Business meets IT in the Cloud

According to Gartner, the Cloud is one of the top technology trends driven by technologies like mobility, video, social media & collaboration and ubiquitous computing. “Looking at all of these technologies, enterprises have to analyze if they can scale up their infrastructure to meet growing needs; you will find that there is a bottleneck here,” he noted.

There was a sea change in the nature of employees today as well as the work processes that they followed. “Businesses have to prepare themselves with a full-fledged back-end infrastructure to support scenarios where employees bring their own devices to work,” Thoppil said.

He warned that while new technologies might look interesting, they came with their own challenges. “There is an environment of new customers, employees, ecosystem and even competition. Therefore, to satisfy the norms of efficiency and innovation, enterprises need to align business and IT. For this, we need Cloud computing,” he said.

He said there had been a shift in IT models with various drivers accelerating the journey towards Cloud computing.

“A lot depends upon how your IT systems integrate with the private Cloud. The Cloud is both a business and a technology model. The difference between the private Cloud and a virtualized environment is one of TCO,” he commented.

Companies might have different strategies for their data centers and the other essential arms of their IT set up. However, the Cloud was becoming critical to strategy and planning today.

He advised CIOs to be careful while designing their Cloud strategy in order to ensure that the Cloud vendor was able to visualize, investigate, strategize, incorporate, orchestrate and nourish the change that it brought to the table.