With enterprise and small and medium sized organizations looking forward to incorporating next generation IT infrastructure,Cloud Computing is fast emerging as a primary technological choice today.
Cost and agility are two of the main factors driving communities to adopt cloud, as both can reap different benefits from a tailored cloud deployment.
Investing in cloud can allow organizations to cut costs without sacrificing output quality, especially because cloud computing is offered in a variety of formats to best fit an organization’s size and infrastructure needs.
Changes in cloud computing centering around projects based in the open source community can
provide a valuable asset of upstream innovation to both communities as well.
Cloud computing can allow smaller businesses or startups to delegate rote tasks and focus on creating product, as opposed to managing large tasks that would distract from functional goals, such as an email server.
An Infrastructure-as-a-Service investment can allow businesses and enterprises of varying sizes to elastically scale their cloud resources up and down to fit their business needs. Last, Platform-asa-Service can allow both communities to develop applications at their own pace and tailored for their business size and at their own pace, allowing them to elastically scale Platform-as-a-Service as their business continues to grow.
INDIAN MARKET SCENARIO
As per the views of Jagjit Arora, Regional Director, Sales, Red Hat India, Open hybrid cloud is Red Hat’s technology vision. Many cloud initiatives fail to deliver the promise of agility and value to the business.
“We believe that building an open and hybrid cloud can help organizations solve real business problems by providing interoperability, workload and data portability, open APIs, and freedom of choice across new and existing heterogeneous infrastructures.
Open technology connects customers to a community of innovation that enables new business capabilities – when they are ready for them.
And open standards ensure customers are never limited or locked in. We have a broad portfolio that helps enterprises gain the benefits of an open hybrid cloud with no lock-in and across their choice of physical, virtual and public cloud infrastructures.
An open and hybrid approach to cloud is the only cloud architecture that allows enterprises to bring the benefits of cloud to all of their IT, and is the only way for enterprises to adopt the cloud incrementally while preserving flexibility,” he explains.
According to Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions,Verizon Enterprise Solutions, India, most of the large enterprises that have chosen to look at the cloud have picked the private cloud as the preferred option. Private clouds refer to dedicated infrastructure that is not shared with other users, but still allow enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of cloud, including virtualization, scalability, flexibility
and cost control.
“Economics shouldn’t be the only driver: One of the great advantages of cloud computing is cost savings opportunities. However, with private clouds these savings are harder to realize for a couple of reasons. First, there is likely a cost of hardware associated with the deployment. Second, because the hardware is not shared only larger deployments begin to enjoy the benefits of the economies of scale. While there are some cost efficiencies to be had moving from an on-premise to a private cloud environment, the focus should be on business cost benefits.
Private can be open: Private clouds can also greatly benefit from open standards development tools. By keeping private clouds as standard and open as possible, enterprises can shift workloads as needed and avoid getting locked-in with a specific provider’s technology. The truth is, open standards hold a promising future and, as the cloud landscape matures, they will help speed up the maturity process and encourage more enterprises to leverage the cloud.
Private, it’s just the beginning: These clouds could serve as a stepping stone for enterprises that need (or want) to retain some of the control over their cloud architectures. As public clouds mature,these organizations can develop the knowledge and
confidence to combine their environments with public clouds, creating a fully functional hybrid ITsolution.
The future of cloud computing is nothing but promising. Private clouds have started to gain momentum as enterprise customers require a single-tenant dedicated environment for certain workload applications. Mastering the key facts of private clouds is critical for its successful adoption and proper integration with traditional and other hybrid environments,” he explained.
VERIZON’S FOCUS TOWARDS CLOUD
Verizon Cloud is the new cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform and cloud-based object storage service. With this service, Verizon is fundamentally changing how public clouds are built.
Large enterprises, mid-size companies and small development shops will get the agility and economic benefit of a generic public cloud along with the reliability and scale of an enterprise-level service with unprecedented control of performance.
Verizon Cloud Compute is built for speed and performance. Virtual machines (softwarebased computers and servers) can be created and deployed in just seconds, and users build and pay for what they need.
With Verizon Cloud Compute, users can determine and set virtual machine and network performance,providing predictable performance for mission critical applications, even during peak times. Additionally, users can configure storage performance and attach storage to multiple virtual machines. Previously, services had pre-set configurations for size (e.g. small, medium, large) and performance, with little flexibility regarding virtual machine and network performance and storage configuration. No other cloud offering provides this level of control.
Verizon Cloud Storage is an object-addressable,multitenant storage platform providing safe, durable,reliable and cost-effective storage accessible from anywhere on the Web. Object storage is extra robust and Web-traffic reliable, making it ideal for cloud-based applications. Verizon Cloud Storage overcomes latency issues that have plagued many traditional storage offerings, providing improved performance.
CHALLENGES TO CLOUD ADOPTION Information security will always be a key point of concern. Today customers are looking at cloud platforms that are compliant to PCI DSS, data centers being SAS 70 Type II certified.“Acceptance of virtualization as a core IT technology:
Most companies have virtualization technology within their enterprise but have been reluctant to adopt it for their mission-critical applications.
This is primarily because the relevance of virtualization is being gradually recognized and understood. They are looking at Hybrid Cloud models, where they can choose public Vs Private.
Acceptance of IT SLAs and reducing actual IT ownership: “Server hugging” is a coined term that describes this hurdle quite well. IT organizations are reluctant to let go of the physical equipment for fear that what it is being replaced with is inferior.
This barrier is easy to overcome provided you can clearly articulate the service levels you require for all areas you are considering using a cloud infrastructure or service.
Network sizing and design changes: Most previous IT models are based on large internal networks and few Internet touch points. Cloud computing changes that model and often requires a much larger connection to the Cloud to prevent latency issues.
Some of these points may remain hurdles for some time even though organizations see the value in cloud computing,” Prashant from Verizon adds on.
On the other hand, Jagjit Arora from Red Hat says, “Moving to the cloud involves some risk as you may transfer part of your IT infrastructure outside of your business to a third party. The key is to managing this risk is to work with trusted cloud providers who have a proven track record in the space.By working with the right provider you can make sure that the right security measures are in place and that you have access to the services the business needs. Working directly with a cloud provider can also ensure the proper service level agreements are in place and that your data is secure. It is also important to manage your cloud usage properly and make sure employees have access to the resources they need through your cloud provider. If they look outside the business and rogue clouds get into the
mix you have essentially lost control over your data.
This can lead to data loss and sensitive information being compromised as it is now outside the company firewall. In the long term this can even mean loss of customers and impact on profits. Some of the largest public clouds are built on open source technologies. Open source technologies allow businesses to build customized clouds that meet the needs of the organization. They achieve this without huge licensing costs, lowering the barriers to
entry to allow smaller businesses to develop affordable, custom cloud set ups. Open source clouds also encourage and support the development of new cloud offerings by facilitating collaboration between technology providers,” he adds on.
FUTURE FOR CLOUD
The cloud is no longer an “if ” for many businesses, it’s a given. Most businesses already work in the cloud, or store data there, or deploy applications from the cloud, and as a result the cloud will be the major driver of IT spending and decision making for the foreseeable future.
Here is how the future will look for cloud: The Cloud Gets Intelligent: Organizations are
increasingly focusing on leveraging their data to enhance decision-making, drive revenue, reduce costs and improve customer experiences, and the coming years will see cloud providers move strongly to support their customers in these efforts.
“We think a lot about analytics and the need that all businesses have for analytics. We see a lot of internal usage and across the entire industry the notion that businesses can mine very useful information from the vast data sets they have is a big deal. Providers will put forth a range of offerings that range from the building blocks of analytics solutions to full turnkey services. We expect to see a sharp focus on how enterprises and governments use technology to enhance customer experience and enable innovation. Enterprise success will be measured by how well organizations can use technology to meet user expectations and harness innovation. Key trends will include, M2M as a service, which will overcome issues that have previously prevented organizations from fully embracing M2M. Also, with cyber-attacks becoming more sophisticated, hiring executives with relevant skills will compel organizations to demand a substantial increase in security investments. Lastly, organizations will use cloud for more than just development and testing, explains, Prashant Gupta from Verizon.
As per the views of Jagjit Arora from Red Hat,“According to research firm Gartner, the Indian enterprise software market is expected to touch about $6.7 billion by 2017. India is one of our key markets in the APAC region as open source is coming up as the driving force behind emerging technologies ranging from cloud to social applications.
Big data, analytics, and hyper scale computing will also play a major role in catalyzing the adoption of open clouds among enterprises,” he concludes.
RED HAT’S FOCUS ON CLOUD
We helped lead the way to open platform,middleware, and virtualization technologies. From Linux® to JBoss® to OpenStack, Red Hat drives innovation in emerging technology by standardiz-ing software and liberating resources. In fact, the first clouds were built on open Red Hat® technology. And these same open technologies are defining the future of cloud computing and IT. Our robust cloud portfolio includes products like Red Hat® Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat Cloud-Forms, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack® Platform, Red Hat Storage Server, and OpenShift—Red Hat’s Platformas- a-Service (PaaS) product suite.