Sachin Waingankar, Head of Cloud, Web Werks India
“Organizations with on-premise data centers are now moving to the hybrid cloud because of its performance, stability, security, and quality.”
As the organizations are facing a lot of business pressure due to the contraction of budget, their attraction towards cloud and Hybrid computing becoming natural as they are getting better business value. Sachin Waingankar, Head of Cloud, Web Werks India, explaining how cloud or hybrid environment offers better value over on-prem environment.
With the constantly changing business environment, how do businesses decide between on-premise vs cloud?
Decisions between on-premise or cloud are driven by criticalities, compliance policies and turnaround time. Cloud computing is a diverse computing paradigm incorporating the benefits of service-oriented architectures through virtualization. Hence if a business is required to deploy IT architectures in two days, procuring and deploying servers in such a short span is close to impossible. In such scenarios, cloud computing becomes the business’ best bet. In addition to that, organizations experience a major cost-benefit when they move to the cloud as they move from capital expenditures to operational expenditures. However, compliance issues can act as inhibitors concerning storage, usage, data protection, etc. Organizations can thus maintain benchmarks and compliance checklists with their cloud service providers, to ensure that their offerings are designed to comply with data regulations like ISC, PCI-DSS, HIPPA, TIA, SSAE, OIX-2, etc. One determining factor includes the duration of the project. In short-term projects that have huge requirements, investments in on-premise infrastructures for minimal business applications are more like an aimless decision. On the other hand, the pandemic forced even well-established businesses to undergo digital transformations and mitigate risks, thus shifting even long-term projects to the cloud for its disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
One of the latest trends in data centers is the Hybrid cloud. Can and should firms adapt it to suit their business needs?
Hybrid cloud, the amalgamation of cloud services and on-premise data is gaining high popularity among users due to various reasons involving improved performance, flexible business operations, capacity expansion, optimized costs, and enhanced security. To maintain the confidentiality of data for security and compliance, organizations choose to maintain data on an internal network or a private cloud that will be hosted on-premise. This gives the firm access to both the physical and logical infrastructure. The Hybrid cloud is in trend today since it allows businesses to choose their computing models along with giving them the benefits of operational costs and management perspectives. Organizations however should move to the hybrid cloud after due diligence of their IT study. This includes understanding applications, understanding application dependencies, its portability followed by accessibility and compliance. This study will enable organizations to decide between which workloads and data could be hosted in a public cloud, the benefits, and risks it entails and, applications and data that are too sensitive, too specialized, or otherwise would be best hosted in a private cloud and thus helping them transition to the Hybrid cloud easily.
Since the pandemic, we have seen a 25% increase in cyber-attacks. How can the cloud deal with it?
Any application or data that goes over the internet, whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud is exposed to an equal amount of risks. Data centers have multi-layered and constantly upgraded security systems in place to prevent data theft. Such a high degree of data security requires advanced tools and manpower which is unlikely to be available in-house for most companies. In addition to that, even if applications are protected with the best firewalls and IT policies, it is still susceptible to a cyber-attack if it isn’t updated to the latest security badge.
What defines normal for the future of businesses in 2021?
With the public cloud utilized mainly by e-commerce and, information and communication technology providers, more and more businesses are moving towards a hybrid cloud. Organizations with on-premise data centers are now moving to the hybrid cloud because of its performance, stability, security, and quality. This has been pushed by the pandemic that resulted in work from home policies and the inability to access systems in a lockdown. One great benefit of cloud computing is that lifecycle management, upgrades, and, replacement of used resources are taken care of by cloud service providers. This greatly reduces costs, labour, and time for organizations performing this task on-premise in a traditional environment and brings in business feasibility through virtualized architectures.
