Maximizing Growth on the Cloud

As an integral part of IT strategy, Cloud computing can make businesses more responsive, flexible, scalable, and competitive. However, it’s not merely about moving from the physical to the Cloud and extending an organization’s data perimeter, it’s also about fundamentally evaluating IT strategy and delivery. That’s where the challenge lies. Netmagic Solutions and Akamai, in collaboration with CIO magazine, examined IT challenges in Cloud app delivery at a roundtable at the recently concluded CIO Year Ahead event.   Today most apps can be ported to the Cloud, delivering them to end-users involves many challenges that include sub-optimal performance and more. “The major challenge we see today is not at the backend infrastructure, but at the delivery of the app to end-users. As CIOs we have learnt the art of framing strong SLAs, but we are crippled by inadequate infrastructure to deliver the apps to end- customers,” said Girish Rao, head-IT at Marico.   Contrary to popular belief, Cloud computing does not work out as a one-stop solution for all the needs of an organization. For instance, CIOs need to look at its tolerance to latency from an applications point of view. “If all your users are on the LAN, it makes more sense to keep applications local rather than port them to the CloudCloud,” said Karan KirpalaniKirpalani, AVP Product Management at Netmagic Solutions.   “We operate on a very large scale and at disparate locations. When I am thinking of an application to standardize 50 office gates across the country, I need a Cloud app that can reach each of them. Here, the actual challenge lies in last mile connectivity, and Cloud service providers have very less influence. So what do I, as a CIO, do to improve the situation? How do we ensure our apps are ‘Cloudable’?” said Suneel Aradhye, group CIO at RPG Enterprises.   The real challenge in delivering Cloud applications boils down to three things: Network, infrastructure, and the application itself. “As an IaaS provider, our philosophy of service delivery is this: Deliver to our clients the same experience over the Cloud as they’re used to experiencing from their in-house datacenter, with no compromise,” said Kirpalani. “A comprehensive Managed Service Provider gives you a very high level of control with a very strong SLA. With Akamai, we can deliver the whole piece end-to-end. We provide you last mile infrastructure with our expertise, and provide the contact acceleration with Akamai so that you have a single point of contact.”