1. technology and computing

Moving in the Cloud
Shailendra Ravi
Senior Director, Emerging
Markets, EMC India COE
Enterprises in India are extensively using cloud, but they have realized that
the neither public nor private cloud alone can fulfil their requirements. While
some companies use public cloud for economy and convenience, others prefer private cloud for better security of important data and critical systems. Unfortunately, one size does not fit all. Some enterprises need the best of both
public and private cloud. Hybrid cloud is an answer for such enterprises.
Today, the hybrid cloud is fast emerging as an ideal approach to IT architecture as it allows organizations to mix and match the resources between local
infrastructure and infrastructure that is scalable and provisioned on demand.
A Hybrid Cloud is no longer just an alternative to moving everything to the cloud
but it has now become the differentiating factor for any business looking ahead at
their long-term ability to outperform competitors. In my day-to-day interactions
we see that in many organizations end users and lines of businesses are circumventing corporate IT to use public cloud offerings that are not available internally.
From a purely technology management standpoint, enterprises today are at
various stages of evolution. While there are many organizations that still run on
traditional IT infrastructure, there are a good number of organizations that have
moved on from legacy and achieved various levels of automation. According to
EMC’s IT Transformation Index 2015, 46 percent respondents have partial virtual environments with respect to compute resources in their datacenters. Only
17 percent of the respondents are on the verge of transitioning to fully virtualized environments with over 80 percent of their compute resources virtualized.
We at EMC recommend enterprises these days to adopt a hybrid cloud model
for agility and greater visibility and transparency into IT costs. It also provides
excellent high end solutions such as integration, cloud management, cloud security, networking, and consulting to offer highly scalable resources that can be
adjusted on-demand. This enables our CIOs to be a “broker of value” with business rather than being a custodian of assets. According to the recent study done by MarketsandMarkets the growth of hybrid cloud is estimated to reach about $84.67 billion in 2019.
Unfortunately, building a hybrid cloud has not been easy for many organizations.
According to EMC IT Transformation Index 2015 only 7 percent of the enterprises have
moved business processing workloads and 4 percent have moved decision support
workloads to the hybrid cloud. Even building an on-premise private cloud with virtualized infrastructure, automation and self-service can become a project that fails to
deliver on the vision, despite investing millions of dollars and thousands of personnel
hours. EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud unifies the best of private and public clouds into
one solution, bringing in trust, control and reliability coupled with simplicity, cost and
flexibility. What’s more, this also provides increased visibility into the true costs of IT services and can map resource consumption to the application and infrastructure owners.
To be leaders in this era of cloud, mobile and big data technology, organizations
must shrink their perimeter controls while increasing their real-time security analysis capabilities. Today’s IT environments are being driven by users and customers demanding anytime, anywhere and any device access to existing and as well
as new functions and services. CIOs must enable this new breed of applications
and meet users’ service level and device preference expectations, while protecting
against more advanced and persistent threats than ever before. The ever-changing
threat scenario is now targeted at the weakest link of an organization—the end user.
Trusted IT means two things: predict threats and avoid harm. EMC leads the industry in both. To predict threats our intelligence-driven security products provide
fast and accurate monitoring and response. To prevent harm our data protection
products allow data of any size to be continuously available and recoverable, even
across large geographic distances. The data is further used in analytics as well.
With increasing APTs the traditional approach to security focusing only on the perimeter is no more adequate. We recommend that organizations should embrace
security analytics for real time intelligence on both internal and external threats.
In short, Hybrid cloud provides the best of both worlds: secure, on-demand access to IT resources with the flexibility to move workloads onsite or offsite to meet specific needs. It’s the security you need in
your private cloud with the scalability required of your public cloud.
If you are interested in knowing your current ‘State of IT’, you can participate in an online survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/emctransformationindex . The report can be accessed at the end of the survey.
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