THE CLASSIC DILEMMA: INTRANET VS. CLOUD

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1 THE CLASSIC DILEMMA: INTRANET VS. CLOUD With most of the boxes ticked, be it time, cost, fit for purpose or user experience, adoption of cloud in various forms and shapes is becoming an essential differentiator for CIOs who are increasingly seeking a place in the board room; it is only a matter of time before they become an existential strategy, writes Prabu Balasubramanyan, Executive Director, TransSys Solutions. 35

2 Traditionally, organisations grew their IT landscape by identifying applications for every of their business critical needs, acquiring the application as well as the required infrastructure to operate them, bringing in consultants or technical skills required to deploy them. Once these are deployed, these applications need to be maintained, upgraded and supported, which calls for a continued presence of required skills in the organisation, by adding further costs to the business on an on-going basis. These applications typically come under two classifications Business Applications (ERP/CRM/ Vertical Applications) and Internal collaboration applications (or Intranet applications) that aim at internal communications and collaboration. Over time, these investments and the cost of sustaining them as well as keeping them current, has grown to be a drain on the organisational budgets. And the stress typically gets further accentuated when the business climate is not conducive enough. Even otherwise, organisations often times find themselves spending more money on keeping their lights-on instead of spending on growth and innovation initiatives. In other words, instead of investing in the core competencies of the business or in the continued pursuit of their raison d etre, funds are consumed to maintain what they have. This is the classic dilemma that is bothering the minds of many CIOs today. Rays of hope This is where the cloud is becoming a game changer today. Relieving the organisations of having to make significant CAPEX investments in expensive hardware and software license acquisitions, cloud solutions offer customers agility and leading edge and niche solutions that addresses key functions of the business. Cloud applications, (known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions) today addresses every aspect of business application needs allowing new age organisations build themselves a cloud centric business model. This can be seen in both the business applications as well as the internal or intranet applications today. Cloud centric IT landscapes allow organisations an amazing level of elasticity that could have been both time and cost intensive in the traditional on premise model. With an ability to scale up and down the configurations & processing power, cloud infrastructure helps many CIOs to get instant gratification at a fraction of the costs, which would have otherwise been redundant in a CAPEX model. The same applies for business applications on the cloud as well. With an ever-increasing array of applications for every need, the SaaS world presents the CIOs with an ability to truly adopt best of breed applications. These applications also bring in great level of user experience and agility that could not have been achieved with an on-premise application either packaged or custom built. WITH AN ABILITY TO SCALE UP AND DOWN THE CONFIGURATIONS & PROCESSING POWER, CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE HELPS MANY CIOS TO GET INSTANT GRATIFICATION AT A FRACTION OF THE COSTS, WHICH WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE BEEN REDUNDANT IN A CAPEX MODEL. 36

3 Private and Hybrid Clouds Delivering the Cloud Promise with Cloud Network Automation Private/Hybrid Clouds Are Growing 73% of CIOs budget for cloud today 1 9 out of 10 CIOs plan to increase private/hybrid cloud spend 1 36% of Apps will be on the cloud within two years 2 Manual Processes Slow Deployments Cloud promise of minutes But Reality is hours or days 70% don t have automated IP address management 3 8 out of 10 handle DNS manually or with custom scripts 3 3 touches per spin up IPAM Admin Server Admin DNS Admin Automating Network Services Improves Agility Provisioning new VM takes 72% De-provisioning and clean up take 100% When a subnet is full, it takes 3X And tracking VMs coming and going is 24X more time with manual process more time with manual process as long to create new instance longer with manual Cloud Is Growing. Are You Keeping Up? You are only as fast as your slowest point. Automation can help, learn more at Cloud Network Automation Can Provide: Agility Cost Savings Productivity Sources: 1. Piper Jaffray CIO Study, UBS CIO Study, Infoblox Study 2015 Infoblox Inc. All Rights Reserved infoblox.com info@infoblox.com 37

4 COUPLED WITH THE FACT THAT THESE DATA CENTRES HAVE TO GO THROUGH REGULAR AUDITS TO KEEP THEIR CERTIFICATIONS CURRENT, CLOUD ADOPTION WITH FURTHER LAST MILE DATA SECURITY ASPECTS LIKE DATA ENCRYPTION ETC. ACTUALLY PRESENTS THE CIOS TODAY AN EFFECTIVE COVER AGAINST EVEN INTERNAL RISK. Collaboration In this age of talent, organisations are willing to acquire the right talent irrespective of the location in their pursuit of excellence. And putting the talents together to work towards a common goal has been a challenge for many business leaders and CIOs. This also necessitates effective collaboration and real time communication within the organisation. Often times, this called for extensive investments in secure internal networks and a communication/collaboration tools and the typical office productivity applications, making the whole process an expensive affair. When you combine the time factor to this where such collaboration may be short term in nature or project centric, these investments leads to fair amount of redundancy as well. Leading organisations today are consciously adopting cloud applications like Office 365 from Microsoft that includes applications like outlook and Sharepoint, Google Apps to break away from the shackles of a monolithic on-premise deployment of such applications and benefit from the latest technology without having to bother about building internal maintenance and support skills. The cost effective technology upgrades in these cloud model also helps businesses leverage latest features and functionalities without having to incur heavy investments. 38

5 ABOUT Prabu serves as the Executive Director for TransSys solutions. In this role he provides strategic leadership and governs the expansion of services and business solutions of Transsys in providing an end-to-end scalable IT services. With over 12 years of association with the delivery management of varied projects in diverse domains (Airlines, Telecom and Banking & Financial Services as a special mention) and a significant portion of this having been spent in the Europe, Middle East & Africa, Prabu brings in the unique perspective of delivering ERP solutions to meet the expectations of the customers of this region in a way that would help the stakeholders realise value and their vision of such implementations. The same applies for business applications also. Most of the marketleading solutions when it comes to business applications are either from proven cloud players (e.g. Salesforce, Workday etc) or those who are adopting the cloud-first approach to their new software releases. And then there are classic players like Oracle, who infact straddle across all aspects of cloud such as SaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), leading to a new terminology of Anything-as-a-Service or XaaS. The data security myth The CIO community along with the risk management, or internal audit team, often times cite data security as an argument against cloud. It is a known fact that the challenges to data security are more internal than external. The security breaches are often times either caused or aided by internal vulnerabilities. And cloud data centres with their various security layers today present a far more effective data security option to businesses than what they can ever afford to build internally. Coupled with the fact that these data centres have to go through regular audits to keep their certifications current, cloud adoption with further last mile data security aspects like data encryption etc. actually presents the CIOs today an effective cover against even internal risks. A natural choice With most of the boxes ticked, be it time, cost, fit for purpose or user experience, adoption of cloud in various forms and shapes is becoming an essential differentiator for CIOs who are increasingly seeking a place in the board room; it is only a matter of time before they become an existential strategy as well. The cloud applications today are enabling the line-of-business leaders to make calls on IT solutions, which were hitherto in the exclusive domain of CIOs. And their quick-to-deploy nature with zero to little options for customisations makes a convincing case for businesses to adopt more and more of industry standard practices in their pursuit of cost efficiency. 39