Category: Cloud

The year 2020 will go down in history books for many reasons. One of those is that the business world is more distributed than ever — customers, partners, and employees work from their own locations (and rarely their offices) today. What does that mean for businesses? The consumer touchpoints are different today, wherein supply chains and delivery networks have changed. This is where organisations have to find new ways to deliver value and new experiences to customers.

In response to the pandemic, business organisations had to fundamentally change the way they operate. They had to transform processes, models, and supply chains for service delivery. To sustain business and remain competitive in a post-COVID world, they had to challenge the status quo and make a lot of changes.

Digital is no longer an option 

When the global pandemic gripped the world in March this year, organisations with three to five-year digital transformation plans were forced to execute plans in a few months or days. Either that or they would go out of business.

A new IBM study of global C-Suite executives revealed that nearly six in 10 organisations have accelerated their digital transformation journey due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, 66% of executives said they have completed initiatives that previously encountered resistance. In India, 55% of Indian executives plan to prioritise digital transformation efforts over the next two years.

This calls for new skills, strategies, and priorities. And the cloud and associated digital technologies will strongly influence business decisions in the post-COVID era. Organisations need to have a full-fledged cloud strategy and draw up a roadmap for cloud migration.

To achieve this, the leading-edge companies are aligning their business transformation efforts with the adoption of public and hybrid cloud platforms. For many sectors, remaining productive during lockdown depended on their cloud-readiness. Operating without relying too heavily on on-premise technology was key and will remain vital in the more digitally minded organisation of the future. In a way, we can say that with the right approach, strategy, vision, and platform, a modern cloud can ignite end-to-end digital transformation in ways that could only be imagined in the pre-Covid era.

To deliver new and innovative services and customer experiences, businesses – be it large corporates, MSMEs, or  start-ups – all are embracing disruptive technologies like cloud, IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, big data analytics, etc., to drive innovative and profitable business models.

For instance, introducing voice interfaces and chat bots for customer helpdesk is a compute intensive task that requires big data analytics and artificial intelligence in the cloud. This enables customers to just speak to a search bot if they need help in ordering products on an e-commerce website. They can also order the product just by speaking to voice bot like Siri or Alexa, for instance. The same is applicable for banking services. Voice based interfaces are enabling conversational banking, which also requires processing in the cloud. These services simplify and improve the customer experience and provide customer delight. But to introduce such innovative service requires an overhaul and transformation of traditional business processes – that’s digital transformation.

Solving infrastructure & cost challenges

Cloud computing has been around for ages, but CIOs still grapple with cloud challenges such as lack of central control, rising / unpredicted cost, complexity of infrastructure, security & compliance, and scaling. However, over the years, public cloud technology has evolved to address these challenges.

Central Control: Public cloud offers dashboards through which one can monitor and control cloud compute resources centrally irrespective where it is hosted (multicloud).

Managing Complexity: IT infrastructure is getting increasingly complex and CIOs have to deal with multiple vendors for cloud resources. Infrastructure is spread out over multiple clouds, usually from different vendors. And various best of breed solutions are selected and integrated into the infrastructure. As a result, the management of all these clouds and technologies poses a huge challenge. CIOs want to simply the management of infrastructure through a single window or single pane of glass. Cloud orchestration, APIs, dashboards, and other tools are available to do this.

Reducing Costs: Demands on IT resources are increasing but budgets remain the same and lack of billing transparency adds to it. Public cloud addresses both issues as it offers tremendous cost savings as you do not make upfront capital investments in infrastructure. There’s also a TCO benefit since you do not make additional investments to upgrade on-premise infrastructure – that’s because you rent the infrastructure and pay only for what you consume. The cloud service provider makes additional investments to grow the infrastructure. There are cost savings on energy, cooling, and real-estate as well.

And since usage of resources is metered, one can view the exact consumption and billing on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Usage information is provided through dashboards and real time reports, to ensure billing transparency.

Compliance & Regulation: Regulatory and compliance demands for data retention and protection may be taxing for your business.

Automated Scaling: Public cloud offers the ability to scale up or down to provision the exact capacity that your business needs, to avoid overprovisioning or under utilisation of deployed resources. Cloud service providers ensure that the resources are available on-demand, throughout the year, even when business peaks during festive seasons. And this scaling can happen automatically.

Global Reach: Apart from scale and cost savings, the cloud offers global reach, so that your customers can access your services from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, the cloud’s ability to explore the value of vast unstructured data sets is next to none, which in turn is essential for IoT and AI. Big Data can be processed using special analytics technologies in the cloud.

Agility: The cloud also makes your business agile because it allows you to quickly enhance services and applications – or a shorter time-to-market for launching new products and services.

Then there’s the benefit of control and management. A ‘self-service cloud portal’ offers complete management of your compute instances and cloud resources such as network, storage, and security.  The self-service nature offers agility, enabling organisations to quickly provision additional resources and introduce enhancements or new services.

With all these advantages, businesses clearly recognise the need for transformation and are gradually leaving legacy technologies behind in favour of next-generation technologies as they pursue competitive advantage. Public cloud is critical to this shift, thanks not only to the flexibility of the delivery model but also to the ease with which servers can be provisioned, reducing financial as well as business risks.

It will not be possible for most companies to transform their businesses digitally unless they move some of their IT applications and infrastructure into public or hybrid clouds.

Key considerations for cloud migration

Regulation and compliance are other vital considerations. What kind of compliance standards has your service provider adopted? There are industry-specific standards like HIPAA for data security and privacy. Besides, there are standards like PCI-DSS applicable across industries — and regionally specific standards like GDPR. Ask about compliance with all those standards.

Keep in mind that the onus of protecting data on the public cloud lies with both – the tenant and the cloud service provider. Hence, it would be a good idea to hire an external consultant’s services to ensure compliance and adherence to all the standards. This should be backed by annual audits and penetration testing to test the robustness and security of the infrastructure.

You also want to ensure resilience and business continuity. What kind of services and redundancy are available to ensure that?

Ask your cloud service provider for guarantees on uptime, availability, and response time. The other aspects to check are level of redundancy, restoration from failure, and frequency of backup. All this should be backed by service level agreements (SLAs) with penalty clauses for lapses in service delivery.

WAN optimization, load balancing and robust network design, with N+N redundancy for resources, and hyperscale data centres ensure high availability. But this should be backed by industry standard certifications such as ISO 20000, ISO, 9001, ISO 27001, PCI/DSS, Uptime Institute Tier Standard, ANI/BICSI, TIA, OIX-2, and other certifications. These certifications assure credibility, availability, and uptime.

Do you remember what happened when the city of Mumbai lost power on October 12 this year? Most data centres continued operations as they had backup power resources. And that’s why their customers’ businesses were not impacted by the power failure.

A key concern is transparency in accounting and billing. Ask about on-demand consumption billing with no hidden charges. How are charges for bandwidth consumption accounted for? Some service providers do not charge extra for inbound or outbound data transfer and this can result in tremendous cost savings. Do they offer hourly or monthly billing plans?

Public cloud for business leadership

Enterprises that still haven’t implemented cloud technologies will be impeded in their digital transformation journeys because of issues with legacy systems, slower change adaptability, longer speed to market and an inability to adapt to fast-changing customer expectations.

Companies are recognising the public cloud’s capabilities to generate new business models and promote sustainable competitive advantage. They also acknowledge the need for implementing agile systems and believe that cloud technology is critical to digital transformation.

However, the cloud does present specific challenges, and one needs to do due diligence and ask the right questions. Businesses need to decide which processes and applications need to be digitalised. Accordingly, IT team needs to select the right cloud service provider and model.

The careful selection of a cloud service provider is also crucial. Look at the service provider’s financial strength. Where is your business data being hosted? What kind of guarantees can they give in terms of uptime? What about compliance and security? These are vital questions to ask.

Switching from one cloud service provider to another is possible but not a wise choice due to many technical and business complexity., so look for long-term relationships. An experienced and knowledgeable service provider can ensure a smooth journey to cloud – and successful digital transformation.

Source: https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/view-how-can-cios-drive-digital-transformation-by-maximizing-the-value-of-cloud-8011661.htm

At times, considered as a conflicting concept to an IT infrastructure, edge computing and cloud computing effectively complement each other’s functions. Even though they function in different ways, utilising one does not prevent the use of the other.

Cloud computing is a more common term than Edge and has been used by businesses for a long time. Businesses have favoured it due to the flexibility it provides to manage a workload on a dedicated platform in a virtual environment. However, the time it takes to communicate a task from the primary server to the client is noticeably huge when compared to edge computing. Hence, the former requires more bandwidth if connected to IoT devices.

Benefits of Cloud computing
The primary role of cloud evolves from that of an infrastructure utility to serve as a platform for the next generation of organisational innovation and evolution. Cloud computing not only allows companies to scale their operations but also provides them with the best-suited service model depending on specific requirements such as PaaS, IaaS or SaaS.

While the organisations have deployment models to choose from such as Public, Private, and Hybrid clouds, they can keep a check on the capital and operating expenses by using cloud computing. By adopting cloud strategies, enterprises have seen significant improvement in efficiency, reduction of costs, and decreased downtimes. With the recent disruption and large-scale lockdown measures due to COVID-19, the mobility, security, and scalability of cloud data platforms further highlighted its value to the businesses. The current pandemic has pushed companies to migrate to cloud environments to deal with the lockdown crisis and promote their geographically scattered teams with regular data access, sharing, and collaboration.

The relevance of Edge Computing
While cloud computing has its benefits, for improved performance and meeting more efficient computational needs, businesses are inclined towards using edge technologies. It provides a distributed communication path that works on a decentralised IT infrastructure. When transferring large quantities of data, it is essential to optimise data and complete the process in milliseconds.

Edge computing allows organisations to process, analyse, and perform necessary tasks locally on the data collected. This brings analysis closer to the data generation site eliminating intermediaries and makes it an affordable option for better asset performance. Edge computing makes it possible to utilise the full potential of the latest IoT devices which have data storage and processing power. A few areas where Edge computing has demonstrated incredible success are autonomous vehicles, streaming services, and smart homes. As new technologies like 5G networks, smart cities, and autonomous cars become common, they will integrate with, operate on, and be more dependent on edge computing resources.

Edge vs Cloud Computing
While edge computing and cloud computing are very different from each other, it is not advised to replace cloud computing with Edge. Both have different uses and purposes. Edge computing can be used for extreme latency operations and programming with varying times of run whereas cloud computing is suitable for programmes that require massive storage and provides a targeted platform. The former needs a robust and sophisticated plan for security with advanced authentication while it is easy to secure and control the latter along with remote access.

With the rise in the adoption of digital technologies, the data generated, as a result, continues to increase. And while processing these data, many organisations have started realising that there are shortfalls such as latency, cost and bandwidth in cloud computing. To help eliminate these drawbacks, enterprises are now gradually moving towards edge computing, an alternative approach to the cloud environment. Edge computing not only lowers the dependency on the cloud but simultaneously improves the speed of data processing as a result.

As IoT devices are becoming more widespread, businesses are in need to put in effect edge computing architectures to leverage the potential of this technology. Nowadays, companies are integrating edge capabilities with centralised cloud computing, and this integrated network infrastructure is called fog computing. Fog computing helps in enhancing efficiency as well as data computing competencies for cloud computing.

It is not possible to rely only on the Edge or on the cloud for your IT infrastructure but rather an amalgamation of the two that is best suited to the company’s operations. As these models become more mainstream, companies can strategise to find various hybrid structures to reduce costs and enhance their full potential.

Source: https://content.techgig.com/is-edge-computing-better-for-the-future-or-the-cloud-answers-evp-cio-yotta-infrastructure/articleshow/78874732.cms

While hyperscale data centers are already changing the way OTT players operate, the adoption of Blockchain will be a real game-changer for the sector.

Coronavirus is one word that took the world by storm. Literally, panic is in abundance; public transport is shut, and work from home is a norm these days. However, there is something else that is gaining popularity amongst those stuck at home in these times of crisis – OTT media platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Disney TV, Hotstar, etc. The OTT trend has picked up so much during the pandemic times that Nielsen has predicted a 60% increase in that online streaming making it necessary for players like Netflix and Amazon Prime, amongst others, to adjust their business strategies.

Thanks to deep internet penetration, cheap data, and exciting content, video consumption has been on a growth trajectory in India for some time now. The latest BCG-CII report indicates that the average digital video consumption in India has increased more than double to 24 minutes per day from 11 minutes over the past two years. As the report rightly points out, the rise in these numbers are also because of the increase of the OTT players in the country.

Over-the-top world view

There is no doubt about the fact that OTT technologies have disrupted the Indian entertainment landscape. Subscription-based, on-demand OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar, and Amazon Prime are slowly and steadily becoming the preferred medium of entertainment for modern Indians.

The shift in viewer sensibilities has propelled the growth of the country’s OTT industry. As per a Boston Consulting Group report, the Indian OTT market, which is currently valued at USD 500 million is expected to reach USD 5 billion by 2023. The television sets are also now becoming smarter. They are now catering to the needs of these OTT technologies by making their content available in a high-quality viewing experience. No wonder that the India television market is projected to surpass USD13 billion by 2023, led by these new breeds of Smart TVs on the block.

What powers the OTT?

CDN or the content delivery network is the infrastructure through which OTT content is delivered to the end customer. Simply put, CDN is hosting the original content – video, picture, etc. – on a central server and then sharing it remotely through caching and streaming servers located across the globe. Hence, a relevant network capacity planning feature built into the CON is required to monitor network traffic and plan the capacity increase ahead of time.

Video storage on the cloud

Video files are unusually large. To compress them on the fly and stream them on-demand to hundreds of millions of people with high resolution and minimal latency requires blazingly fast storage speed and bandwidth. It is a technological nightmare. With the growing quantity and sophistication of OTT video content, there is more traffic, more routing, and more management across the CDNs.

The OTT players typically rent space in the cloud to store their data. As their content keeps expanding and setting up the infrastructure means huge capex, there is a need for a high level of expertise in this ever-changing and updating technology landscape. Hence, going to a third-party service provider makes complete sense. This makes life extremely simple for everyone as the only thing that now needs to be done is for the user to ask for a specific file to be played, and the video player, in turn, will ask its content delivery network or CON to fetch the desired content from the cloud.

Need for speed

The need for speed, scalability and network latency are driving OTT players towards Hyperscale Data Center service providers. They need all three in major proportions and 24x7x365 days, without a glitch even during or rather more during times of crisis like the current COVID-19 situation. Since the current and future demand of these players cannot be fulfilled by traditional data center players, they need are hyperscale data centers that can scale up the provisioning of computing, storage, networking, connectivity, and power resources, on-demand.

These data centers are designed and constructed on large land banks with expansion in mind. Also, they are created with the idea of absolute agility. Something highly desired by the OTT players. The OTT players are looking for service providers who can quickly increase the bandwidth and the storage capacity during high streaming and downgrade during slow times.

Redundant connectivity, local internet exchange and national exchange connectivity are also some of the things that an OTT player looks for in a data center and will find it more easily along with everything mentioned above in a hyper-scale facility.

Recently Spotify, the Swedish streaming giant had to shell out USO 30 million in a settlement over a royalty claim by an artist. With Blockchain, you can deploy a smart contract as well as it can be used to store a cryptographic hash of the original digital music file. The hash associates the address and the identities of the creator.

Another trend that will be a game-changer for this industry is SG. With SG, the next generation of networks will be able to cope better with running several high­demand applications like VR and AR. This will change the way content is developed and looked at on OTT platforms. It will also, however, make the role of hyper­scale data center more critical. The networks will ultimately be in them, and they will be the actual load bearers of it all.

A decade ago, cloud computing was for enterprises what AI and IOT are these days. Exciting meaningful but still not a part of their world. Today however, we can safely say that cloud computing has become a part of the mainstream enterprise technology world. Gartner predicts that by end of this year, 75 percent of organizations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model. The discussions have now moved from does cloud make sense to our business to what kind of cloud environment is best for us. Cloud is no longer a buzzword but a need for most businesses, and at the same time transitioning to cloud is an expensive affair. In this article, I will highlight few of the things that as a business you should consider before making the move.

Different cloud environments 

There is no one size fits all in Cloud computing. Every cloud provider has a different setup in terms of physical infrastructure, technology infrastructure, functionality, pricing and policies and others. Private, where computing services are offered via dedicated resources over a computing infrastructure hosted on-premise or at service providers cloud but in the dedicated model. Public, where computing services offered by third-party providers over the public internet and hybrid where a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services are used.

Multi-cloud v. Hybrid-cloud environment

While public and private clouds are simple, there are multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures. Although they sound similar, there is a major difference between them. In a multi-cloud setup, enterprises may use multiple public cloud from multiple cloud providers, whereas hybrid cloud solutions combine the advantages of public, private and multi-cloud to deliver the agility, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness to your organization.

It basically means that you are not putting all your eggs in one basket and hence, distributing the risk and getting the best environment for your application as per business and users need. For instance, a business that is spread across geographies and is using cloud services, finding one cloud infrastructure provider to meet all its demands and needs, is a big challenge. For such organizations, a multi-cloud architecture is best suited.

Drivers for a Multi-cloud environment

Another major reason for enterprises to adopt multi-cloud is avoiding vendor lock-in. This means that you will be working with more than one vendor in a multi-cloud setup. When a multi-cloud strategy is adopted by organizations, it provides them with more leverage than the cloud provider. The organization now has the option of transferring workloads between providers basis pricing or differing capabilities.

Other factors like cost savings, performance optimization, a lowered risk of DDoS attacks, as well as improved reliability, make hybrid-cloud a very attractive option for many businesses. Multi-cloud environment is one of the most flexible environments one can go in for.

Challenges of a Multi-cloud architecture

While multi-clouds seem extremely attractive there are some pitfalls to it as well. One of the biggest is the possibility of difficult integration across multiple cloud servers and vendors. Keeping track of all the stakeholders, applications and deployments with multiple vendors and platforms can be a thing of IT management nightmare.

Then there is the entire security angle to it. While the multi-cloud does limit the DDoS attack, it may leave an enterprise vulnerable to other attacks, if don’t plan the organization level security policies as per the individual cloud operators’ measures. So now an enterprise has to be not just aware of knowing each of its many cloud service providers’ security measures and then has to identify the steps needed to secure the gaps.

Strategize your way to a successful multi-cloud, the Yotta way

Before you jump into the multi-cloud bandwagon, it is a good idea to form a strategy. Solid strategies that will help you understand why exactly your business needs a multi-cloud setup. Is it because you want to reduce vendor dependency or is the focus risk mitigation? Questions about functionality, procurement or application portability on this kind of environment need to be addressed clearly before embarking upon this journey.

A clearly defined multi-cloud strategy will automatically lead itself into a successful venture. While there are challenges, there are solutions to overcome them as well, for instance, instead of learning and using new tools, with Yotta’s orchestration layer one can manage and deploy any cloud as per security posture/polices of the organization. Besides, Yotta can also help to move your workloads across clouds by taking the entire responsibility of the migration. If your enterprise is looking to shift to cloud computing or moving to a multi-cloud environment, schedule a free consultation with our cloud experts.