While cloud computing provides many benefits, at the same time, it introduces major risks — data security and regulatory, technology, vendor, financial etc — that need to be governed and managed by user organizations.
According to Amit Saxena, Global Deputy CTO, State Bank of India, companies should never try to move everything in a single go onto the cloud or multi-cloud environment.
“Though it looks tempting to use the cloud’s compute capability, companies should not rush into migrating and rather focus on understanding what they are aiming to gain with it,” he said.
“For every organisation, the operational risks associated with the cloud varies a lot. First comes regulations that are based on the particular industry an organisation operates in, this could be financial services, healthcare or manufacturing. Based on that, the whole dynamics about data protection changes, whether data should be kept on-premises or on the cloud; does the cloud provider’s servers need to be within a particular geography, etc.” maintained Shiv Kumar Bhasin, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, NSE India Limited.
“Before embarking on a digital transformation journey led by cloud technologies, organisations should first completely understand what cloud is. There are three types of deployment: private, public and hybrid. Then, there are different types of service models SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Understand what all this means and what responsibilities come with each,” said Mansi Thapar, Head Information Security, Jaquar Group.
Even after moving to the cloud, not everything becomes the service providers’ responsibility and the CIOs should keep that in mind, believes Thapar.
“Also, companies must look for SLAs, and at the exit contract, whether any lock-in period is included or not. Companies should first understand and then plan their cloud strategy accordingly,” added Thapar.
Dr Christopher Richard, MD & Chief Cloud Architect, G7CR Technologies emphasised on the need to push for same standards on the public cloud. He believes this will enable migrating to other service providers very easy.
