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February - 2015 - issue > CXO View Point

Cloud is Here to Stay

By Manjunath Krishnamurthy, Manager IT Infrastructure, Sanovi Technologies
Monday, February 9, 2015
By Manjunath Krishnamurthy, Manager IT Infrastructure, Sanovi Technologies
Cloud is becoming the mainstream and an integral part of an organization’s IT strategy and deployments. Businesses can no longer ignore cloud offerings, led by product vendors, end users are increasingly open and considering the opex model. There is cloud based IT strategy for every enterprise, be it a small, medium or a large enterprise, leveraging from the wide array of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. IT leaders are seeking to reduce the capex burden and deliver information services which increase the benefit to the businesses. When IT organizations are tightly aligned with business, the resulting benefits of process automations results in productivity. We at Sanovi had made the choice of Messaging and Collaborations, that are used enterprise wide, to be moved to the cloud. Our experience had been that these services consumed the majority of the IT resources and managing and sustain these competencies in house was not in line with the goals of the business.

The digitization of everything leads to the security challenges everywhere. Increased investment in the security, however, is not correlated with better security or increased investment in the right reaction to the inevitable breach and this is a big concern. Sanovi has adopted BYOD policy to create flexible and technology friendly work environment, this has helped IT to cope up with the faster engineering release cycles. However, these resulted in many smart, connected products enter the enterprise networks via BYOD, the network policies and architecture had to be aligned to meet these needs.

At Sanovi, we realized the potential of Hybrid Cloud Model very early on, and have emphasized on leveraging virtualization technologies. We reduced the real estate foot print of our Computing Space, with majority of our production running on the Hybrid Cloud Model. To have an agile IT and align to business needs, we used the capabilities of hybrid cloud to fulfill end users requirements. This has enabled our IT and Business Leadership visualize the whole datacenter in terms of computing power, and how it can capitalize along with the benefits of optimal use of IT at reduced costs. This is in contrast with traditional IT, that would be investment heavy and not optimally utilized and are seen as static investment in silos.

The private cloud is still a relatively newer term, but is based on proven technology that has been around for a while. Besides providing tremendous benefits of the pooled computing resources and virtualization, it maintains the security and reliability of a normal dedicated server. The private cloud is not fits for everyone but it definitely was a boon for us, with our dynamic workloads of Engineering or Product Development Environments, where the computing and networking power needed to be orchestrated dynamically and many a times, the engineering community was part of the orchestration process. The flexibility of this kind was enabled our product development to follow agile development methodologies, with faster release cycles.

Business leaders must look at business resiliency immediately, for both on-premise and cloud applications. Typically IT departments are focused on production systems, investing in solution for recovery and continuity becomes an afterthought. A combination of Natural Disasters, hardware failure and human error result in IT outages that often results in financial loses. Sanovi realized the requirements of mid-level enterprises for IT recoverability and has innovatively positioned Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) product to meet their needs. Any scale of enterprise can leverage on the cloud infrastructure to meet their recoverability objectives with cost effectively and achieve IT resilience. IT at Sanovi is the early adapters of these technologies and contributes in maturing the products. We are successfully running Sanovi products internally to automate our critical production Infrastructure. Sanovi Cloud Continuity product is running on a mix of hybrid cloud model with DR infrastructure from vendors like NetMagic and AWS. Our recoverability capabilities have been achieved for a fraction of investments that a conventional model would take.

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