Cloud computing’s advantages and developments in the technology landscape

Simply described, cloud computing is the transmission of computing services over the Internet (“the cloud”) in order to provide speedier innovation, more flexible resources, and economies of scale. You usually only pay for the cloud services you use, which helps you cut costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business grows. Mr. Narinder Kumar, COO, TO THE NEW in a discussion with CXOToday shares his detailed insights on the same.

Q-1 Tell us about your company’s contribution to the industry’s facing challenges in the Big Data Analytics/Cloud Computing business.

Ans: Cloud computing and data analytics offer huge potential to organizations, but businesses face a few roadblocks to adopting and implementing these new-age technologies. These challenges usually are resistance from the management and stakeholders, budget constraints, finding the right expertise to carry out the projects, and compliance & security.

To overcome these challenges, we focus on starting our advocacy of cloud culture from the top and let it trickle down from there. We keep all stakeholders engaged in the entire process by jointly mapping the business goals with cloud and data adoption. This process increases the adoption rate and encourages senior-level folks to become brand ambassadors of these technologies in their businesses. We then take this organization-wide by holding meetings to spread awareness of how data and cloud are helping the organization to scale, save costs, become agile and improve.

Cloud computing involves initial investment, but it saves money in the long run. We frame the entire budget and forecast the savings. We also have compliance audits conducted by the data governance teams, resulting in a tighter security protocol for our cloud solutions.

Q-2 What have you planned for the rest of the year in terms of technology and Business?

Ans: We have an entire suite of offerings to implement Public Cloud. The reason why we prefer the public cloud is that it has an edge over the private cloud in terms of reliability, cost, and elasticity while offering a secure environment. There are several benefits of the public cloud: easy data management, disaster recovery functionality, high scalability, monitoring & automation tools, and customizable architecture. We leverage these to increase our client’s performance and ensure a smooth migration to the public cloud. A user-friendly dashboard of a public cloud makes it easier to set it up and manage, and it takes just a few minutes to initiate and start your cloud journey.

Also, we are focussing on creating an automation accelerator with pre-built packages of data models, frameworks, and other assets, to efficiently & securely onboard new applications on the cloud. This accelerator will provide an agile process for consistent onboarding of applications, with reduced efforts, faster turnaround time, and a lower cost.

Q-3 Cloud computing has drastically transformed the technological landscape for businesses. While the switch to cloud computing may appear overwhelming at first, the numerous verifiable benefits should encourage it. What’s your comment on this?

Ans: Businesses are moving from a fixed set of services to an iterative, scalable set of applications to constantly adapt to meet the needs of businesses and customers. To meet these needs, Cloud computing has evolved software architectures and business computing. I agree that switching to cloud computing might seem overwhelming at first, but if we proceed one step at a time – identifying priorities, defining goals, and looking at the big picture, we can effectively navigate the logistics of switching to cloud computing.

Cloud computing gives an unmatched platform for digital transformation. It takes care of all the IT infrastructure, giving businesses the time to focus on their core offerings. With cloud computing in place, the organizations don’t have to worry about setting up the servers, RAM, firewalls, admin components, and security tools. In fact, all these components are automatically installed, configured, and updated, thus reducing manual efforts. Modern tools and best practices of cloud computing ensure that the applications integrate seamlessly with their technologies, thus enabling a faster GTM.

Furthermore, cloud computing has the feature to achieve auto-healing that would help serve the client in no time after an application is compromised. With autoscaling in the picture, the organizations have to pay only when the resource they need. In a nutshell, cloud computing allows for modernization and innovation without the organizations making hefty investments in expensive equipment and hardware. All this,  plus saving time and money, makes it an ideal case for businesses to opt for cloud computing.

Q-4 In a world where cloud outages are a reality, how do you architect for resiliency?

Ans:  No digital system is error-proof, and even the most carefully thought-out plans can go awry due to unforeseen events.

Here are a few ways we have adapted to minimize the impact of cloud outages:

• Adopt a Multi-Cloud environment: A multi-cloud approach will reduce risk and provide greater flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.
• Make security a top priority: Cloud services can also open avenues for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities and cause cloud outages, and thus we have the right security tools and processes to defend against threats.
• Have a disaster recovery strategy for Cloud outage: We have a plan for how we’d respond to an outage. This helps us recover more rapidly and minimize the impact on business operations.
• Mock test the above strategy: Testing your disaster recovery plan is a vital step that most organizations miss. The cloud presents a perfect environment to implement a disaster recovery test empowering you to evaluate your plan.

Q-5 How do you see the industry growing in upcoming years?

Ans: With digital transformation becoming the focus of every organization’s growth strategy, Cloud computing has become a fundamental requirement for most organizations.

The lockdown and the Covid-19 pandemic made many organizations chart the course for their journeys toward cloud computing. Cloud computing witnessed huge growth as organizations of all sizes are moving ahead in their digital transformation journey. The emerging technologies help achieve scalability and flexibility to store the big data, reduce infrastructure complexities, and enhance collaboration. Thus the time & energy spent on foundational infrastructure requirements and the cost of deploying applications & infrastructure will be significantly reduced.

With the help of the IoT and cloud computing, we can conveniently store the increasing volumes of critical data. The computing capability has empowered organizations to analyze the data closer to the source, decrease data processing time, and turn this data into actionable insights. As they progress in their digital journeys, organizations will focus more on their core products and services rather than building a data centre or managing IT infrastructure. This will result in an overall increase in the productivity of organizations across industries.

One of the most critical areas of discussion around cloud computing is security. Service providers need to ensure that the data is stored securely, thus keeping the cyber attacks at bay. We feel that vendors offering public cloud services would be differentiated w.r.t to their add-on services in terms of security offering to the public cloud environment, disaster recovery plan and their expertise and experience with the public cloud vendors.