Five mistakes that affect cloud's success

BANGALORE, INDIA: Enterprises need to be educated on public cloud life cycle to ensure they do not fail in their venture. Anna Gong, VP, Virtualization, Service Automation & Cloud, APAC, CA Technologies in an e-mail interaction with CIOL's Deepa Damodaran talks about some of the mistakes that enterprises commit owing to which they tend not to reap the benefits of cloud and what can vendors do to attract enterprises. Excerpts:

CIOL: What are some of the common mistakes, owing to which companies do not get to experience the benefits of cloud?

Anna Gong: They are:

1. Security and compliance are not factored systematically into lifecycle of IT and due diligence process. Security should be considered every step of the way from architectural design, deployment, to production.

2. Many organization staffs are from a traditional IT background and have little cloud expertise. Whether investing in private or public clouds, treating these skills as similar is a common mistake and can cause negative results.

3. Certain organizations may be more innovative than others, but could adopt cloud technologies too quickly that may not serve the needs of the business nor can IT manage or be ready to manage the complex requirements. 

4. Sometimes consuming cloud or developing cloud services may come from a different budget outside of IT. Thus, the business may not involve IT when making cloud choices and that can create failure across the organization.

5. Certain companies failed to have a clear plan in adopting cloud services. You can easily adopt cloud, but what does that architecture look like, who will manage it, how secure will it be and how compliant is that to my business and how will it affect my end users’ experience.

There is also a lack of exit strategy. What if you want to scale back or switch over to a different provider? These steps of moving and exiting the cloud need to be well thought out to ensure smooth transitions and manageability.

CIOL: How to address the cloud adoption issues of enterprises?

Anna Gong: There are a few ways to address them through a consultative and awareness building approach.

1.Education and building awareness of public cloud life cycle from adoption to deployment to maintenance.

Let us review the benefits and consequences. Some enterprises may want to explore public cloud options, but they may not be ready and vendors need to be prepared to speak the truth.

Perhaps it starts with private cloud first, such as consolidation, standardizing, automating manual processes and optimizing manual labor, and then plan on building a more dynamic cloud model which could be a game changer for your business, and become a revenue generator instead of a cost center, by moving into public clouds.

2. Flexible financial modeling, go-to-market differences and ROI benefits that can be tangible to the customer for moving into the cloud.

3. Standardization and guidelines need to be articulated clearly for adoption to private or public clouds.

4. What are security measures for moving into cloud? Help enterprises to understand how they can secure IT and reduce risk to ensure that critical data and identities are protected especially with explosion mobility and end point devices. This will help them how to secure new online businesses that will drive revenue, decrease risk, and ensure compliance.

5. To ensure enterprises are more comfortable with service levels in the clouds, providers should extend service levels all the way out to end users, if possible.

CIOL: Who should go for cloud services and who should not?

Anna Gong: It really depends on the company’s IT maturity. Large enterprises have invested a lot of money in building out their infrastructure over the last 20-30 years.

It will take them longer than an SMB which may have fewer legacies to deal with to adopt cloud services. Smaller companies that require quick infrastructure build-out, cost effective measure to hiring a full IT staff, and have less data to worry about could adopt cloud much easier.

CIOL: There is this debate on proprietary and open clouds? Your take on it?

Anna Gong: Vendors who have built more robust proprietary and out-of-the-box applications have invested tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of research and development to serve the requirements of large complex IT environments.

Open source clouds could be consumed by anyone with a quick and less complex requirement but would require more customization than a proprietary solution would and perhaps later services and support could become costly due to the heavier customization work required for open source. Thus proprietary applications would be a better choice for more complex IT needs.