By Sanjay Agrawal, Technology Head, Hitachi Vantara
IT companies are increasingly relying on the cloud, thanks to its ability to enhance security and agility in the current ecosystem. An industry report found that 89 per cent of organisations have a multi-cloud strategy and 80 per cent employ a hybrid approach. India’s cloud computing market is growing with 53 per cent of organisations increasing their cloud adoption last year, with Healthcare at 53 per cent and pharma at 49 per cent being the leading sectors.
Moving to the cloud
Companies that use cloud platforms release new products and services 20 to 40 per cent faster. It enables organisations to scale their workloads based on demand. Plus, the increased automation optimises performance and efficiency. Cloud enhances workplace productivity by giving organisations the flexibility to support their remote and distributed employees. Reports show that the global sales of collaboration applications increased by 28.4 per cent in 2021, with sales of INR 2910 crore. This number could reach INR 6380 crore by 2026.
Also, corporates store 60 per cent of their data in the cloud, which gives them better control over their data and minimises risk. Enterprises can choose to store their data based on compliance, security and policy requirements. A hybrid setting also standardises cloud storage, streamlining disaster recovery and data insurance.
Starting your cloud journey
As companies race to modernise its legacy applications, the often-asked question is when and how to move the workloads to the cloud. At the heart of any migration strategy lie the core dependencies, namely company size, infrastructure and the reasons for cloud migration.
Enhancing your roadmap
The first step is to reimagine how you will manage applications and workloads with optimum resources. You then right-size those resources to maintain cost efficiencies and meet new application resource demands effectively. The outcomes will not happen overnight, but such a hybrid cloud foundation will help organisations rethink its IT services roadmap. Enterprises need solutions that allow for self-service IT services across virtual machines and containers. They must assess the application services to be migrated and proceed.
Setting operational expectations for hybrid cloud
Hybrid-cloud experiences run the gamut of cloud solutions. If a company uses a hyperscaler cloud, then a simple request via the provider’s API would result in a couple of servers ready for use within minutes. Organizations should demand that level of expertise from specialised cloud providers.
An integrated solution reduces hybrid cloud complexities and increases operational efficiency. An example would be an integrated platform offering a self-service catalogue when an application or database administrator must deploy new resources or adjust existing services.
Managing and protecting data with the cloud
Every data application has its own expectations and goals to be met for recoverability and business continuity. When it comes to testing, development and analytics, multiple copies of production data are required and organisations need to align with the necessary compliance requirements. Infrastructure software solutions automate data availability, protection and recoverability, locally and remotely. It ensures that data is synchronised across sites and can be backed up and duplicated to preferred cloud hyperscalers to meet backup SLA requirements.
Making data accessible to cloud services
Organisations should be able to extend data centre operations to third-party operators while remaining within their on-premises security boundaries. On-premises data hosted or virtualised cloud storage can be replicated and cloud provider services can access it as and when required.
Organization can have governance control over a virtual storage portal combined with the near-cloud, high-speed networking communication to hyperscalers. Enterprises should find a solution that guarantees the same security, reliability and scalability in the cloud as in data centres.
Ensuring flexibility to run apps on other clouds
Organisations need a solution that can extend or migrate workloads to clouds in hyperscaler environments. End users need a single management portal that provides that uniform view and control over resources, regardless of where the infrastructure runs. Migration use cases need not rebuild their existing virtual models by using the specific custom images of each hyper-scale. They can avoid different operational processes.
Getting a single, unified perspective
As organisations move to the cloud alongside their on-premises and near-cloud infrastructure, they need to observe what is happening across their entire environment to get the most out of their cloud solution. With observability, businesses get a single, unified perspective, from the data centre to the farthest edges of the cloud. The aim is to aid organisations manage performance efficiently across all infrastructures.
Building a digital future
The Indian Public Cloud Services market is expected to reach INR 1350 crore by 2026. India will need around 22 lakh cloud experts by 2025 and this requires an acceleration of our cloud talent supply. While migrating to the cloud seems complex, it becomes easier as an organisation better understands how this technology can meet evolving client needs. Cloud is not the destination but a step in your enterprise’s digital transformation journey to help you make the most of innovation and opportunity.