Migration of workloads a major concern

Rajesh Awasthi, Associate VP, Managed Hosting & Cloud Services, Tata Communications talks about their foray into the data centre business and types of clouds that customers prefer.

Getting into the data centre business

Around 2008 we got into the data centre business because our customers started saying why don't you also give data centre space for us to host our IT or networking equipment over and above the networks that you are delivering. We have around 44 plus data centres. Our customers can do colocation with us. In 2009 we started IT as a service. That was the formation of managed hosting. In 2010 we are started off our first multi-tenant private cloud offering. We deliver our managed services from 17 locations across the globe. We started our cloud nodes in 13 locations.

Around 2013 we did a tech refresh and we termed it Cloud 2.0 from our side called IZO private cloud, which was built on open source. We decided to deliver cloud which had freedom of choice from a hypervisor perspective. We have VMware KVM and Hyper-V. From a security perspective, this was a private cloud, which was multi-tenant with multiple technology options on the perimeter firewall security side. At a storage level we have NetApp and HP storage and if a customer wanted also EMC. In the last one-and-a-half years, we have seen enterprise customers’ propensity to move to public cloud, so we partnered with AWS and Google. We are a digital infrastructure services company. That is, we are more concerned with infrastructure and platform services, rather than Software as a Service.

Concerns of the customers

About three years back the greatest concern of customers was the possibility of data theft because of data leaving their own data centres. Today we see that most of our customers, be it mid-market or even the top end or SMB, their concerns on security are to some extent been taken care of, though ransomware is still a huge concern. But the biggest challenges they have today when moving to a cloud environment is how to migrate their workloads. Their IT systems normally run 24X7.

Their concern is which cloud environment is best suited for their application workloads. That's where they want a consulting partner to help them with data classification or workload classification to identify what would work best on which kind of environment at an optimal cost. They are open to looking at monthly recurring charges with a capability to scale up on a pay per use basis. They want flexibility to access, not only by the internal employees but also by their partners, or by customers when they are deploying a digital platform.

Public, private or hybrid?

From a requirements perspective, what you get in a public cloud environment is the scale, agility and the latest technology. It gives you the flexibility when you have a transient workload and you need certain things to be deployed very quickly to meet a business requirement. Over a period of time we've seen that the public cloud providers are becoming enterprise centric. Most of their work still comes from what they call digital native business. These are companies which were born in cloud and have requirements which are very transient in nature.

If we talk about the Flipkarts or the Myntras or the Snapdeals of the world, their workloads could be very variant depending on what time of the year, based on which they will come up with new campaigns. What they need is agility and the ability to scale very fast. That's why they want a public cloud. Then there are the startups who do not know whether the business idea they are trying to float will scale up and they want to manage their cash flows. They are open to look at public clouds to launch an idea and see how it goes.

If you come to a specific enterprise or an agnostic customer, they know that their environments are predictable in nature, like say a manufacturing company with an ERP. They know that their workloads are going to be very predictable. They don't have transient requirements. These companies prefer private cloud, which could be multi-tenant. For more complicated solutions, we might customize a hybrid cloud environment. We've seen customers putting in their SAP kind of environments on multi-tenant environments where they create a virtual private cloud on top of a public cloud environment.

There’s also Edge, which is going to become relevant in times to come. It would be driven by applications or workloads which are going to be very latency sensitive—the five millisecond or sub millisecond kind. Customers would want to deploy Edge nodes closer to where they are sitting. We have large number of Points of Presence, so we are well poised to deploy these Edge nodes. That’s because the Point of Presence are nothing but data centres, which are connected to high speed internet or network for bandwidth.

5G and the effect on cloud adoption

I'm not an expert on the network side, but I believe that 5G will help with last mile connectivity. From a cloud adoption perspective, we see that 5G is going to be a big enabler for the SME segment. Your mid-market and enterprise customers will continue using either MPLS network or maybe SD-WAN, which they would deploy. 5G would be a good enabler for the SME customers to adopt cloud environments because connectivity will be taken care of using 5G networks. These networks would have ample bandwidth for them to connect even the enterprise workload which they may deploy on the cloud environment, being accessible by their internal users, as well as by their partner ecosystem.

I believe partner ecosystem is something which would benefit big time for even the mid-market and enterprise customers. When we are talking about SD-WAN, the underlay network could be anything, it could be a P2P link, a data network, it could be an MPLS network, or it could be even a wireless network like 5G giving sufficient bandwidth and latency to the customer. This would give the user experiences they would want for their end users to have.