To the outside world, cloud computing might seem as just a new way to outsourcing, but from the inside it is all about increasing productivity, optimizing application controls and doing away with the inflexibly of long contracts.
All this is driving enterprise to a new direction of positive behavior towards cloud and creating opportunities out of their challenges. The advantages of cloud computing are quite extensive and that’s why enterprise are now able to compete on a level playing field.
Talking about the importance of cloud for the enterprise segment, Naresh Sharma, Director channel sales, CA Technologies, explains, that today’s enterprises understand the real value of public cloud in terms of cost efficiency, time to market and its ability to grow new models for business. “Owing to the same, the importance of cloud and the adoption of cloud is growing at a rapid pace. Enterprises today are open to looking at public cloud options compared to in-house private cloud setup. Also, many large enterprises today do not have captive data centers and are hosted with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who also providing cloud services. CA Technologies has an extensive product portfolio for SMB segment which are designed by understanding the needs of the industry. Additionally, we also offer practical and differentiated technology, and emphasize on packaging and licensing that make sense for customers and partners. CA has offerings for large enterprises, growing businesses, government organizations and service providers. Some cloud products offered by CA Technologies are CA Nimsoft Monitor, CA Applogic Cloud Platform, CA Cloud Minder. These cloud solutions, help increase business agility, accelerate cycle times, reduce costs, increase margins and drive revenues,” he adds on.
As per the views of Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab, South Asia, enterprises are actively using virtual environments in their infrastructure, because these technologies enable corporations to make hardware and software infrastructures easier to manage and scale. CISOs need to pay attention to the security and reputation risks associated with this and implement secure access and encryption technologies to support this trend.
“Virtualization is another emerging trend. Although we are not seeing a strong increase in virtualization-oriented cyber-threats, we do have a different problem. One of the main advantages of virtualization is that it allows new virtual servers to be implemented extremely quickly and easily. It’s so quick and easy that some companies have huge farms of virtual servers, many of which are poorly protected and under-managed. Flexibility and related advantages encourage companies to shift critical workload into virtual environments. However, not everybody realizes that by creating another virtual serving you are – in effect – launching the same server software used on real hardware. Of course, like any other software it will probably contain vulnerabilities that should be patched. So IT Security managers should pay extremely close attention to the security of the company’s virtual infrastructure. Traditional security solutions are not the answer here. In virtual environments they cause new issues, leading to decreased consolidation ratios, antivirus storms and poor management, especially in VDI environments. In 2013 lots of experts were talking up the prospect of efficiently analyzing Big Data. We see this as an interesting trend, at the same time, as the most dangerous threat. Cyber-espionage is a good example of such a threat. It is extremely hard to address these risks using traditional security approaches. However, a technology capable of analyzing large amounts of unstructured data and finding correlations between multiple events inside a particular system is something that we believe can address advanced persistent threats (APTs) efficiently. We’re actively investigating opportunities all the above areas,” he adds on.
Security is certainly one of the biggest concerns organizations face when it comes to cloud adoption. But concerns in the cloud are fast changing towards confidence in cloud as more and more mission critical data is being run on the cloud. Security is relative to what cloud computing solutions are used or which cloud environment the organization is planning to migrate to.
In order to overcome security fears while moving to the cloud, CIOs and IT leaders must develop a strategic cloud module along with their vendors or cloud service providers so that they are aware of the functioning of the cloud.
Speaking about the benefits of cloud, Naresh Sharma from CA adds that the primary benefit of cloud is achieving the economies of scale. It helps in growing the volume output of productivity with fewer resources bringing down the cost. “Cloud helps in reduction of overall cost of production. Cloud reduces the spending on technology and allows access to data from anywhere. Cloud helps in streamlining processes and gets more work done in less time with less people. Monitoring of projects can be done more efficiently and helps enterprises function in their allocated resources and in time frames. Mobility along with cloud has helped in increasing innovation and productivity within employees. The freedom to work on the go has led to achieving increased output from individuals,” he adds.
And as far as the enterprise community and its computational needs are concerned, it is all going to be driven by cloud. It is the future of things to come and when it comes to optimizing IT solutions and business needs cloud is helping enterprise achieve rapid return on investment and moving capital expenditure to operating expenditure in the fast lane. All this is prompting more and more enterprise to seriously look at incorporating cloud infrastructure.
With the help of innovative concepts such as storage as a service or infrastructure as a service, and moving ahead on the above assertions, today, the technology driven concepts of cloud computing are also answering a number traditional IT challenges such as increasing the responsibility of otherwise slow and unresponsive systems working within the enterprise community.
