Author: Navin Malhotra

Cloud Computing – The “in” word• Cloud is one construct everyone want to perceive within their

organizations, which is treated as the biggest revolution in the IT world, even larger that the “internet”.

• Gartner, Forrester and like wise agencies have predicted big on cloud.

• Initially there were issues / concerns from CIOs, clients, regulators but those are slowly phasing out with larger and more experienced vendors who provide end to end cloud solutions with robust and state of the art infrastructure assuring better and compliant services to the industry.

• There are cloud service providers who are providing stringent SLAs, are certified in ISO, FISMA, HIPPA, SSAE 16, PCI-DSS and are proving the value of moving to cloud.

Author: Navin Malhotra

Challenges moving to Cloud• There are challenges while moving to cloud and the CIOs and

infrastructure groups in an organization are finding ways to find the answer to those challenges.

• We can segregate those challenges in two broad categories: – First one are the challenges from within the organization like, what to move to cloud,

technical considerations etc;– Other one is from our customers, like what will happen to my critical data if you move to

cloud, who will own the responsibility. Those customers could also be our customers end customers as well.

• There are many myths circling about the cloud as well, which are on similar lines when the internet started taking shape a few decades back.

Author: Navin Malhotra

How to plan moving to Cloud (public / private) or on-premise

• We should remember that everything cannot be moved to cloud, so there will remain something on-premise depending upon the technology challenge of moving to cloud, regulatory requirement or ROI assessments.

• Through a detailed assessment involving detailed review of current applications, analyzing the application landscape across multiple dimensions, evaluating cloud readiness of each application in scope, a very calibrated approach can be set out for enterprises to adopt a cloud model.

• Many organizations are coming up with scores called as “Cloud Index” which helps in assessing what services / applications / infrastructure is ready to be moved now or at later time.

Author: Navin Malhotra

How to plan moving to Cloud (public / private) or on-premise

• If we have an application which is changed frequently, highly regulated applications like for FDA clients, applications which were developed on legacy systems which are not supported in cloud are the ones which should better be kept on-premise.

• We can define the stages as below while moving to cloud:– Scoping – It will primarily include defining the scope for moving infrastructure,

applications, devices etc which needs to cloud (public, private) or in-premise, depending upon the assessments as listed out earlier.

– Planning & Discovery – Planning and discovery is the process of identifying business and technological drivers that motivate a migration to cloud, as well as collecting data about current systems and their performance. We must list down the detailed requirements / configurations for the infrastructure, applications, devices etc to assure that the migration is successful.

– Estimation – It deals with the estimation of both cost and time. This will be required to be used along the scoping, planning and discovery phases, so as to reach the ROI measurements in realistic way.