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EDITOR’S QUESTION
SACHIN BHARDWAJ,
DIRECTOR MARKETING AND
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT,
EHOSTING DATAFORT
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T
oday, cloud is a well-known buzzword
with leading business executives and
business decision makers. The cloud
is meant to provide environments that are
scalable, reliable and highly available among
others. Migrating workloads to the cloud
brings with it various benefits. their IT team in refreshing their onsite
systems. Earlier, security was a barrier in
public cloud adoption. However, security
is now seen as one of its biggest strengths
as cloud providers are adopting the latest
innovative technologies, security systems
and compliance initiatives.
However, initiating an end-to-end cloud
journey for an organisation, as a first
step into digital transformation, is a more
challenging task. An organisation’s cloud
journey involves strong interplay between
heads of business and IT decision makers as
well as senior management. However, once the cloud decision does
get a green light, the real challenges rear
their heads. Where do you start? Which
applications and workloads do you push
first? Who are the right vendors? How do
you tackle legacy processes? How do you
get the teams to co-operate? How do you
ensure your management gives you support
to transform?
For business and IT decision makers, the
question is no longer whether to enter the
cloud or not. If an organisation is serious
about competing in tomorrow’s digital
market place, adopting cloud technologies
and cloud platforms is the best way to
move forward.
Such cloud initiatives bring about an
alignment between business and IT, yielding
transformation with enhanced competitive
differentiation, productivity, agility and
reduction of IT costs.
With the adoption of the public cloud on
the rise, more and more organisations are
integrating a public cloud strategy into their
long-term digital transformation plans. Public
cloud helps organisations in scaling up their
operations with ease without needing to
invest in new hardware and upgrades.
They can migrate tons of data to the cloud
and reduce thousands of work hours for
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The solution therefore lies in anticipating
and planning for all these challenges
to reduce the complexity of the cloud
journey. Similar to any complex and
challenging project, it may also demand
expert management.
Migration of data to the cloud is the
process of moving business processes,
business elements, data and applications,
from an onsite premise to a cloud
environment. Similar to any migration
process, transitioning an IT environment
from onsite environment to the cloud,
especially the public cloud, has its share
of project management and change
management challenges.
Among the other operational considerations
that need to overcome are concerns
around privacy, interoperability, data and
application portability, data integrity,
business continuity and security. Migrating
to the cloud has its share of benefits and
hitches and end-user organisations should
work with their cloud services provider to
identify what is in their best interests.
A cloud services provider can play the role
of a trusted partner by assisting in the
process of migration to the cloud. This can
be done by setting up a proof of concept in
partnership with the end user organisation.
This will give the end user organisation
an idea of the following: comparison of
application performance between on-
premises and in-cloud; possible points of
complexity and failure during migration;
network bandwidth required for end-to-end
data transfer; and hands-on evaluation of
the capability of the cloud services provider.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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