India is on the cusp of digital revolution, thanks to the government’s ambitious Digital India project and key sectors digitizing their service offerings. For example, led by Digital Lockers, the government is gradually in the process of streamlining all citizen services over the Internet. On the other hand, high growth sectors like ecommerce, banking & finance, education etc. are using digital platforms like mobile phones to reach more effectively to their consumers and stay competitive. Factors like these are providing the right platform for cloud computing to unleash its true potential and drive new wave of disruption.
In such dynamicbusiness environment, SMBs and large enterprises are left with no choice but to constantly drive business transformation. A cloud-first strategy can help CXOs embark on this journey. With industry analyst predicting a strong upward momentum in adoption, cloud services providers (CSPs) should focus on providinghighly available, easily scalable andextremely reliable solutions to take business faster to market.
Although CIOs have been penning cloud strategies for past few years, concerns like security, compliance, outages and data proliferation have marredthe complete rollout strategy. The genesis of this pain-points lies in the way the first cloud computing architecture was built.
Inception of Cloud:
This is a far cry from the days when cloud and grid computing gained popularity after an e-commerce giant made its cloud platform available to others. This horizontal scaling based cloud platform soon gained popularity among other sectors. As SME’s, banks, telco’s and other enterprises needed more in-memory compute power along with enterprise RDBMS, this platform was not best suitable for their requirement. This forced enterprises to change theirI T architecture to make it compatible with the e-commerce cloud. Therefore, CIOs with Legacy applications, Enterprise Databases, SAP/ ERP / SAP HANA reverted to on-premise or migrated to the traditional managed IaaS.
Although the hype surrounding cloud has increased in the last couple of years, many enterprises have failed to go beyond the proof of concept (PoC) stage.
Challenges
Not all implementations succeed. Delivering a best cloud strategy requires the following pre-requisites to be carefully considered to drive measurable business and stakeholder benefits.
Superficial expectations: Like traditional projects, cloud implementation should be a part of an enterprise wide strategy. CIOs must set a list of realistic expectations on addressing the right business problem. In many instances, cloud is generally adopted with short-term focus, but transforms into a long-term project, which obviously fails to meet high expectations of the stakeholders. Before on-boarding with a CSP, CIOs need to have detailed comparison between their Application and Database Architecture and the Architecture of the Cloud platform provided by the CSP.
