, it could pose threats to existing structure — and people’s jobs. Many telecos are faced with internal resistance to adoption. What are the solutions?
As discussed security concern is one of the inhibitors to deploying the cloud, but the situation is now changing rapidly, how organizations deploy and manage cloud computing makes the difference.
Security controls in cloud computing are, for the most part, no different than security controls in any IT environment. However, because of the cloud service models employed, the operational models, and the technologies used to enable cloud services, cloud computing may present different risks to an organization than traditional IT solution.
One source of worry for IT is the very thing that makes cloud computing so cost-effective – other tenants who are sharing the multitenant cloud. Many see multitenant clouds and their tenants as potential entry points for viruses and malware. Other cloud security concerns include: data loss, and leakage; enabling business continuity and disaster recovery in the cloud; and managing service-level agreements (SLAs) and the security environment.
Cloud homogeneity can make security auditing simpler and help organizations demonstrate that legal and regulatory compliance has been met. Clouds also enable automated security management, which help ensure consistent and auditable application of security policies and controls. Clouds also can provide cost-effective redundancy/disaster recovery services through virtualized cloud infrastructures. Strategic security assessments of existing infrastructure, policies, controls, and governance are necessary to meet the demands of doing business in the cloud. This approach can result in tangible business benefits, such as fewer business disruptions and data privacy and protection.
Are cloud services meeting local, regional and national regulations? What is your opinion on this?
Fragmented regulatory framework is affecting the evolution of cloud computing in Asia. In some countries, including some tiny island nations require that citizens’ personal information remain inside their national borders. Such data sovereignty laws are preventing some of the benefits of economies of scale – Cloud storage providers can’t maximize efficiency by providing regional cloud centres; SAAS providers can’t run applications remotely if they need to download data in order to analyze or change it; and it could even hamper recovery in emergencies, because back-up data centres might be affected by the same weather or terrorism issues that shut down the main site.
Asian market for cloud is huge; and to realize its full potential, Cisco along with few other cloud players have formed Asia Cloud Computing Association and are working with regulators to loosen up some of their regulations in order to allow clouds to proliferate and local companies to benefit from cloud
What are Cisco’s Cloud offerings?
Cisco’s cloud strategy is to enable our customers to offer cloud services and applications by providing them with solutions for private, public and hybrid clouds that uniquely combine the unified data center and the cloud intelligent network.
Under our strategy, we deliver products, solutions & services to organizations so they can build their own secure Clouds capable of supporting enterprise-class SLAs.
Cisco also enables Service Providers to deliver secure Cloud solutions & services to their customers. The company is investing to advance the market for Cloud by driving technology innovation, open standards and ecosystem development.
Cisco also provides solutions for our customers to deliver cloud services like Collaboration Cloud, Video Delivery, Infrastructure as a service, VXI, security-as-a-service and others.
Danish Khan
[email protected]
