CLOUD INTEGRATED STORAGE (CIS) THAT PROVIDE CREATIVE PURCHASING OPPORTUNITIES FOR CUSTOMERS

Enterprises are transitioning mission-critical workloads to public cloud storage as the cloud storage industry consolidates in the backdrop. Several recommendations are outlined for CIOs to ensure business continuity and lower total cost of ownership.

IMPACTS:

•           The cloud storage industry is failing to provide large-scale implementations to meet the increasingly sophisticated demand from customers.

• Service providers are experimenting with pricing strategies for cloud integrated storage (CIS) that provide creative purchasing opportunities for customers.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Align around a single cloud storage vendor whenever practical to simplify vendor engagements and CIS infrastructure customization.

• Compare CIS pricing with on-premises storage pricing by comparing usage charges and infrastructure savings. For example, when replacing existing on-premises storage with CIS, savings will be realized by the elimination of backup and disaster recovery applications meant for data protection.

• Work with CIS infrastructure vendors that have a clear service and support methodology spanning the gateway vendor, intervening networks and cloud provider. Several loose partnership relationships exist today that leave uncertainty as to who is the lead vendor.

• Define data management policies and enforcement techniques to minimize data leakage into unregulated or public domains.

ANALYSIS:

Technologies such as cloud storage gateways, WAN optimization and caching algorithms, along with pricing policies and services offered by public cloud storage providers, are all vital elements for CIS. All of these technologies and approaches are rapidly evolving and thus require due diligence by organizations intent on moving into the cloud storage arena. In addition, assembling these elements requires IT organizations to engage with a vendor community that has an uneven or developing competence. Most IT organizations are accustomed to working with a storage community largely composed of established and experienced enterprise-scale vendors such as EMC, HP and IBM. This is not currently the case for public cloud storage. Instead, as organizations move to cloud storage, they must deal with little-known startup companies or large, but new, public cloud vendors. These vendors are refining their business models, customer engagement approaches and product offerings. Given this backdrop and to mitigate implementation risk, as IT organizations consider CIS, they must pay attention to trends in the cloud storage industry and their impact on the successful addition of CIS to new or existing data center environments.

Although there are many developing situations in the cloud storage market, this research examines four impacts that affect the vendor and technology selections in this vibrant industry.

Run proofs of concept. This advice may seem obvious, but because of the newness of the CIS industry, organizations should confirm acceptable system operation by at least simulating use cases in an actual CIS environment. Cloud and gateway vendors should fully support this activity and work together to prove acceptability. Customers should avoid vendors that cannot meet this requirement.

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SHAPING BUSINESSES AND GOVERNMENTS BY SOCIAL MEDIA, MOBILE, (BIG DATA) ANALYTICS AND CLOUD COMPUTING (TOGETHER CALLED SMAC).

The world is being swept away by certain forces in technology that are bringing people closer than ever before—and India is no exception. Together with telecom, certain emerging technologies are set to create a huge impact on how people connect with each other, how enterprises produce goods and serve customers, and most significantly, how governments engage with citizens for various purposes.

The industry has even coined a term for the new technologies coming together to shape how businesses and governments work: the 3rd Platform, which is driven by social media, mobile, (Big Data) analytics and cloud computing (together called SMAC). The 3rd Platform can indeed play a major role in delivering effective citizen services in tune with the ambitious agenda for e-governance under the Digital India initiative. With a planned outlay of R1 lakh crore and the goal of providing high-speed Internet access to about 2.5 lakh of the total 6.4 lakh villages in the country by 2019, Digital India envisions multiple government services to be made available on the Internet as well as through mobiles.

Under Digital India, various government ministries and departments are expected to come up with their own ICT projects for health services, education, judicial services and other areas that touch citizens on a day-to-day basis. It has been reported that, wherever feasible, the government will prefer to adopt public private partnerships (PPP) to speed up the rollout of programmes and services.

One way to enable such partnerships quickly and effectively is to build those public-private bridges through cloud computing, especially hybrid clouds. A hybrid cloud incorporates public clouds for access to a variety of applications and services, and private clouds for reliable performance and security for critical applications and sensitive data. The benefit of the hybrid cloud model is that the government can roll out applications more quickly and cost-effectively while at the same time, keep sensitive citizen and other confidential data secure and hosted on servers kept within its own data centres or premises.

Another 3rd Platform technology, social media, can help the government respond to the needs, complaints and suggestions of citizens on its schemes and programmes. Like mobile, social media is fast reaching a critical mass (around 100 million Indians are said to be on Facebook, for instance)—and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be used by the government optimally. Social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can be effective medium to deliver effective services during natural calamities. An alert mechanism can be built using Twitter, for example, to alert people of the neighbouring area about a disaster that has just struck a town or city. And within the disaster-hit city, the government can enable outreach for assistance through various social media sites in addition to, say, telephone helplines (which often get clogged in such times). The idea is to provide multiple means of interaction to address citizen issues and concerns.

On the mobile front, India has one of the fastest adoption rates in the world, be it in terms of smartphones or mobile apps.  At present, we have roughly over 900 million subscribers in India. The government must tap into the opportunity of providing services such as healthcare by hosting the applications on the cloud and making the same accessible through mobile apps. In a country where tens of thousands of people shift base among various cities for jobs or other reasons each month, the mobility of healthcare will be an added advantage to those citizens, who will be able to see their health data and access the services irrespective of which city they are in.

For India to be a truly connected society, the various modes of communicating with and serving citizens will need to be integrated in a cohesive manner. Such an approach will not only increase citizen-government interaction and make life easier for citizens, it will also avoid duplication of efforts and reduce expenditure on service delivery. Mobile banking, for example, is already bringing down the cost of serving customers significantly for banks.

There is a lot of potential on the Big Data front too. As the government collects ever-larger amounts of structured data related to various schemes and unstructured data through citizen engagement on different platforms, analysing and using that “Big Data” to derive insights for more effective planning and implementation will assume even greater significance.

The real key for the government will be to adopt a holistic approach to embracing the 3rd Platform in order to accelerate the realisation of a truly Digital India.

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Cloud Computing: IT's Driving Again

If it was once true that non-IT departments led a company's decision-making on adopting cloud, that predominance of shadow IT is no longer the case. Not only has the enterprise spend on cloud grown by 38% over the last year, IT's share of that spending now reaches 80% of the total. 

Not only is spending on the cloud growing, but it represents a rapidly increasing part of the overall IT budget. Organizations adopting cloud services expect to spend "54% of their IT budget on cloud in the next two years.

The debate over public versus private cloud "is now moot, without necessarily making it clear exactly what the outcome had been. Debating the merits of one versus the other "is insufficient to describe the complex decisions that companies are facing when selecting a delivery model," it said. In other words, companies don't expect all their needs to be met by one or other. If anything, they're mapping out a future that will include both. 

While infrastructure-as-a-service is viewed as an implicitly efficient way of running computing, only 14% of those contacted said that saving money was a primary motive for using cloud computing. Rather, 32% said the primary perceived benefit of the cloud was agility, not cost savings.

Enterprise spending on cloud has grown 38% in 2014, and IT now controls 80% of that budget, finds Verizon study.

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CLOUD COMPUTING -- WHERE DO YOU START?

Cloud computing is a disruptive phenomenon, with the potential to make IT organizations more responsive than ever. Cloud computing promises economic advantages, speed, agility, flexibility, infinite elasticity and innovation. How will you phase your organization into cloud computing?

Key Challenges to overcome in Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing forces you to wrestle with three key strategic, operational and people challenges:

• Governance:

Cloud computing enables speed, agility and innovation. You need to move from the drawing board to deployment. Is your organization ready to adapt? You need a clear vision and effective processes, skills and organizational structure to drive cloud innovation in your enterprise. 

• Cloud Computing Environments:

You need to choose a cloud computing environment that's right for your organization. Should you consider private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud solution? More and more organizations are moving services, storage, email, collaboration and applications to the cloud. You need to decide whether to choose to support private, public or a hybrid cloud mix. What's the right mix of infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and application (SaaS) environments for your organization.

• Security & Privacy:

If someone else is running your computers and software, you need strategies to stay secure. Your security policy depends on how many pieces you control – the more you own, the more you control. Are you ready to extend your enterprise security policy to the cloud? You need to break through the resistance and increase confidence that cloud is safe. You need to keep your data safe from prying eyes. You need your security team to buy in to your cloud initiatives. That's a tall order.

By 2015, at least 20% of all cloud services will be consumed via internal or external cloud service brokerages, rather than directly, up from less than 5% today. (source- Gartner)

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Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing have become fixtures in the enterprise.

Organizations are beginning to realize how profoundly a Cloud-Centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premises architectures and, with that, how different their management and monitoring needs will be.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing have become fixtures in the enterprise, and that trend is sure to continue for a long time to come. But the reality is that, to date, those gaining real benefit from the cloud at the enterprise level have been limited largely to isolated pockets.

These include software development and operations teams leveraging infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service (IaaS and PaaS) to slash costs and improve agility; sales teams licensing their own SaaS CRM systems; or lines of business "going rogue" and sidestepping IT by using apps like Dropbox to facilitate easier file sharing inside and outside the company.

There are still some fundamental obstacles to widespread adoption of cloud apps. The two biggest are security concerns and a lack of confidence in app or service performance and availability. Recently, a study was conducted asking IT teams about their current and planned use of cloud apps and services within their organizations. A few particular points stood out:

• Fewer than 20% of the survey respondents felt that their tools were doing a good job managing their cloud-based apps. The rest were at best ambivalent; more than 20% said their tools just aren't up to the task.

• More than 40% of the respondents had no tools at all to monitor and manage their cloud apps.

IT teams adopting cloud apps often find themselves in a challenging position. Their users and business management still look to them to "own" application availability and performance, even though they no longer own the application hosting environment.

The tools that they have used to manage their on-premises applications don't give them the same visibility and control in the cloud. Most of these tools have evolved alongside the on-premises applications, operating systems, server, and network infrastructure they have been used to managing.

As they adopt more cloud applications and services, organizations are beginning to realize how profoundly a cloud-centric IT architecture differs from their legacy on-premises architectures and, with that, how different their management and monitoring needs will be.

For businesses to fully embrace the cloud, they will need management tools that are designed from the ground up to support the remote, distributed nature of cloud apps and services.

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