‘Indian CIOs leapfrogging peers with cloud-first strategy’

Cloud migration is not an end in itself for every application, according to Prashant Pradhan, Chief Technology Officer, IBM India/South Asia. “The focus must be on the outcome, and where the legacy applications fit in the puzzle,” he says in an interview to BusinessLine. “With the launch of IBM Cloud Private, we aim to help customers across all industries modernise their internal systems and take advantage of their investments by transforming them into a true cloud environment.”

Indian CIOs are leapfrogging peers with a cloud-first strategy because in many cases the external digital ecosystems are evolving faster than other parts of the world. CIOs here identify the need to address changing business priorities that are largely data-driven in the coming years. Excerpts:

Is it curtains for the enterprise data centre? An emerging contra view suggests that the traditional on-premises data centre will be around for a while. Your views?

The answer often lies in data — which in turn drives what makes sense for compute. For example, a company collects data on, say, customer location — and their core service/offering primarily leverages location.

The data and compute are perfectly okay to be cloud native. In contrast, say the company deals with a lot of personally identifiable information, financial/regulatory data, or some data which are a unique differentiator to your organisation; it’s much more likely that the company will have a hybrid strategy — to separate, say their systems of ‘engagement’ from systems of ‘record.’

One of the important things to recognise is that many benefits of cloud native applications are about containerisation, microservices, continuous delivery, and devOps — which has nothing to do with public vs private. So many enterprises are adopting cloud native in their on-premises data centres. As long as they can multiplex these re-factored workloads effectively, the choice has less to do with public vs private, than being cloud native on their software.

Our recently-launched IBM Cloud Private provides the bridge to a full-fledged cloud strategy by allowing companies to create cloud environment behind their firewalls and take advantage of the control and security of their on-premises system with the freedom to connect or move resources to public clouds in the future.

We understand most companies need a combination of public and private clouds to meet their needs. In fact, most companies will use multiple clouds from different vendors. IBM is advancing a multi-cloud strategy that helps companies securely move between different clouds, both public and private.

Has digital transformation based on cloud-native applications now become the trend?

This is not about a ‘trend,’ but the characteristics of these applications, which pose specific engineering demands on us. For instance, popular digital offerings deliver new features to users almost every week — not months or years — and with no downtime. Their workload can fluctuate in a matter of minutes or hours — say due to a new offer, or campaign, or other events.

Also, digital applications need to naturally leverage ecosystems — smartphones, sensors, payment gateways, maps, weather, Aadhaar, etc. Companies just can’t reinvent the wheel on each of these. So if you think about it, you can’t achieve any of this with big ‘monoliths’ of software, tightly coupled with infrastructure.

By design, companies need clean separation of concerns — both within their software (which manifests as microservices) — and between software and infrastructure (which manifests as virtualisation/ containerisation). Similarly, from a process/lifecycle perspective, you simply can’t do this without the right version management, integrated testing and deployment — what we call the devOps toolchain.

So, cloud-native is simply the right engineering framework and best practices for these applications. You wouldn’t do it any other way.

Do modern-day CIOs obsess themselves about a ‘cloud-first strategy’ and cloud-native applications? What is it like in India?

We do get into discussions where CIOs may approach cloud as an end in itself — versus as-a-means to an end. However, what is interesting is that, consistently across industries, we see businesses asking IT for capabilities which are naturally delivered by a cloud native approach. Examples could be attacking cost to serve through digital, establishing data platforms to flexibly serve multiple lines of business, creating ecosystems of B2B partners, and the likes.

In each case, the path goes through cloud — in very specific architectural patterns — and we work with CIOs to ensure it is designed and implemented correctly. India is leapfrogging, because in many cases the external digital ecosystems are evolving faster than other parts of the world.

Today, being on cloud is important for organisations to harness the full potential of their data. While building their cloud strategy, CIOs need to look at cloud as a technology that adapts, evolves, and learns to address their changing business priorities, which will be largely data-driven in the coming years.

Keeping these principles in mind, IBM Cloud has been built for future to help CIOs usher in the next era of businesses by leveraging an enterprise strong cloud built to help them get value from their data and a cloud possessing a full range of cognitive abilities, from machine learning to AI coupled with strong security and compliance capability.

As the continue to build on their cloud strategy, IBM cloud can also offer various forms of cloud-based services such as blockchain and Internet of Things.

How are latency, cost, security and compliance factors taken care of while effecting migration to cloud?

We use well-defined methodologies to plan cloud migration — something we call ‘Cloud Innovate.’ A key here is to have architectural patterns and best practices — often by industry — which makes sure we have a repeatable/proven approach, and are not re-inventing the wheel on a case by case basis. The methodology ensures all these factors are considered.

Under the hood, generally, data are a big element driving a lot of the planning. Compliance is part of that, and often industry-specific.

Security is part of the architectural pattern, and so is latency/performance requirements. Cost is foundational as part of the overall RoI and business case coming out of the exercise.

IBM Cloud is one of the most secure cloud platforms available today, and it is proven by the fact that we have a large roster of clients in some of the most highly regulated and data-sensitive industries, including global banks, healthcare organisations, telecom and government agencies. IBM protects the cloud environment through a comprehensive portfolio of solutions.

These security solutions span the entire cloud lifespan and all security domains – including identity and access management, application, and data security, as well as infrastructure protection and security intelligence for the cloud.

What happens to those legacy applications in whose case migration could prove difficult/expensive?

For many important legacy applications, the more pertinent question is ‘refactoring’ the application for cloud — typically to fit within an overall architecture comprising cloud native applications - not so much about migration.

For example, core banking refactoring — by externalising various capabilities through APIs - is a very common (and important) part of cloud-native digital transformation programmes in banks.

So as discussed before, cloud migration is not an end in itself for every application. The focus must be on the outcome, and where the legacy applications fit in the puzzle.

With the launch of IBM Cloud Private, we aim to help customers across all industries modernize their internal systems and take advantage of their investments in this systems by transforming them into a true cloud environment.

How should start-ups, small businesses, and large enterprises brace themselves for the future here? What are the cost implications/benefits?

Interestingly, this is less a factor of the size/life stage of a business, and more of their data/service/offering. As discussed above, the choice of being cloud native is different from public vs private cloud.

In B2C start-ups dealing with non-personally identifiable information/non-regulatory data, both cloud native and public cloud make natural sense, while being very cost effective and allowing rapid scaling. However, there are enterprise startups, or healthcare start-ups, who need to plan their cloud usage more carefully. Overall, start-ups are adopting cloud as a platform for innovation, cost flexibility, scalability, access to cloud-enabled new age technologies and market adaptability, coupled with strong security features.

Small businesses naturally benefit a lot from SaaS — especially in support functions such as HR, payroll, accounting, marketing, etc. This is a great trend, because it allows them to focus almost exclusively on growing their core business, and get all their IT needs delivered on cloud. For midsize businesses, the cloud represents an opportunity to leverage leading-edge technologies and shift to a services-based model for IT. Additionally, it makes a huge difference, particularly for organisations that may not have large IT staffs or deep expertise in all of the critical areas of IT, such as storage, networking and databases.

In case of large enterprises, hybrid tends to be the more common pattern. As per Gartner, 90 per cent of Indian companies will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities by 2020. To boost their competitive success, Indian organisations are strategically combining cloud and traditional IT into hybrid solutions.

Small businesses are known to favour public cloud while enterprises have a preference for private cloud?

Both SMBs and large enterprises are an important part of our growth strategy. To tailor our offerings for each customer, we address this through our ecosystem focus and work very closely with our business partners.

As mentioned in the previous point, small businesses tend to leverage cloud via packaged SaaS offerings, as opposed to ‘natively’ building on cloud. Our business partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) who create these clouds-based offerings need the same levels of enterprise readiness, data readiness, the power of AI and analytics on that data, and adherence to open standards as our largest enterprise clients. So, our design point is to empower a strong ISV ecosystem, with offerings designed for the cloud and cognitive world which they can leverage to serve both large enterprises and SMBs.

Do you think you have a big space to play in the digital banking space? What is the progress here, if any?

Banking is among our most important verticals, and we are driving digital transformation globally with our clients. The digital ‘bank of the future’ is about the new ‘digital native’ customer, new channels, new ecosystems and partnerships, new risks and regulations, and a highly agile back office. We have a significant commitment to these transformations, powered by data, AI, blockchain, and security — delivered on IBM Cloud.

In India, we are delivering digital transformation for the largest public-sector bank in India. There is a tremendous opportunity being enabled by deep digital penetration, India Stack, payments, and innovation by FinTechs. Banks in India are in a very unique position to capitalise on this ecosystem, and we intend to work with them closely in this digital transformation.

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