4 reasons why cloud computing is becoming mainstream

MUMBAI, INDIA: Cloud computing has been a topic of discussion and consideration in the last few years. It has moved from being a mere technology concept to actual deployments, as the Indian public cloud market is poised to treble to $1.9 billion (about Rs 12,000 crore) by 2018, according to Gartner.

As opposed to the earlier perception that cloud computing would be more prevalent in the SME sector, even big organizations—at 65 percent, have embraced its services.

While the concept has scaled the first level of evolution, it is now important the cloud services be integrated with the overall business ecosystem. Here are four reasons why the cloud should not be looked upon as a mere alternative to the existing IT infrastructure.

Increased demand from lines of business:

The overall business ecosystem is turning fiercely competitive. Time-to-market assumes significance as the organization’s integrated business processes and units should quickly respond to the changing dynamics.

To achieve this, the cloud should enable on-demand access to resources for each business unit so as to respond to market opportunities. The cloud deployed should be robust enough to reduce the unplanned downtimes so that every line of business has continuous and consistent access to the resources.

Source for faster new product development and revenue generation:

The industry in general has a perception that cloud computing is difficult to embrace and deploy. Vendors are not helping change this perception since most of the available solutions are actually dependent on the vendor management business model.

The need of the hour is to have a platform that provides an integrated and repeatable installation framework for rapidly deploying and easily managing a cloud-based infrastructure. This in turn can be achieved by allowing a structured installation process that factor in the flexibility required by the enterprise to address their requirements. Administrators should be provided with a graphical interface so as to enable to deploy their private cloud and add compute as well as storage capacity as per the increasing demand.

Hours, not years is the new RoI benchmark:

OpenStack is pushing the industry benchmarks with ongoing advancements in the field with the result that hours is the new benchmark for enterprises to realize their RoI on cloud investments.

Enterprises are also concerned with safeguarding the existing investments in technology. In technical terms, this is possible by providing support for mixed hypervisor cloud thereby providing enterprises the flexibility of a multi-hypervisor environment and at the same time safeguard existing investments in technology and manpower skills.

OpenStack paving the way:

The conventional pitch by vendors that any software-based technological platform can be customised only upto a limited scale, no longer holds true as customers now want a truly customised solution addressing all their business needs.

To achieve this, one needs a platform such as open source that allows continuous development and improvisation without any significant cost implications.

Here’s why mentioning the OpenStack Community is important. The community which is one of the most vibrant attracts the broadest industry support and is part of the open source cloud project. The participation of many of the industry’s leading vendors ensures that the OpenStack project has long-term viability thereby ensuring innovation as an ongoing process.

At the end of the day, Indian businesses are looking to the cloud to deliver new business needs. In doing so, open cloud infrastructures provide the best possible ROI with minimal investment and the advantage of a powerful community backing. Don’t be the enterprise that falls behind.

The article is authored by Venkatesh Swaminathan, Country Head, India, Novell, NetIQ, SUSE & Attachmate, and opinions expressed do are his own