- CIOs are confident about moving their workloads on the Cloud Owing to the built-in security layers, access control within network infrastructure, compliance, threat mitigation and many such advantages.
- CIOs have identified the need for virtual collaboration on Cloud which will enable co-creating content in real -time, consistent communication, interactive ideation and prioritizing capabilities.
As more applications and workloads become cloud-native, organizations need a new approach that facilitates consistency, improved security, remote monitoring and process agility.
At the recent edition of “Digital Leaders Club”, curated by CORE Media and powered by Google Cloud India, CIOs from different sectors and Google India executives, discussed the use-cases for infrastructure modernization and how they foresee their digital journey being steered along with modernization and managing virtual workloads.
Anoop Mathur, Founder & President, CORE Media, facilitated the discussion and in his opening statement he emphasized on the nature of changing work environments. He said, “Virtual is the reality and Cloud is ubiquitous in today’s environments. Virtualization helps maximize the use of existing resources and optimize operating costs. In an already virtualized environment, migrating to the Cloud supports scalability and flexibility. While, privacy and related risks were a concern with virtual environments, Cloud has now evolved significantly to support in terms of security, scalability and supporting virtual workloads.”
A collaborative approach towards modernization
The IT Head of a large Indian Conglomerate shared that “Data centre and infrastructure has never been a problem for us and we are hosting at our own location. We have begun the modernization journey in collaboration with our technology service providers”
Group CIO of an internet company shared his views, “We are cloud native and during the pandemic we saw a 3x surge in traffic. Cloud came across as a super-hero during that phase to help us maintain the blazing speed that was the utmost necessary. As an Internet company we need the ability to scale up and down in fraction of seconds for our B2b and B2b2c services. We are now in the refactoring stage.”
Sharing what Google Cloud has to offer for larger conglomerates, Sai Prasad Kolluri, Principal Architect - Google Cloud said, “Transformation doesn't come with a click of a button. We have brought technology solutions that support the 3R strategy – replace, refactor and re-platform. This fundamentally gives flexibility for enterprises to be able to experiment, observe and progressively accelerate modernization.”
The speed at which organizations develop and introduce new applications becomes a source of competitive advantage. To keep up, organizations must faster and agile business transformation and cyber risks, security must be tightly integrated with the development process.
Head of Information Systems of a leading real estate group shared, “Real Estate as an industry has predominantly been very traditional and not at the forefront of technological adoption or advancements. However, recently there has been a massive change in the way real estate developers now look at technology and the clear focus is on faster customer acquisition and simplifying customer journeys. Technology comes as an enabler. Infrastructure is the cornerstone for driving real-time data insights. Our use-case clearly led us to adopt public Cloud. Working from remote locations accelerated processes and data started coming in faster. However, skill sets and expertise to drive modernization is critical and lack of that creates error margins and inconsistency.”
Speaking on the skill sets and modernizing apps on cloud, Sai Prasad shared, “We have recently announced the Cloud dusting boost campaign that aims to create experts in app modernization and skills. As for the real-estate a lot of the GPU based capabilities that are sitting on cloud are being used. And we work very closely with all the remote workstation partners. This gives flexibility in terms of API management. There is a convergence between telco provider and cloud provider. Anthos makes the way you run your applications more simplistic. The biggest advantage and the flexibility is the ability to have like one single control plane or dashboard. At a click of a button you can ensure that all your applications are compliant.”
As organisations have begun their digital journey, they are exploring easier development, faster innovation, and efficient scale, all while simultaneously reducing their technology risk. However, some of their workloads cannot move to the public cloud entirely or right away, due to factors such as industry or region-specific compliance and data sovereignty needs, low latency or local data-processing requirements, or because they need to run close to other services.
Speaking about bringing the cloud power closer, Sai Prasad mentioned about the Google Distributing Cloud Edge. He explained, “It is a portfolio of solutions consisting of hardware and software that extend our infrastructure to the edge and into your data centres.
Security solutions on Cloud
Chief Transformation Officer & Head (SAP & IT) of a petrochemical company shared, “We have automated production, operations and leveraged technology for energy optimization. Earlier, security seemed a challenge but the built-in security layers have made Cloud a better choice. For mid-size companies like us, we need a seamless collaboration and how Cloud plays a role. Remote working became an inevitable choice in the pandemic, so the need is to co-create content and ensure a seamless flow of communication in real-time. Efficiency and faster decision making are essential.”
Speaking on the security part, Sai Prasad shared, “Hyperscalers, especially Google is layered, the security is multi-fold. We are able to provide a late three layer for data protection. We’ve built the whole risks for analysis, protecting websites and enterprise assets,
Speaking on the role of data, President & Head IT of a leading coffee café chain in India shared, “Every customer that walks in the café generates data and which is why most of our workload runs on cloud. We have seen a spike in digital payments in recent years. Data and insights are critical elements of our digital strategies and growth.”
Addressing this Sai Prasad added, “One of the flashy products we have is Google Big Query. With Big Query we have been able to build massive interval platforms on the cloud which are kind of self-managed and also build machine learning on top of it with the data that is sitting right there to build insights for future action that one needs to take. Google has opened up what we see from Google trends and the data sets are anonymized. Enterprise data can be merged with the trends.”
CIOs across various sectors are interested to explore and experiment with technology applications and they are interested to understand Edge Cloud. Getting the skill sets and resources at par with the pace of digital transformation is challenging and CIOs seek strong and expert cloud technology partners.
