Cloud(y) adoption

As ClOs continue to remain fascinated with cloud computing, vendors believed that their efforts will start to bear fruit in 2010. By Rajendra Chaudhary

The folks in the business of IT sure do know how to get people psyched up about a certain technology and make it seem like the greatest thing ever to hit enterprise computing. Not that there's anything wrong with talking about technology, but it's just that too much attention sometimes trivialises the key issues and makes it all rather redundant and everyone moves on to the 'next big thing' without ever wondering what became of that piece of technology and if all that hype was actually worth it. At present cloud computing is running the risk of attaining that dubious distinction.

In the past 18 months or so, no other technology has dominated the CIO mindset like cloud computing. Regardless of whether the emerging service delivery model applies to his IT set-up or not, every CIO has a thing or two to say about the topic. But the moment we asked the adoption question, the conversation in most cases ends abruptly with the CIO advocating the merits of a 'wait and watch' strategy.

Most Indian CIOs believe that the cloud is yet to prove its worth. For example, Girish Rao, Head-IT, Marico believed that although cloud model claims to offer a more flexible and financially viable alternative to on-premise computing, it still hasn't matured enough to convince him totally. "There are issues with regards to privacy, reliability, security which are yet to be fully resolved and I would not like to risk a move from my existing, in-house system to the cloud in these times of grave uncertainties," said Rao.

The majority of the CIOs have similar feelings. Their interest in the cloud remains mostly academic despite continuous vendor claims about the maturity of the model in terms of the underlying technology, service offerings and vendor support.

Santanu Ghose, Country Head, HP Infrastructure Software & Blades, HP India said that cloud security and application availability are two major issues with Indian CIOs which is why we haven't seen them move their IT into the cloud. He said, "Security and availability are critical pieces to the adoption of cloud. The cloud must support an environment that provides very high uptimes and without any outages.

Security is equally critical. Today as information is becoming critical to most organizations, any compromise on security or data loss can have an enormous business impact."

Vendors may over sell the cloud in 2010

Vendors aren't disheartened for they believe that it is just a matter of time before these CIO blues alleviate. In fact Jeremy Cooper, Vice President, Marketing (APAC), Salesforce.com thinks that Indian enterprises are actually on the cusp of significant cloud adoption in the days ahead.

"We are pleased with the reception cloud computing has been getting in the Indian market in the recent past," said Cooper. He continued that although Indian organizations are still lagging vis-à-vis their global counterparts in terms of adoption, the conversations that we've had with some of them in the past 3-4 months indicate a move towards higher adoption rates. There are a host of incentives for organizations to adopt the cloud such as faster deployment, better capacity planning and faster business provisioning, and flexibility to innovate. We do realize that adoption is taking a little bit of time (which is natural in the case of a new technology like this) but we are absolutely confident that we will see much better results in coming months.

While Vikas Arora, Group Director, Enterprise Services Division, Microsoft India doesn't seem to buy Cooper's optimism, and added that 2010 will be the year when the status quo will start to change for the better. He said, "I'm certain that in 2010, the current interest will start bearing fruit and we'll see a greater number of organizations trying it out in the form of PoCs and cloud prototypes. That may even result in some adoption. But I don't expect the numbers to be large. It may still be limited to some forward looking organizations, but 2010 will certainly set the wheels in the motion on the cloud adoption front."

According to Ghose ,in 2010, organizations will focus on the elements that will help them build private clouds. "As customers look to gain more understanding of this space, there will be strong interest from CIOs around many interrelated topics such as SaaS, convergence of infrastructure, IaaS and cloud security. This will form the critical elements around which the next private cloud environments will be built.

A recent Gartner report suggests that despite the economies of scale offered by public cloud providers, private cloud services will prevail for the foreseeable future. Though public cloud offerings continue to mature, through 2012, IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing.

Take baby steps and ask questions

From a user's perspective it is important that they go slow and ask the right set of questions when evaluating cloud vendors because it is these factors that often determine the vendor-customer relationship. There are two components that CIOs should be most careful about viz. application and infrastructure. If it is an application that is being bought off the cloud, the vendor must ensure that there's enough clarity on how data is managed, what is the underlying technology and more. Secondly customers should be relatively aware of service provider's (SPs) infrastructure.

According to Anand Ramakrishna, General Manager & Head-Cloud Computing Services, Wipro Infotech, transparency is the operative word in a vendor-customer relationship in the cloud that would develop into a mutually beneficial engagement. For this, the customer should define the various aspects of service that are absolutely critical for him. This should not be an extensive list but a short one, which the SP can focus on. They can then provide visibility to the customer on how these critical aspects would be handled. This will that ensure both parties are clear and in sync."

Kiran Datar, Managing Director, Cisco WebEx Technology Group, added that the enabling technology and the associated management challenges are just one part of the story. The success of cloud computing depends on a vendor's ability to managing process disruption and cultural change.

As per Datar, the inherent nature of cloud computing changes the way in which IT processes work inside a user organization. The cloud connects users more directly with the resources and makes them more self-sufficient. Unlike in a conventional set-up where users have clearly defined roles and have to follow certain processes here they can be extremely independent. For instance in cloud scenarios users can provision resources as per their job requirements without having to follow a formal requesting process. This is just one example of a process disruption. Something it can lead to increased agility and create issues for the CIOs who need to do a due diligence on how they will adjust to these new realities.

There are many other elements of technical as well as non-technical nature that both user organizations as well as a cloud vendors will need to address. The key for vendors is to remember that tackling this cultural disruption is just as important as the underlying technologies.

rajendra.c@expressindia.com