Adoption of cloud has grown significantly in all type of industries as businesses see benefits in efficiency, cost savings, and performance with limited resources/budget. Organizations that have well-architected cloud computing models have achieved key busines benefits including: faster deliveries, seamless data backup, enhanced productivity, scalability, reduced time, powerful server capabilities and flexibility.

Software product companies offering Software as a Service (SaaS) help customers in cutting down admin and operational costs that were part of the traditional models prevalent earlier.

Having a cloud strategy is important for a contemporary business, especially in this digitally disruptive era. Without having a cloud strategy driven by business outcome, organizations increase the risk of failure and their investments may get wasted.

Organizations move or adopt cloud for various reasons. It is important to evaluate if cloud strategy and the existing IT landscape is beneficial for your organization’s growth. Before deciding on a cloud strategy, you should consider the following scenarios:

- What is the demand of IT throughout the year?

- How much of IT spend is impacting the company’s overall business?

- Are there better options available?

Such a detailed evaluation will give you the right vision to formulate an appropriate strategy that will help your organization. Businesses may also adopt a staggered approach for implementing a cloud strategy.

Cloud strategy begins with a clear understanding of the organization’s technical and business objectives. The important drivers to shift to cloud and the solutions required to drive these changes are identified.

A proper cloud strategy road map is then developed to guide the cloud migration. The cloud adoption may be initiated on a small scale and as per the business or IT demands. Strategies driven from the needs also help choose the right cloud platform and execution.

Get in touch with our cloud consultants who can help you perform a detailed evaluation of your business requirements. We can then formulate a cloud adoption strategy aligned with your business goals!

There are many models to perform assessment and feasibility studies to evaluate the TCO for cloud adoption. For certain features, the cloud service may cost a bit more but the organization always has the option to scale down.

For some organizations, saving cost may be the primary business objective. Having different cloud models with visibility of TCO for Open and Capex may be a more suitable approach for them.

The pricing of cloud services may be slightly complex. Some cloud solution providers eliminate this worry by offering a flat rate pricing model. You can also decrease the cost factor by entering into a long-term Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your cloud provider.

The cloud migration strategy must be aligned to business goals and the organization’s objectives – short term and long term. A dedicated vendor or cloud implementation partner will add value to the various cloud service options, build interoperability's, and work on frameworks/details that internal teams may miss. Engaging a vendor ensures that decisions are taken faster and there is accountability for tasks, especially during a crisis.

It is often perceived that cloud computing is more prone to security risks, when compared to on-premise data centres. The truth is that cloud service providers follow the most stringent security practices for cloud storage and hence, are faced with very few security breaches. Today, many live production commercial transactions are running on the cloud. In fact, more breaches have been recorded on on-premise DCs.

Having a clear cloud strategy helps. It is best to have a clear idea about critical resources that need to go on the cloud. It is advisable to partner with a reliable cloud computing service provider, who can handle the transition with minimal disruption to service and business.

There are a few factors such as reliable network, data backup plan, etc. that one must be prepared with before migrating to the cloud, in order to avoid any critical data loss.

Workloads can be moved to the cloud depending on the business objectives and cloud strategy. Organizations may choose to move the complete IT workloads to the cloud, stepwise.

Conventionally, Cloud services were always used for data backup, but now it is extensively used for storing & processing application-based workloads like CRM, HR, marketing, etc.

Test and Dev environments can be quickly spun up in the cloud on demand, and after use, the service can be shut down. Scalable and on-demand applications work best in cloud as organizations don’t have to invest upright on capex. Backup as a Service helps in ensuring business continuity and reducing downtime.

Protection of business-critical resources against cyberthreats is one of the topmost concerns shared by organizations in the context of cloud migration. Cloud computing service providers implement numerous security features to secure the data, and also to ensure that the data is restored with minimum or no disruption.

Some of the key components of cloud storage security are encryption, identity management, application security, physical security, and firewalls. Cloud also provides appropriate Identity management, Access Controls, Authentication and authorization for access. With these security practices in place, organizations can ensure the safety of their critical data.

Some of the key characteristics of a cloud computing model are the following:

• Elasticity and Scalability
• Self-service provisioning and automatic de-provisioning
• Standardized interfaces
• Billing self service based usage model

If a cloud computing service provider follows the best cloud governance practices and are compliant with certifications like HIPAA, ISO, PCI-DSS, DOC , you can be assured that the cloud is qualified to handle sensitive information.

In cloud computing, scalability refers to the process of statically increasing (scale up) or decreasing (scale down) the computing resources or its capacity to meet the varying workload requirements.

On the other hand, elasticity in cloud computing refers to commissioning and decommissioning of a large amount of resource capacity to meet the workload requirements. The underlying aim of cloud elasticity is to prevent overprovisioning or underprovisioning of a specific application/service.

The different layers of cloud computing are:

• SaaS: Software as a Service (SaaS) provides users direct access to the cloud application without installing anything on the system.
• IaaS: Infrastructure as a service provides the infrastructure in terms of hardware like memory, processor speed, etc.
• PaaS: Platform as a service provides a cloud application platform for the developers

An open-source software infrastructure in cloud computing, is used to implement clusters in the cloud computing platform. It is used to build public, hybrid and private clouds. It enables you to produce your own data center in a private cloud and allows you to use its functionality in many other organizations.

Virtual platform helps in:

• Implementing Cloud OS
• Managing service level policies
• Keeping the backend level and user level concepts different from each other

Before selecting any cloud computing platform, following factors must be evaluated: Compliance with Industry Standards and certifications Strategy to manage data loss/ latency Data Governance and security plan Data storage plan Business continuity Plan System Uptime Data integrity in cloud computing

A private cloud imitates the delivery models of public cloud providers. However, this is done completely within the firewalls for the benefit of the company’s users. A private cloud is heavily virtualized, and it consolidates a large amount of IT infrastructure into one/multiple logical resource pools.

Private clouds are owned and managed by individual companies. The access to the cloud may be limited to the enterprise that implements it or a part of its value chain.

Yes, but that doesn't mean it will be easy. Certain services are used to move applications from one cloud platform to another (such as from AWS to Azure) and from internal data centers to the cloud. Cloud vendors adopt standards-based technologies in order to ensure true interoperability.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are used in cloud platforms because they:

• Facilitate communication between one or more applications
• Act as gateways for enabling direct/indirect cloud software and infrastructure services to users
• Save development effort and time

If you have more queries regarding cloud computing and cloud adoption, write back to us at sales@embitel.com and our cloud consultants will get back to you for assistance.