Vishnu Bhat, SVP and global head, cloud and big data, Infosys, discusses the latest trends and challenges in the cloud industry.
What are your tips and solutions to enterprise CIOs to improve RoI from cloud deployments?
Cloud offers a platform to bring enterprise agility, optimize cost and fuel innovation. It is essential for the enterprise CIO to take a holistic view of cloud and its evolutions as it pertains to his or her enterprise. Enterprises also need to establish a best of breed cloud ecosystem that meets their needs in the near to long term and evolutionary in the long term. CIOs also need to plan and regulate the evolution of such an ecosystem else the cloud initiative could spiral out of control both from a management and governance perspective as well as cost. In order to ensure return on investments, the CIO should consider:
a) Clear Vision and planning
- By establishing a clear roadmap for the evolution of the cloud ecosystem
- By Understanding the resources and services you will likely establish in your cloud ecosystem
b) Identify service providers early on – Have a good mix of service offerings from all forms of cloud, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc., and identify the best for what you need.
c) Measure everything – Have a definitive measurement framework for metering, billing and reporting mechanism so that you know what is going on in your cloud environment.
d) Most cloud contracts could be commercially and legally complex – Cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Identify a cloud ecosystem integrator that can provide a unified outcome from a cloud environment. Ensure flexibility with strong governance – Identify a management tool that will go well above and across the individual service provider’s management tool. Infosys cloud ecosystem hub is one such example.
How is Cloud contributing to security issues?
Security has always been one of the main concerns and is considered as an obstacle by enterprises looking to adopt Cloud Services. Primary reasons include ownership of the infrastructure, data security, virtualization security and compliance adherence issues.
Enterprises are gradually beginning to understand various options available to secure Cloud infrastructure. For e.g. enterprises subjected to various data regulations are moving their non-critical business functions to the Public Cloud and hosting critical functions in their own private cloud.
Organizations should carefully evaluate security controls present in the Cloud Infrastructure as per Industry guidance. Security controls could include Physical security, Compliance, Network Security, Systems hardening and availability of the infrastructure.
Which are the main industry verticals that are deploying cloud?
Almost all verticals are now leveraging Cloud. Ideal workloads are typically low risk and common platforms with an increasing acceptance of mission critical applications.
Cloud adoption is varied across industry verticals. We see that Healthcare industries are more likely to use cloud services than retail and banking.
Industries adopt Cloud services primarily due factors such as cost savings, flexibility, time to market and scalability. Each industry treats these parameters differently, for e.g. manufacturing has a greater priority on cost savings than other industry verticals whereas flexibility is a significant factor for banking, finance and insurance organizations.
Industries also vary in adopting the type of cloud delivery model. For e.g. banking, finance and insurance prefer to build a private cloud due to more stringent security regulations.
What are the latest cloud trends?
Some of the foreseeable trends include:
– In the next three to five years, 50 – 70 percent of all enterprise workloads will move to cloud.
– Poor return on equity will drive more financial institutions worldwide to process the majority of their transactions in the cloud.
– Utilities with smart metering solutions will use cloud-based big data analytics to address asset-, commodity-, customer- or revenue-related needs.
– Financial entry barriers to technology are disappearing, with easier access and delivery models on cloud.
– Security and related services will increase significantly on cloud transactions.
What are the pricing related concerns on cloud deployments from CIOs?
At times CIOs discover that the popular belief that “cloud is a cheap alternative” is not true. Also, interoperability between clouds can be a very demanding experience if not managed carefully.
What are your new cloud offerings?
Cloud Ecosystem Integration: Infosys helps its customers transform their IT through the cloud and enables this through its professional services, industry partnerships, and pre-designed and integrated cloud solutions. We work with our clients to:
- Enable business agility, contestability and scalability
- Respond to business needs faster with simplified, agile IT
- Scale rapidly and help business capitalize on market opportunities faster with cloud services
- Manage complexity of fragmentation, change and operations
- Have a single point of accountability to create, transform and manage your hybrid environment
- Freedom from vendor liaison, and commercial and legal complexities
- Manage technology and organizational change for more effective cloud adoption
- Transition to ‘service-oriented’ IT organization
- Simplified ‘pay as you use’ cost structure for your IT
- Transition from ‘asset-focused’ to ‘service-oriented’ IT management
- Transparent governance and management of IT costs with single enterprise view
Infosys Cloud ecosystem Hub – A unified platform to build manage and govern, private, hybrid and public clouds, Big Data Edge – a unified big data customer experience platform.
Rajani Baburajan
