Cloud Eliminates Upfront Investment In IT Infrastructure

Cloud computing as I have understood is the mechanism by which one can share the IT resources on a large basis and use in a shared mode. So there can be different types of clouds. It can be a public or private cloud service offered by several players in the market.

Generally most of the corporates prefer their ERP or mission critical applications to be hosted on a private cloud whereas public cloud can be used for mailing, back-office applications. There are some companies who have started using these services.

Some cloud providers are also offering application level sharing on the public cloud like Salesforce.com or Oracle applications like Siebel on-demand. They are offered on a platform as a service (PaaS) model.

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Cloud computing will broadly benefit Organisations and also CIOs as it eliminates the upfront investment in IT infrastructure. It’s also because the payment model is pay-per-use.

I would recommend cloud computing to CIOs because there are benefits to be reaped over a period of time, primarily because of the factor of flexibility in provisioning. The manageability and security aspects are also improving by the day. We just have to decide on the Service Level (SLAs) requirements in terms of how much resources are to be allocated to which applications on the basis of the user count.

However a lot of hype is created by vendors about cloud computing. The prices are also not attractive enough because of less economies of scale achieved by the vendors.

At Bajaj Electricals we are using a private cloud. Our Datacentre is hosted at the Reliance site. We are not using public cloud services but we are currently evaluating Google’s cloud services for some of our applications.

We were looking for one of the applications for Disaster Recovery (DR) and were looking for cloud vendors who can offer us the DR site entirely on cloud but we couldn’t find out any cloud vendor who can provide cloud services on the SUN Solaris platform. Our primary site has a lot of ERP, CRM and Supply chain applications running on SUN solaris platform so we were looking for a cloud facility available in a pay-per-use model for our DR site.

There are vendors in the market that are ready to make investments on different platforms. I am optimistic about this even though until now all the vendors that I have come across offer services on a windows platform.

Finally I am looking forward to the vendors to approach us to introduce their offerings on hosting the DR site on the cloud as we don’t plan to invest in any hardware for the DR site.