CIO's Checklist For Cloud Implementation

Kavindra Sharma, Head Consulting - L&T Infotech, shares with Biztech2.com, the key learnings from the cloud computing experiences of some large companies in USA. He further elaborates on the private cloud initiatives of L&T Infotech and the company’s experimentations in the public cloud space.

What are the key takeaways from the cloud implementation experiences of US companies?

We distilled around eleven key points from the cloud implementation experiences of some large companies in USA, across the high-tech semi conductor, pharma and engineering space.

The companies realised that a lot of cloud installations are already operational without their knowledge. CIOs particularly were stunned to know that many business departments have gone ahead and procured services from the cloud. The CIO’s office rose up to the challenge. However, it was about six to seven months too late to be able to smoothly catch up.

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It was realised that almost half a dozen of applications that they thought would be provisioned on premise were already on the cloud and the business had gone ahead, created and acquired those services at a very reasonable rate.

So, what were the concerns that came across?

The number one concern for CIOs that came across was gathering information about the amount of contracts that the various business departments had signed. It’s a very common sense concern. The SaaS solutions came from different providers and there was no uniformity in the contracts. So, the first and foremost agenda for CIOs was to issue guidelines to facilitate users and the departments for having contracts in place which will put them in good shape.

Another concern related to contracts was negotiating with the vendors - what are the right points to negotiate, and the importance of being always aware of the kind of business scale and volumes when deciding the terms of negotiations. The growth path of the business and the supposed idea of volumes that will be reached in the future should also be considered in deliberations with the vendors.

The second concern, and a very important one, was around security on the cloud. It is a CIO concern and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) cannot ensure ‘data security and privacy.’

In case of on-premise you might have typically deployed extra hardware and software, run by programmers, fixing the minor glitches once in a while. However, in a cloud arrangement you need to have clarity well ahead of time which will help to chart a roadmap for different departments and also align them towards one goal. This is another area to be considered.

Another key concern area is that in a lot of cases the CIO will be out of the loop. Once the application is provisioned, the business leaders are directly dealing with the CSPs. So, what kind of auditing mechanisms, checks and balances are in place have to be ascertained. The IT architecture and blueprint of the company is increasingly going out of the four walls of the CIO’s office. So, what’s the desirable change in the existing enterprise architecture is food for thought and there are no definitive answers for that. This should be constantly monitored by CIOs.

Can you elaborate on the cloud computing initiatives at L&T infotech?

L&T Group is a conglomerate of over 50 companies. We have a corporate IT for all these companies. Thus, there is a commonality when it comes to corporate IT in terms of ERP and wide-footprint software. We have a large datacentre and it is growing.

The company has already gone live with the concept of private cloud. By adopting virtualisation we have nearly provisioned a slice of CPU and computing resource almost on demand within our own company. However, the private cloud doesn’t give the advantage of scaling up and scaling down, which is possible in a public cloud. Within L&T Infotech steps have been taken to ensure that some of our own applications that are used by employees are hosted on the public cloud. I can’t divulge more information on that, but very soon many other applications are likely to go onto the cloud. They are single point and not very hugely integrated applications.

It remains a complex task to figure out what all can go on the cloud. But, we are seeing very good use cases and patterns where the company is using a combination of both, where some part of the application can be hooked on the cloud along with the data within our own premises. This can be done by using good Extract, Transfer, Load (ETL) capabilities on the cloud to pump data on the right applications. A lot of innovation is taking place. So, more than shifting our own application onto the cloud, we are seeing how we can leverage the cloud for doing something which is probably not possible, or will be possible with more difficulty by hiring or acquiring additional hardware and software capability.