CIO Challenges While Seeking To Embrace Cloud

The basic challenge in CIOs being hesitant to move on to the cloud is they are unable to understand their business context in terms of how it would benefit the organisation. A part of the problem is the inability on the part of the vendors to articulate the value proposition and other part of the problem is the lack of clarity in the commercial/cost models.

Another issue is the absence of an ‘Arbitrator’ in case of an eventuality or disagreement between the Vendor and user. For example if a company wants to put its email system onto a public cloud then– primarily the concern is where is my data going to reside. The Cloud Service Provider (CSP) should be able to safeguard it and in case of a situation or an incidence of dispute which includes a breach – How that data would be retrieved back is a grey area. There has to be some sort of contractual agreement that makes mandatory for the CSP to recover the user data. Currently there is no regulation that brings this requirement into the legal framework – Very much like how the banks are regulated by the RBI in India. This results in a vague, open field relationship between the Client and the CSP where existing good relationships build over years of working together might help but in fresh and maiden kind of cloud partnerships, in case there are differences – the need of an arbitrator is being felt in the Industry.

Strategic Intent Is A Barrier And Not Technology

At a recently held conference I was at, all the major cloud vendors were the participants. It was a product agnostic event and the discussion was more around issues and challenges that come in the way of adoption of cloud computing. There was a session on cloud where a question was asked from the crowd about the problem of putting UID data on Amazon cloud, where the data would reside outside India. This is given the condition the data can be masked and encrypted. A Government executive was also one of the participants and he replied back saying that the barrier is not technology but strategic intent. The data is strategic to India. It’s about the biometric information, retina scan data and other important information of Indian citizens. Considering the fact that this data would reside in Singapore, which is the nearest location for Amazon, what if there is a war situation between India and Singapore. All the communications will be snapped. In such a scenario, the confidential data is out of the control of the Indian Government.

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These are the kind of concerns that the organisations are not able to put in context. Companies would also feel that Amazon can set up a datacentre in India. Still they will not be able to control the data at will.

Companies Looking For Guaranteed SLAs

Performance is another issue in cloud computing. Let me put this from a telecom industry context, where the IT systems are highly complex and the data sets are very different. The telcos are not moving to cloud simply because of a complete denial to guaranteed SLAs on performance. No Public CSP is ready to sign performance based SLAs with the telecom companies although they are willing to pay for it – so cost here is not an issue, which is quite often the case.

Lastly it’s been said that the non-critical applications should be moved to the cloud. However even for those apps, there are various integration points to be taken into account. For example at Tech Mahindra, there are about 40 thousand employees. If we decide to move our non-critical applications on cloud, our management costs would go up. The users will have to log in through a two layer phase for accessing the intranet, one residing inside the intranet and the other outside the intranet. We cannot have separate log in credentials for inside and outside the intranet.

So I believe, which is well concurred by analysts and various reports that Hybrid Clouds will be the first wave of cloud adoption. As a facilitator, brokering companies who will only specialise in connecting the public and private cloud will soon start mushrooming. There are already many such companies in USA. Very soon similar ones will begin operations in India. These companies will provide IAM functions on the cloud.

The author is Global Head - Internal Infrastructure Management and Cloud Computing Competency at Tech Mahindra.