"Service providers should offer performance, availability, and scalability assurance"

Almost every company, from large to small and midsized, generate huge amount of data through complicated applications usage. Now the onus is on the companies to manage it effectively for their businesses. This requires the imperative need of a modern technology oriented data centre, whether on-premise or hosted.

It may not make good business decision, for some companies, to manage their own data centres and hence, there have been the need of third party data centers leveraging on the capabilities of data centre service providers to run or manage data centres for the business.

The simple reason is that any data centre requires a lot of capital expenditure and in this slowdown, IT budgets are getting restricted and most CIOs think on ways to reduce Capex and Opex. Even from the prospect of having its own data centre, CIOs worry on multiple topics.

To propagate a unified solution on these lines, NxtGen-through Smart Infrastructure Forum organized in Delhi in association with DQ Channels-spoke on their offerings. In the sidelines, DQ Channels also moderated a panel discussion in the presence of around 100 CIOs on the challenges, best practices and the way forward in the New Year 2014. 

From a government perspective, Praveen Mishra, Additional Director, ERNET India spoke on the challenges on the adoption of cloud computing and virtualization. According to him, awareness itself is very low at this point of time. He cited an example where one of his customers had security concerns the moment he was shifted to a virtual machine from an on-premise data centre.

 He said: "Physical machines are as secured as the virtual machine but the apprehension in user's mind is due to the lack of awareness. People feel cloud is a common platform."

 Reacting on this perspective of lack of awareness and security concerns amid cost, A S Raj Gopal, MD NxtGen explained on his company's standpoint and initiatives.

Rajgopal cited incidents while providing a service, when his own servers were compromised. "Someone from Brazil had compromised our servers once but the good part was that we had invested in technologies which led to pull off this issue," said Raj Gopal.

He says that a CIO should have a clue on the newer technologies while investing in a data centre, go through all vendor evaluations and make huge capital investments, which he maintains, a phenomenal cost. But in shared services, mentions Raj Gopal, the costs go down and he adds, "Security becomes far simpler."  

He believes that it is a service provider's responsibility to provide security as it is part of the infrastructure and not part of the application.

 

To a CIO of mid to large enterprises, Shrirang Despande of Emerson suggested not to predict the IT infrastructure investment, rather invest on short term goals. He adds, ".We developed one critical infrastructural, by which we can deal with flexible infrastructure approach-IT changes, which are likely to happen over a period and completely change in the IT requirement."

Amidst, from a consultant point of view on SLAs, on issues that a CIO should consider on SLAs accountability and multiple and contradictory compliance across geographies, Venkat Nippani,Director, Government & Public Sector Consulting, Grant Thornton spoke on different issues.

He mentioned that in cloud security alliance, SLA management is not different from the traditional set up as the framework doesn't change.

He said, "There are lot of apprehensions but at the end of the day contractual and legal things have to be worked out and one has to look for getting multiple best practices."

Adding on the SLAs front, Rajgopal quipped, "An assurance of performance, availability and scalability should be asked while entering into an agreement with a service provider. One should not get stuck with some investments which cannot grow."
The next 12 months
 On the view on the next year, Mishra of ERNET says that, "The internet of thing that is internet over the new protocol- IPv6 would add and enable enormous devices. There are already buzz words like smart homes or smart cities."

While Despande of Emerson, on his outlook of the next year, cited an Emerson initiated Data Centre User Group Survey where the company surveys number of companies, which have existing data centres on growing needs.

He said, "Energy saving, infrastructure management and modularity has climbed up the ladder in the preferences. There degree of consciousness has increased and hence we will see lot awareness related decisions in the coming year."