Cloud Computing
- Kunal Konar
- 1 day ago
- 24 min read
Updated: 20 hours ago
Author: Soumitra Poddar, Founder and Director, Strategic Services
Prologue
I came across the Cloud Computing Technology, probably, sometimes in 2010 while at US. However, I never fully realized that. Later on, while I was commissioning a Decision Support System and have started to use proprietary software, in between 2010 to till date, where licenses were configured via a Virtual Private Network rather than locally available desktop licenses, I became aware of this technology and its all-pervading presence. I have also realized this cost-effective and sophisticated technology with regular updates and feature addition is here to stay for a long time in the modern era. This curiosity about cloud computing always pushed me to have a systemic and clear-cut conceptual understanding of the whole package. This article is the culmination of that quest.
I connected with veteran professional/entrepreneur, Mr. Soumitra Poddar about a year ago. I sincerely requested him to publish something at the Magazine section of my website from his professional expertise so that both mid-career professional like myself and budding professionals everywhere get to learn something from his knowledge. He communicated the first draft on 02Jul2025 and after few rounds of collaboration, this article is now finalized for the global readership.
~~ Kunal Konar, Publisher
Introduction
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with a pay-as-you-go-pricing model. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, end users can access technology services, such as computing power, storage and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider. The cloud providers are third-party organizations that make dynamic provisioning of IT capabilities (hardware, software, or services) over a network.
Cloud computing is a computing model and not a technology. In this model of computing, all the servers, networks, applications and other elements related to data centres are made available to IT end users via the Internet, in a way that allows IT to buy only the type and amount of computing services that they need.
The cloud model differs from traditional outsourcing in terms that customers don’t hand over their own IT resources to be managed. Instead, they plug into the “cloud” for infrastructure services, platform (operating system) services, or software services, treating the “cloud” much as they would treat an internal data centre or computer system providing the same functions.
Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications. For example, healthcare companies are using the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for patients, BFSI companies are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention, while video-game makers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.
Cloud Computing Timeline
Characteristics and Advantages of Cloud Computing
Digital technologies are transforming industrial production processes from design and engineering up to manufacturing and are helping organizations harness the full potential of Industry 4.0 in terms of greater flexibility in processes, improved productivity, higher quality production, and increased revenue.
As the proliferation of digital technologies continues to disrupt market segments and industries, adopting cloud platforms can help organizations transform to meet changing business conditions and cater to the evolving customer needs.
The more production-related initiatives a company undertakes, the more it needs to share data across sites. Meanwhile, cloud technologies continue to get faster and more powerful. Thus, companies will increasingly deploy machine data and analytics to the cloud, thereby enabling more data-driven services for production systems.
Cloud computing can help organizations lower costs, reduce business risks, improve operational efficiency, become more agile, innovate faster, create new revenue streams, and reinvent customer and employee experience. An overview of the cloud computing architecture is provided in Figure 2.
Agility
The cloud gives the end users easy access to a broad range of technologies so that they can innovate faster and build nearly anything that they can imagine. Users can quickly spin up resources as they need them – from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.
They can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives them the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform their business.
Scalability and Flexibility in Capacity
Cloud computing offers a set of flexible facilities that can be turned off, scaled up or trimmed down as per the circumstances of the user. IT users do not have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future.
Instead, they provision the amount of cloud resources that they actually need. Suppose a promotion of sales is very popular, in that case IT capacity can be immediately and quickly added to it for the avoidance of crashing servers and losing sales. When those sales are done or events are over, the capacity can be shrunk to contain costs. When scaling up and down, users are altering the power of an instance, perhaps using one with a greater CPU power, and are simply adding or removing the number of instances they are using.
There is workload resilience as the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) often implement redundant resources to ensure resilient storage and to keep users' important workloads running, often across multiple global regions. This offers a significant advantage compared to on-premise solutions from a cost perspective alone.
Cost Management
Using cloud infrastructure reduces capital costs as organizations don't have to invest massive amounts of money buying and maintaining hardware, equipment, facilities, utilities or building large data centers to accommodate their growing businesses. This allows them to trade capital expenses for variable expenses. Additionally, companies do not need large IT teams to handle data center operations because they can rely on the expertise of their cloud providers’ teams. The variable costs are also lower in cloud computing because cloud resources are measured at a granular level, enabling users to pay only for the resources and workloads they use. There is no standby cost.
With many cloud services, users pay only for what they use. The concept of utility-based metering means that if a user has taken only one server, for instance, running for two hours, and then has shut it down, it pays for only two hours of computing resources.
Moreover, as the cloud providers are working with very large infrastructures and resources that are optimized and shared between different organizations, the end user can benefit from exceptionally low compute storage and network costs compared to traditional hosting. The variable expenses are much lower than what IT users would incur doing it by themselves because of the economies of scale.
Cloud computing also cuts costs related to downtime, since downtime rarely happens because of the in-built redundancy and cross hot-standby provisions. Thus, companies do not have to spend time and money fixing the issues related to or arising out of the downtime.
Global Deployment, Data Accessibility and Workload Mobility
Cloud computing offers another advantage of working from anywhere across the globe, as long as there is an internet connection available. Storing information in the cloud means that users can access it from anywhere with any device with just an internet connection and they do not have to carry around USB drives, an external hard drive, or multiple CDs to access their data. Corporate data can be accessed via smartphones and other mobile devices, enabling remote employees to stay up to date with co-workers and customers without limitation of the device used.
Also, users of cloud services can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. Most of the cloud service providers have infrastructure all over the world, so the users can deploy their applications in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks.
End users can spin up computing resources such as server time, storage and network for almost any type of workload on demand. They can provision these capabilities themselves in self-service mode thereby eliminating the traditional need for IT administrators to provision and manage computing resources.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
One of the major concerns of an organization using IT is loss of data. Storing data in the cloud guarantees that users can access their data not just anytime but even when their devices, e.g., laptops, tabs, smartphones etc. are inoperative or have been hacked. It also offers greater security to sensitive data in case of loss of some equipment as the user can even remotely wipe out data from the lost machines to avoid it getting in the wrong hands. With cloud-based services, organizations can quickly recover their data in the event of emergencies, such as natural disasters or power outages. This ensures business continuity and helps in recovery of data and information making them available even if the business suffers damage or disruption.
Migration Flexibility, Multi-Tenancy and Resource Pooling
Organizations can move certain workloads to or from the cloud, or to different cloud platforms as desired for cost optimization or to use new services as they emerge. With resource pooling, cloud providers service numerous customers from the same physical resources. The concept of multi-tenancy lets numerous customers share the same physical infrastructures or the same applications yet retain privacy and security over their own data.
The CSPs optimize their resource pools by putting applications in closer proximity to end users as it reduces latency and improves the user experience.
Automated Updates on Software
In cloud computing, the CSPs regularly upgrade and update the software including the updates on security. So, the users do not need to agonize regarding getting obsolete and spend their crucial time on maintaining and upgrading the system.
Better Control on Documents and Enhanced Collaboration
Before cloud came into being, employees needed to send files in and out as email attachments for being worked on by a single user at a time. Due to this, organizations ended up with a mess of contrary titles, non-compatible formats, and out of date file content. Moving to cloud computing has facilitated central file storage. This has brought in enhanced collaboration by authorizing diverse groups of people to virtually meet and exchange information with the help of shared storage. Such capability helps in improving the customer service and product development and also reducing the marketing time.
Cloud Computing Models
Cloud computing is basically a process of delivering computing services and as is the case with any service sector product, there are different models with their own typical combination of services delivered, their advantages, and their limitations.
There are three basic models (see Figure 3) of cloud computing and each model represents a different part of the cloud computing stack. The cloud computing stack consists of layers of cloud computing services, servers, platforms, and components, which can leverage several different clouds forming a single application stack.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. The CSPs provide grids or clusters or virtual servers, networks, storage and systems software designed to augment or replace the functions of an entire data center. Users are also provided application programming interfaces (APIs) that let them migrate workloads to a virtual machine (VM). They have an allocated storage capacity and can start, stop, access and configure the VM and storage as desired. IaaS providers offer small, medium, large, extra-large, as well as memory or compute-optimized instances enabling customization of instances for various workload needs generally on a pay-as-you-go model.
The IaaS cloud model is closest to a remote data center for business users and it provides the user with the highest level of flexibility and management control over their IT resources and is most similar to existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.
Examples of IaaS include Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud [EC2] and Simple Storage Service under Amazon Web Services (AWS). Diadem Technologies is amongst India’s leading cloud service providers that provides cloud, dedicated and hybrid hosting solutions to clients across the globe.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform-as-a-service removes the need for organizations to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and allows them to focus on the deployment and management of their applications. In this model the CSPs provide virtualized servers on which users can run existing applications or develop new ones without having to worry about maintaining the operating systems, server hardware, load balancing or computing capacity. Users access the development tools hosted on the infrastructures of cloud providers over the internet using APIs, web portals or gateway software. PaaS is used for general software development, and many PaaS providers host the software after it has been developed. This helps the user organization to be more efficient as they don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running their application. PaaS is available on an on-demand and pay-as-you-go model.
Examples of PaaS include Microsoft’s Azure and Salesforce’s Lightning Platform, AWS Elastic Beanstalk of Amazon and Google App Engine.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
The most widely known and widely used model of cloud computing, SaaS, provides all the functions of a sophisticated traditional application, but through a Web browser, not a locally-installed application. In most cases, people referring to Software as a Service (SaaS) are referring to end-user applications that are often called web services. It is a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In this model, while users gain access to application software and databases, they don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure, the servers, storage, application development and related common concerns of IT. Their main concern is how to use the particular service available under SaaS on-demand or by subscription.
Examples of SaaS include Microsoft 365 for productivity and email services, Google’s Gmail and Apps, instant messaging from AOL, Yahoo and Google, and VoIP from Vonage and Skype.
Cloud Computing Deployment Models
Cloud deployment is the process of deploying an application through one or more hosting models i.e. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS to leverage the cloud. This includes architecting, planning, implementing and operating workloads on cloud. There are three typical cloud models for different levels of management and security:
Public
Private, and
Hybrid
Public Cloud
A public cloud model is where a vendor makes available use of shared infrastructure, including computing storage and network resources that can be provisioned on demand and typically accessed over the internet for public usage. The set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by a third party for use by other companies or individuals is the public cloud. The consumer never gets to see the hardware used, nor knows the exact location of their data. However, they may specify the geographical region to optimize speed of performance and reduce latency depending on where users are located.
Cloud Service Providers create a highly scalable data center that hides the details of the underlying infrastructure from the consumer. Public clouds are viable because they offer many options for computing, storage, and a rich set of other services. Applications in the cloud are either created in the cloud or are migrated from an existing infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.
Private Cloud
The set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by an organization for the use of its employees, partners, or customers is the private cloud. This can be created and managed by a third party for the exclusive use of one enterprise. The private cloud is a highly controlled environment not open for public consumption. Thus, it sits behind a firewall, giving the company using it greater and more direct control of its data. As a result, the hardware is usually held on premises.
This differs from a typical on-premises server file approach in the sense that the cloud principles of virtualization and resource management tools are applied to create a pool of shared compute, storage, and network resources. With this approach, greater capital expenditure is required to acquire the host and the data center. Additional resources are needed for the day-to-day operations and maintenance of this equipment.
On-premises deployment does not provide many of the benefits of cloud computing but is sometimes sought for its ability to provide dedicated resources.
Hybrid Cloud
The hybrid cloud makes use of both public and private clouds. This model may be used for seasonal burst traffic or disaster recovery.
A hybrid model is established when a network link is configured between the private cloud to the services within the public cloud, essentially extending the logical internal network. This takes the benefits given from both the public and private models and allows the users to architect their services in the most appropriate model. Hybrid clouds are normally short-term configurations, either for testing purposes or for augmenting computing power in peak load seasons. They are often seen as a transitional state for enterprises before moving their service to the public cloud entirely.
However, beyond the three standard cloud deployment categories, two more types of deployments can be seen in practice: Community Cloud, and Multi-Cloud.
Community Cloud
This deployment model supports multiple organizations sharing computing resources that are part of a community. Examples include universities cooperating in certain areas of research, or police departments within a county or state sharing computing resources. Access to a community cloud environment is typically restricted to the members of the community.
Multi-Cloud
"Multi-cloud" means multiple public clouds. A company that uses a multi-cloud deployment incorporates multiple public clouds from more than one cloud provider. Instead of using one vendor for cloud hosting, storage, and the full application stack, users in a multi-cloud configuration use several vendors. They can leverage multiple IaaS vendors, or can incorporate different vendors for different services i.e. IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Multi-cloud can be purely for the purpose of redundancy and system backup.
Each cloud deployment model satisfies different organizational needs, so it’s important to choose a model that will satisfy the needs of the organization. Perhaps even more important is the fact that each cloud deployment model has a different value proposition and different costs associated with it. Therefore, in many cases, choice of a cloud deployment model may simply come down to money. In any case, to be able to make an informed decision, one needs to be aware of the characteristics of each environment so as to optimize the resources.
Cloud Migration Journey
Cloud Migration Journey is the process of migrating business operations from a legacy on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based one or from one cloud provider to another. It entails moving data, recreating computing resources, such as bare-metal servers or virtual machines (VM), and transitioning entire applications to a cloud infrastructure. The journey can be complex, costly, and carries substantial risk.
A cloud journey is not just a technical change; it is a business decision. It involves changes in the entire IT framework, multiple business departments, and critical business processes. Translating business goals into a migration plan is time consuming, but advanced planning is key to a successful migration.
Stages of a Cloud Journey:
Making the Business Case
Identify the Right Applications
Select a Cloud Service Provider
Initial Adoption
Full Migration
Post-Migration
Making Business Case: Identifying the Business Objectives for Migration to the Cloud
A company should start by evaluating the business implications of adopting a cloud infrastructure. Decision-makers must understand how the cloud differs from a traditional IT setup. They must be able to assess the benefits, risks, compliance, security, and data control implications on the organization as a whole and its IT activities in particular. Determine what systems and apps should be first to migrate, and what are the costs and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the expected cloud deployment.
Common business objectives for migrating to the cloud can include:
Avoiding maintenance costs that come with data centers
Achieving increased scalability
Improving resiliency with better failover capabilities
Increasing remote collaboration
Here it is important to gain consensus from the entire team about the business objectives to ensure that the purpose is clear to everyone. For example, for the case of UPPC (Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Ltd) the priority areas included increasing billing efficiency and enhancing customer satisfaction by focusing on reducing daily operational challenges. BookMyShow & iQuippo commenced cloud service usage for zero downtime deployments and for conducting large financial transactions.
Cloud Readiness Assessment: Identifying the Right Applications
Cloud readiness assessment is an essential step that can provide a solid footing before moving forward with plans. A cloud readiness assessment is the process where the existing applications and data are examined to determine if they can be moved to the cloud with minimal impact on operational continuity. The assessment is necessary to help gain a good grasp of what should be done to ensure a seamless cloud migration. Each application has its own unique design, which may or may not fit a cloud environment. If the application is suitable for the cloud, they can be just “lifted and shifted” to the cloud. Otherwise, there might be a need to make some changes.
Assessing cloud readiness also involves assessing potential of the team and identifying skill gaps, scrutinizing current IT infrastructure, identifying security requirements, and assessing operational readiness of the organization. For example, for the case of UPPCL, cloud service assessments highlighted the need of a centralized billing and metering system, as well as a self-service information and transactional tool for internal and external users. The cloud service as such would help users understand natural language queries keyed-in by the user and provide the information requested or process a transaction on behalf of the user.
Selecting a Cloud Service Provider
There is a wide range of cloud service providers, each offering a distinct architecture with a unique set of capabilities, licensing, and support. Some of the considerations for selecting a CSP include:
Suitability of the architecture of the cloud to the design of the organization’s workloads in terms of requirements of modifications in the existing systems.
Cloud implementation support from the provider in terms of their capabilities and services on offer regarding support needed before, during, and after the migration process. They should be included in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Licensing requirements and use of the existing licenses on the cloud.
For example, for the case of the Bihar School Examination Board, the requirement was of scaling operations from a minimal set of users to thousands at any given time. As such, they migrated their operations to AWS Cloud, paying attention to the cost, scalability, & security of the system. Similarly, iQuippo dealt with large scale financial transactions; it required a robust and secure DevOps compliant cloud service infrastructure architecture, and as such, chose AWS by Amazon as the cloud service provider.
Piloting and Initial Adoption
Initially, less business-critical applications such as office productivity, accounting, human resources, and Customer Relations Management (CRM), may be migrated, preferably in SaaS mode. Business-critical solutions, such as warehousing, production, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) that are typically tightly integrated with core business systems may require adopting PaaS and IaaS solutions. This requires pilots and proofs of concept, test and development environments, batch processing, and data archival before transitioning operations to a new, cloud-based solution.
The important aspect of developing the strategy to migrate needs to be addressed with regard to the existing applications. Decision needs to be taken regarding the applications that can be considered for:
Retire: the applications that are not needed in the future are got rid of.
Retain: the applications that are to be kept exactly as is till re-evaluation in future.
Re-host: the applications are migrated as is into the Cloud environment -“Lift and Shift”.
Re-platform: some of the applications are migrated after making some changes to take advantage of some of the special capabilities of the cloud – “Lift, Reshape, and Shift”.
Re-architect: it is redesigning / refactoring the application in a more cloud-native manner creating a server-less version of the legacy application.
Re-purchase: abandoning the existing software and migrating to a cloud-first application.
At this stage itself, the organization should develop a cloud governance strategy detailing which business tasks are performed where, the access policies, and monitoring and security tools that span both on-premises and cloud environments.
Full Migration
Execution of migration to cloud is a transitional activity where the main challenge is carrying out the migration with minimal disruption to normal operation, at the lowest cost, and over the shortest period of time.
If the data becomes inaccessible to users during migration as the system is synchronized and updated after the initial migration takes place, there is risk of impacting the business operations. Every workload element individually migrated should be proven to work in the new environment before migrating another element.
Ways have to be found out to synchronize changes that are made to the source data while the migration is ongoing. This is especially important for mission-critical applications that cannot sustain a long period of downtime. Test your plan, and then start executing it. Create a backup and recovery strategy, and use it if or when issues occur.
Post-Migration
The cloud journey doesn’t get completed with migration. It is the time to compare pre- and post-migration performance of the system. Cloud performance has to be monitored in accordance with the service level agreements (SLAs) and the organization’s performance goals. Customer issues that arise from the new cloud environment, unexpected changes, and synchronization issues may require fine tuning the applications and infrastructure.
Some important actions that need to be taken post-migration are:
Closure: Immediately after migration, it’s crucial to do a clean-up including shutdown and removal of any redundant systems, severing of superfluous network connectivity, and switching to production status of relevant applications on the cloud platform. These actions are extremely important from an operations standpoint. The cost of running those extra resources is one thing, but those systems are easily forgotten over time. When they co-exist, they only cause operational confusion and security issues. Action should be taken to do a controlled but prioritized decommissioning of such systems and connectivity.
Security Review: In the coexistence phase during migration, security policies have to allow traffic and system access between applications on both environments. Those policies need to be reviewed immediately after decommissioning of the “legacy” side of the application. While it can be a tedious process, any security breaches will end up consuming even more time, so it’s best dealt with as soon as possible. The security review shouldn’t be limited to just the legacy workloads. Security for cloud platforms is very different from traditional platforms, and migration provides an opportunity to review the capabilities available and take advantage where possible.
Evaluation: Once the platform is stable, evaluation of what was gained from the whole exercise has to be done with an eye on measuring the parameters on a “like for like” basis. Evaluation and documenting before and after the migration are important as it keeps the team on their goals and any decisions made.
Cost Reviews: Sizing of machines is one area where organizations err on the side of caution and oversize as in the early days of migration, applications tend to live in both environments, thereby increasing the running costs in the short term. Once the migration is complete, the focus has to be on optimizing for costs. A review should be done on a regular basis to determine how resources can be optimally utilized to reduce the costs. Small and manageable improvements can be made over time to gain efficiencies and it should become part of an ongoing process to improve applications.
Centre of Excellence: The migration team goes through many highs and lows during the process. It develops a lot of skill and knowledge that is priceless, and it would be a disaster if that team disbands completely after migration and goes back to their routine jobs. Technical members of the team generally continue with the new platform, but other members who have precious knowledge of the whole journey should also not be ignored. Preserving that knowledge and experience by keeping the team as part of “Centre of Excellence” where they meet on a regular basis for strategic discussions and decisions going forward would benefit the organization.
As a practical approach, the following practices can be adopted:
Getting the key buy-in from businesses on the expected downtime and informing them on the progress, milestones achieved and the key risk and issues throughout the migration process is critical.
The testing of both pre- and post-migration metrics on key process chains needs to be done for validation as an important step.
Data migration and checks and balances need to be signed off during the cloud adoption process.
Issues and resolutions should always be documented. This helps with root cause analysis as the logs can then be referred.
The availability and back-ups of key technical and functional resources need to be ensured for archival purposes.
In order to achieve its goals of the cloud journey, a company goes through the five milestones of Discovery, Review, Documenting Findings, Setting Milestones, and Remediation.
Cloud Migration Challenges
The use of cloud technology has exploded over the last couple of years, and it’s no surprise because operating on the cloud has numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. The global cloud computing market is expected to hit $623 billion by 2023 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18 percent.
Even with such significant growth, many enterprises are yet to realize the full potential of a cloud data environment because migration is often a huge challenge. Uncertainty over financial costs, security, internal resistance to change is among the issues of major concern. For this reason, businesses need to develop a meticulous plan and to carry out meticulous execution for a safe and successful migration.
Some of the common challenges that must be overcome in a cloud migration project include:
Interoperability: Some existing applications require adjustment, or even complete refactoring, to interact with a cloud environment. Whether to move an application’s dependencies, such as databases, to the cloud as-is, or transition to equivalent cloud-based services is a challenge.
Availability: Cloud migration process may require business systems to be temporarily offline. Migrations can also result in unplanned downtime. By developing a cloud-compatible disaster recovery plan, to avoid downtime that can impact business operations and customers, this risk can be surmounted.
Data Mobility: Although cloud vendors give some freedom for customers to download the stored data, the risk with using someone else’s application is often that the users can’t get all their data out of it in a way that’s usable in a different vendor’s software.
Cloud Expertise: Traditional IT teams may not be familiar with cloud environments. Knowledge of on-premises data centres and management of physical servers does not translate directly to the public cloud.
Data Security and Integrity: Cloud migrations can result in data loss or corruption, and may also open the door to attackers. Identifying security and compliance issues that may arise during the migration process, and in the target cloud environment, is important and the security strategy would have to be adapted to the cloud.
With cloud monitoring and management software being excessively flexible, a customer’s ability to know for sure who’s looking at what data and using it, especially from within their own organizations, is limited.
Ensuring compliance with security and privacy regulations for data stored in the cloud raises myriad issues for companies. The volume of data at stake is massive. Users have a tendency to upload more data than they can reasonably use, adding to security complexity and compliance costs. Access is another issue. The cloud enables and encourages more people to access data. And then there is the increasing number of devices supported by cloud platforms, which can become a security risk.
Despite this, it is seen that many companies under-invest in cloud security services. When confronted with a cloud breach, organizations tend to bolster security only in that area of weakness. But that tack can be costly and generally offers a lower-level safeguard than if higher levels of security had been integrated with system architecture at the time of design.
From a practitioner perspective, the following are key for dealing with technical challenges associated with cloud computing.
The Roll Back Strategy needs to be clearly understood and documented in case of failures for data uploads or migrations.
Disaster Recovery (DR) needs to be tested and validated for data replication
Scope creep for applications including the cutover plan needs to be managed and controlled.
Communications on risks and issues needs to be done periodically to the stakeholders as per the project plan
The cloud licenses need to be understood and controlled by the business stakeholders.
Implementation Strategy: Cloud Architecture Review Framework
It is critical to have the right understanding of the state of the workload and get an insightful understanding of architectural best practices. Company business should always have the optimal mix of infra, solutions and spends. Only then will they be able to take home the dividends of the cloud’s promise - of agility, scalability, responsiveness and business impact. Simply put it is vital for businesses to align their workloads – measure and improve, based on the business and technical objectives. To get a handle on all of this, teams need a well architected and optimized cloud environment.
The Cloud Architecture Review Framework describes the key concepts, design Principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. By answering a set of foundational questions, the company learns how well its IT architecture aligns with cloud best practices and is provided guidance for making Improvements. The framework helps businesses to decide, build and deploy infrastructure faster on the cloud. While doing so it helps in lowering and mitigating risks.
This framework delivers insights that enable informed decisions and as the cycle progresses teams end up learning and making best practices as part of their customer driven culture.
In the course of its cloud journey, the company should follow the five pillars of the process of cloud migration to improve their efficiency by using Cloud: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization.
Cloud Migration Timeline
Companies move to the cloud at different rates. An application migration timeline includes planning the migration, training staff, and modifying applications to facilitate deep cloud integration. Each organization will accomplish these steps at its own pace. A medium project involving migrating on a SaaS model may take 2-4 months while it can take 6-24 months to set up more complex server setups and configure cloud-native services in case of PaaS and IaaS models.
As we see in our cases, cloud migration periods vary significantly. For example, UPPCL’s cloud-migration exercise took over a period of 8 weeks, while BSEB took 12 weeks to achieve similar targets. On the other hand, iQuippo required around 6 months to achieve full cloud-migration. As one can see, cloud migration timelines are not constant for companies across industries, but varies according to the complexity of the firm requirements, the challenges it faces in the early-phases, as well as the time it takes for firms to create alliances with cloud service providers.
Acronyms
BFSI | : | Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance |
CSP | : | Cloud Service Provider |
API | : | Application Programming Interface |
VM | : | Virtual Machine |
TCO | : | Total Cost of Ownership |
UPCC | : | Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Ltd |
SLA | : | Service Leve Agreement |
AWS | : | Amazon Web Services |
CRM | : | Customer Relations Management |
SaaS | : | Software as a Service |
PaaS | : | Platform as a Service |
EC2 | : | Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud |
ERP | : | Enterprise Resource Planning |
IaaS | : | Infrastructure as a Service |
CAR | : | Cloud Architecture Review |
SME | : | Subject Matter Expert |
CAGR | : | Compound Annual Growth Rate |
BSEB | : | Bihar School Education Board |
CPU | : | Central Processing Unit |
BCDR | : | Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery |
References
This write up is adapted from a chapter of the book named Digital Transformation Implementation Handbook by the Author and Ranjan K Prasad on 08Sep2022 via Blue Hill Publications. So, interested readers may refer to the same work for more in-depth discussions, sources of quoted information and generic bibliography.
About the Author
Mr. Soumitra Poddar is one of the distinguished alumni of Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur. He graduated from the institute in the year 1995 after achieving his specialization in Finance and Information Systems. Before coming to VGSoM, he worked with Mastek Limited as a consultant and gained a good technical exposure of the industry. In the year 1997, he moved to PricewaterhouseCoopers and worked there for five years as a senior consultant. Later in 2002, he joined IBM.
His entrepreneur approach led him to launch his own business advisory on Tech Consulting (www.strategic-consulting.in, www.vittiai.com). He is the author of the book titled "Digital Transformation Implementation Handbook" (www.dtih.in). He has more than 30 years of experience in the field of Corporate Governance, Investment Banking, Digital Transformation Projects implementation, AI & Marketing Analytics Digital Solutions, Cyber deployments, ERP implementation, Industry 4.0 and Global Transition services. He is also a certified Independent Director by Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs under Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India.
Other than working in the IT Industry for over three decades, he is also involved in academia: Adjunct Professor in IISWBM, Kolkata at present and adjunct professor in IIT KGP for about two years from July2017 to Apr2019.
More about him may be found via his LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumitra-poddar-48567914/. He may be reached at soumitra.poddar@strategic-consulting.in.
~~Publisher, Kunal Konar
12Dec2025, West Bengal, India
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