Indian cos still struggling with public cloud transition. Here’s what I&O leaders should do

While public cloud has been gaining prominence among Indian enterprises, there are still some concerns that impact the adoption. According to Gartner, large enterprises in India are reluctant to embrace public cloud services as they are concerned about reliability, performance and data privacy. Infact, many organisations that invested in public cloud for cost savings have failed to accomplish this, and have abandoned their initiatives. And moreover, the research firm believes India-based cloud providers, compared to their global counterparts, do not have the scale and maturity, which is further limiting cloud adoption in India. [caption id=“attachment_1996843” align=“alignleft” width=“300”]  Thinkstock[/caption] Gartner’s research director Biswajeet Mahapatra says, “Indian I&O leaders should experiment with using public cloud services to understand the business agility benefits, despite some of the known impediments to adoption in India (including bad connectivity, latency, data security and privacy issues).” In his research, Mahapatra has come up with recommendations for Indian infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to take to make the transition to public cloud smoother and less painful.​ He recommends Indian enterprises to create a compelling business case by focusing less on cost savings and more on business impact. Indian I&O leaders should align drivers around business impact, such as agility, scalability, improved customer service and business expansion. “While I&O leaders are finding partners, it is a good strategy that the IT organisation should take the lead in putting peripheral workloads (such as mail, communications, travel, ticketing, expense reporting, advertising and other marketing workloads) on the public cloud, and gain a certain level of maturity and confidence, with no business disruption.” If agility and elasticity are the main drivers for cloud adoption then classify applications where demand is predictable and unpredictable (i.e., demand management), says Mahapatra. “Predictable areas may include communications, backup, storage, standard noncritical applications, etc. However, for areas or applications with unpredictable demand, public cloud provides an opportunity to provision infrastructure resources very quickly without high fixed costs or capital expenditure.” However, not many industries require ad hoc elastic and agile environments. Most of the extra requirements can be planned well in advance (via demand management). Many service providers advertise having elastic and agile platforms; in reality, however, only a few have actual elastic environments where the customer is charged based on real consumption. Most service providers in India are not like Amazon, with their own cloud platforms, although they do have public cloud offerings, wherein one can request a particular configuration and infrastructure stack. The same is provisioned based on the maximum capacity mentioned. Hence, if the maximum storage requirement is 3TB, the entire 3TB is provisioned and charged. One can use 200MB or 2.9TB, but would be charged for 3TB. “Although, technically, this is not a cloud offering, it is the reality in the Indian market. Hence, we advise I&O leaders to have a deeper understanding of the provisioning and pricing mechanism of the service provider,” he feels. Midsize companies with small IT teams should leverage this as an opportunity to evaluate cloud-enabled infrastructure outsourcing, and internal IT should focus only on business-critical projects. In addition to business case, Mahapatra recommends enterprises to start their cloud projects within the next six months by focusing on peripheral workload. “Almost every Indian enterprise is asking this question: “Where should we start?” Gartner advises clients to start small, with a vision in mind. This multiphase journey should begin with identifying the “low-hanging fruit” of applications that can be ported to the cloud.” The six-phase journey includes: test and development are often identified first in this category, although few organisations are concerned with the security of their intellectual property while development is ongoing; file, print, mail, and other productivity and communications applications should be considered first; the I&O department should engage with marketing to help it with capacity augmentation via cloud for ongoing activities; examine cloud suitability of HR, CRM and travel applications; consider putting ERP (especially in midsize companies) on the public cloud to drive agility; and access the process maturity level of your organisation before embarking on a cloud journey. Thirdly, Gartner asks organisations to develop a robust governance policy and sourcing strategy during the next six months, and create a well-defined exit plan before they sign the contract.