BPOWI: Why should organisations look at cloud computing for improving infrastructure?

Bruno Goveas: As enterprises especially BPOs and ITES companies strive for business agility there is a need for increasing the efficiency of their IT operations and infrastructure. This is possible by leveraging cloud computing environments. Cloud- based infrastructure means improved costs. The benefits of leveraging cloud-based services is now well understood, with realization and promise of improved cost efficiencies, accelerated innovation, faster time-to-market, and the ability to scale applications on demand.

There is a definite strategic shift across companies in India, in the different industries, towards a phased approach to implementing public and private clouds to take advantage of these efficiencies for competitiveness and business agility. The drivers for this shift are one or more of the following - need to grow revenue by capturing new markets, superior customer retention strategies, need for global collaboration, increasingly distributed and mobile workforce (employees, partners etc), improving supply chain efficiencies and to cut costs.

BPOWI: What are the kinds of issues that come up when deploying a cloud infrastructure?

BG: The most important decision for business leaders in an Enterprise is to determine the most feasible approach to leveraging the cloud computing environment to their advantage, i.e. determining appropriate applications to migrate over to a cloud infrastructure, when and where (private cloud, public cloud), given the Enterprises business model, business priorities, security, regulatory and audit requirements and current needs.

BPOWI: How do you tackle the issues?

BG: The ideal way to address this concern and yet ensure that enterprises can fully realize the promise and advantage of a cloud computing environment is to take a phased implementation approach. We can classify the migration to a cloud environment, broadly into three phases: Phase One - Consolidation of multiple data centers into a centralized infrastructure; Phase Two - Virtualize the infrastructure in the centralized data center to realize the benefits of shared pooled resources; Phase Three – Migrate relevant applications over to the public cloud, to gain additional operational efficiencies and business agility and yet conform to the necessary audit, security and regulatory requirements. In time, we will likely see a majority of the Enterprises with a hybrid of private and public cloud implementations.

BPOWI: What is your advice to a CTO in a BPO that is looking at going for a cloud computing environment?

BG: A phased approach to moving to a cloud environment should alleviate many of the concerns. Assess your current business needs, priorities and applications. Prioritize the list of applications that are candidates to move over and then migrate them one at a time. The initial application migration will provide the necessary experience and comfort with cloud environments. The insights of the initial exercise can be used to accelerate the migration of the other applications. As you are evaluating cloud providers, ensure that there is a certain level of trust in place, that you understand the history of the cloud provider and the things they have done to ensure they are trustworthy and have a certain level of transparency in functioning. You need to also check the cloud optimization services they have in place. The cloud providers need to overcome the performance, reliability, scalability and security challenges the Internet presents and also ensure cloud optimization so that it can become part of the core infrastructure.

BPOWI: What are Akamai’s offerings for the industry?

BG: Akamai offers cloud optimization solutions that accelerate application delivery over the Internet, from cloud data center to the userCombining Akamai's optimized cloud services with those of a cloud provider, can help enterprises overcome slow response times and spotty availability, improve application adoption and help businesses realize the expected benefits of their public cloud computing initiativesIn addition, Akamai has recently extended its cloud optimization capabilities towards security – helping enterprises defend from network layer and application-specific attacks for their own web sites and applications

BPOWI: How do you help moving existing client side applications to cloud without disruption to business continuity? What can a client expect during such a transition?

BG: Integrating Akamai's cloud optimization solution is fairly straightforwardIt's a managed service based on DNS resolutionIt’s entirely transparent to end-users and can be seamlessly integrated with the customer’s current set-up, requires no upfront capital expenditure and can be quickly deployedThere is no hardware, software or application code changes required

BPOWI: What are the hurdles that a CTO can expect when moving to cloud?

BG: The key hurdles that clients need to overcome are the challenges of performance, availability and security when moving to the cloudWhile public cloud offerings do simplify management of IT infrastructure and generate savings on capital and operating expenditure, they often do not adequately address performance of to the cloud itself