On 22nd
February 2013, I had an opportunity to be a part of an event on Cloud Computing in Pune, India. The event was unique due to the presence of
different thought leaders which includes cloud consultants, CIOs, academicians, service
providers, IT leaders capable of providing 360 degree view on various aspects cloud. This
was pure thought provoking discussion which lasted for nearly two hours.
Discussion
started with the debate over the barriers. As per Prof Sunil, Director, SITM “resistance to change” is the primary
barrier, which is coupled with “awareness” and lack of “education”. Mr Sharat Airani, Chief IT of Forbes Marshal felt
that sometimes “Cloud Scares”. Cloud is widely discussed and debated but lack
of knowledge of what complexity it will introduce allows fear to take over.
This is also followed by concerns for security as the mindset is not towards
taking risk. Security concerns create an unknown discomfort. One more barrier which members felt is inability to articulate the true benefits of cloud to the end
customer. As per Mr Sridhar S, AVP-IT, Vodafone India, “what is there for me” should be clearly articulated to end
customers to get buy-in.
Discussion
progressed further on challenges of implementation. As per the learned
participants the solution has to talk the language of business and walk with
them. The thought processes in cloud is mostly driven by supplier side but in
general everyone felt the need for driving the discussion from demand side. As
per Mr Sridhar the approach of implementation should be phased rather big bang
and should follow change management approach. Mr Sridhar said “Another way is to have smaller applications
or peripheral processes on the cloud first, to open people up to the idea of
cloud.”
The group debated
on competency and understood that there is a larger need to educate industry
and students on cloud. As per Prof Patil, the curriculum needs to be revisited
for cloud and there is a need for tighter integration of students, academicians
and industry to generate awareness. An idea of “Cloud Management Forum” from
Prof Patil with industry and academic participation was also floated. George
Thomas, GM - Delivery, Bilcare Research, observed that every time technology changes, there is a
change in the requirement of workforce and skills etc. needed and as the young
generation learns faster on an average, there is a general trend where the next
generation replaces the earlier.
On financial
considerations the group felt that cloud is an excellent opportunity for
converting capex into opex and different financial models for exploiting cloud
can be leveraged by customers depending on the usage. Cost is not the only
consideration we should adopt to cloud but as a major contributor which makes
the business lucrative. As per Mr Dilip Ittyera, CEO, Aikon Labs, “It actually gets much tougher to implement
cloud in an enterprise. Showing the company clear-cut ways to “save the dollar”
is the way to make the cloud sell better.” As per Mr George, “Although costs of a business have grown over the years, companies are
now expecting a larger return on their investment, in comparison.” Further to this, Mr Sridhar said “Cloud has to show how my end
customers will benefit. That will drive CIOs to map business objectives with IT
initiatives”.
On cloud’s impact
on outsourcing, the group had interesting views. A key aspect that was
expressed was control but this challenge has been there at the time of
outsourcing. Industry is going through the same cycle of discussion on control
over IT environment and data. Along with various issues like cultural
differences communication, synchronization issues, the added fact of reduced
control as perceived by the company might act as a deterrent. As per Mr Sharat,
“As far as mistrust regarding the fact
that the owner cannot see where his data is stored, outsourcing is being
undertaken widely and the data is sent to and fro multiple times and stored at
various locations. So the issue of security of
the data should not be that crucial”. As per Mr Sharat, if sensitive
payroll data can reside in third party premise then the concern over data
security and reluctance over cloud needs to be revisited. Mr Sridhar further added “With organizations outsourcing even their
core processes, companies are not as worried about tangibility of their data
storage.”
The overall theme centered on the awareness and unknown fear of security which came up
several time during the discussion, which cloud providers need to overcome. The need for collaboration with Government was felt at a later date to ease out cloud adoption
to make it successful in the year 2013. A key aspect that was expressed was
control over the data. The
group felt that eventually cloud adoption will happen and as per Mr George, that new technologies take their time to be accepted and although cloud
brought about a sense of insecurity within the internal IT teams of companies,
the adoption of cloud would eventually happen. The discussion ended with
positive note on cloud from various speakers along with caution to various
challenges. Mr Dilip expressed his confidence on cloud as he successfully launched his product
on the cloud and his experience has been so far good in terms of smooth and
convenient management.
The key takeaway
was that to create more awareness and work on standardization of cloud to make
it successful through deeper industry engagement. In the next few months,
CIOSpecialist and Blazeclan Technologies will take endeavors for cloud adoption
which includes more thought provoking session and finding opportunities for adoption and formation of forums to work
with the industry for better management of cloud using the available ecosystem.
The event was supported by Blazeclan Technologies and managed through CIOSpecialist ecosystem and platform.