Cloud Computing: The New Order of IT

Give us an overview of what's happening in the Cloud computing space

There's a tremendous shift happening in India as well as the rest of the world, where the old style of using IT services is being replaced by a newer level of thinking, where resources are being allocated using the utility pricing model. They're no longer constrained in their thinking about resources,

can take their products in any direction,and have tremendously compressed their time to market. If they have an idea, then cloud computing allows them to quickly execute it.

What should be the strategy for an organization to migrate its applications to the Cloud?

For one, it has to be a migratable application. Two, it all depends upon customers. So DR for instance, is something that customers start using early as a learning point. In the short term, they do all the testing and migration for simpler things. In the longer term strategy, any new IT that CIOs buy needs to be Cloud ready.

Migrating existing IT to the Cloud is a different story, as it involves taking a deep dive, looking into data dependencies, compliance regulations, etc. A plan is built to identify the low hanging fruit, the one that can be moved quickly. Here again, the decision may not just be the cost. For instance, if you're running an application inhouse, and its license is about to expire in a few months, then would you buy the software again using

the old license model, or would you rather leverage the Cloud? In the old world, if you purchased a license, you'd be stuck with it for 5-10 years. Moreover, the pricing is so negotiable that everybody would buy it at different prices, leading to frustration (because the other guy bought it at a lower price than you!). In the new IT world of Cloud computing, licensing is much more flexible and transparent. For instance, there's a company called Lawson, which offers ERP, SCM, and talent management services on the Cloud as a subscription model (per user, per seat, etc). The company offers an instance of their ERP free for three months. You can migrate all your data to it, customize it as per your requirement, and if you're not satisfied at the end of it, you can pull out your data and walk away. There is no Lockin!

So we feel that it's a myth that the Cloud locks you in. In Amazon for instance, it's exactly the opposite. We'll give you any OS-OpenSolaris, Linux, Oracle Linux, RedHat, Ubuntu, Windows Server, etc. We try to make our services as simple as possible -simple storage or simple database, simple queue service, etc. Because if we make it simple, it also makes it simple for customers to walk away if we don't meet their requirement.

Your take on Cloud security and the issues that surround it?

Whenever I sit down with a CIO, I drill down into the actual applications and try to understand what's being secured. I never saw a case where we were not able to satisfy the security requirements. We've had a very long history in securing apps on the Internet. Plus, in our Cloud, we have developed a whole set of access control tools that are very rich to use. That said, security in the Cloud is a shared responsibility. We do our best to build super secure services, with very competent operational standards around it. But if you start exposing your passwords of the apps that run on our Cloud,

then it's all for nothing. There's a shared responsibility model, where customers also need to meet all regulatory requirements. It's not just the Cloud piece that needs to be compliant, but the application piece as well.

In Cloud, we just have to ensure that the access control mechanisms we provide work. Rest has to be the process of the customer. From Amazon's point of view, security is our priority number one, and that will never change. It's also our number one investment area. We believe that we can do enormous innovation in the security area -developing tools that are not available in the enterprise space.

We've created much more finer grained access control tools, wherein you can say this particular object can only be accessed by developers in our Bangalore office on Friday afternoon between 3-4 PM. They can only start this virtual machine, but can't stop it. These tools are just not available in the enterprise space. I think given that we're going into more policy driven security mechanisms in the enterprise, we give them very rich tools to map those policy controls so that you can fully automate security.

We know from experience, as long as humans are there, they're the weakest link not only in security, but also in scathing. For instance, if elasticity is important, it really works well if you can automate it, instead of a human sitting there to do it. We create business rules to control it. And in that sense, the new world is very different from the old world. There's more automation in the new world than the older one.

What are some of the unique challenges being faced by Indian CIOs, and are they any different from their global counterparts?

For our customers, making sure that web pages and web services get delivered in a lower latency fashion is a challenge. There's a travel agency, for which very rich imaging is important -that's how they sell their hotel in Singapore. For them latency and bandwidth to Indian customers is important.

In India, broadband has not fully penetrated in a lot of areas. So customers in India are putting more emphasis in providing mobile access to their services than relying on broadband. For instance, Hungama, 8k, etc make sure their customers can access services from mobile. India is very different from other countries this way.

There's also a wide variety of mobile devices out there, which keep changing every year. Customers hope to develop mobile services in a device independent manner. The core of the app/server/data mgmt should sit in the Cloud and be independent of the different devices. So customers should be able to access data from a mobile, laptop, home PCs, or anything else.

The challenge that Indian companies are facing is how to accelerate mobile development. There's a whole range of services that run in the Amazon Cloud that can help with that -geolocation services, easy media conversion services, integration with ad-serving, premium serving, billing, integration with social networks, etc.

How much of the IT infrastructure is moving to the Cloud?

The new strategy for most CIOs is that all new IT should be able to move to the Cloud. A pharma company I interacted with a few days ago has two data centers, which are fully maxed out. However, they don't want to move to a third data center, because they're not an IT company. So any new IT that they're developing is now being done in the Cloud, and their expectation now is to bring down their data centers to one or even less than that.

Moreover, moving to the Cloud also depends upon the organization. Smaller ones for instance, can move completely to the Cloud -desktop as a service, applications, word processing apps, almost all their services no longer need to run on physical hardware. There are even companies that offer complete package in the Cloud. So if you're starting a new office in Chennai for instance, then you could be up and running in two days without having any physical infrastructure there.

In another case, I met an investment CIO, who was responsible for 4000 apps. They're not going to move all of them to the Cloud. His biggest challenge is mergers and acquisitions. He's gone through server consolidation and made everything uniform, and is now using the Cloud as a rapid intermediary strategy. If the company does a merger, then they aggressively move things over the Cloud, get rid of the old hardware as quickly as possible, and start working on integrating things into the environment. In the meantime, the merged company uses the Cloud till things are integrated.

To know more on what is the cloud being actively evaluated for, where is cloud computing heading, is the fear of manpower lay-off a hindrance in moving to the Cloud, and much more, then read the full transcript on http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/

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