Once application/service deployed to the cloud computing infrastructure:

·         Network administrators need not to worry about the load balancing, bandwidth balancing, etc

·         System administrators need not to worry about updating the machines/servers with latest security and other patches, etc.

So from the application owner's perspective, he/she needs not to put much effort and money in this types of administrative works rather devote more on the application feature enhancement.

·         Migrate an existing web- application from on-premise to cloud for some of the obvious reasons. And I believe by now we know what are the different driving factors for migrating an/a application/service to cloud

·         But keep the back-end database on-premise. Quite a few reasons for this, say for instance the data is of very "high business impact" type and can't be put outside the corporate network.

We must have explored quite a few options like being in Windows Azure domain, options are:

·         Make use of Azure connect and create some kind of local area network comprising of the database server and the virtual machines having Azure roles (having the application).

·         Make use of Azure appfabric service bus (my favorite option) to expose database over http as OData interface and also support the CRUD operations.

But now how to expose the SQL Stored Procedures and functions defined in the back-end database.

"Cloud first" strategy is being adopted by some of our leading clients and few of them have a very clear approach for their Infrastructure and application stack. Hybrid is the most common trend and Private Cloud plans are in place for the new and old gears. IaaS consumption from Public Cloud seems to be a short term strategy and PaaS is becoming more prominent for application development even though there is still some fear of vendor lock-in. This to me is the right strategy as more innovations are to happen in the PaaS space and applications can leverage the power of Cloud in terms of scalability, global availability, design for failures etc. more with platform as a service. Application portability gaps across platforms and on-premise setup will gradually diminish with parity amongst on-premise server operating systems and Cloud platforms being addressed with every new version release. Those who consider that an application developed for windows server is a platform "lock-in" may not agree with me on this view.

One of our clients who has adopted O365 has outlined the future strategy for portals with first choice as SharePoint Online and anything on-premise will be an exception (feature parity, data privacy etc). This shows that "Cloud first" strategy is becoming the norm within enterprises with clear directions for non-standard applications and short living workloads. This works well across organizations and industries for especially self-contained application workloads which have least dependency on data residing on premise. Additionally, these organizations could have security and compliance concerns in their data being exposed to the Public Cloud.

Next wave is around mobility and analytics. Will discuss this in my next post. 

Richy Yati Mishra, Associate Consultant, Infosys

We witnessed the era of outsourcing and are now possibly seeing another era open up. Global enterprises which benefitted immensely from the "outsourcing" phenomenon are now welcoming another era, the era of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is in very early stage of large scale adaptation. Jobs/tasks are posted on websites and people independent of their location and based on their competency bids for work and complete it. Benefits are:

·         People works on tasks round the clock. People of every time zone will be working and effectively job is running round the clock.

·         Best people from the world are working on such tasks.

However, the question comes to what complexity level/extent work can be crowd sourced? Do each resource have required or adequate software, platform and necessary infrastructure to work on?

Now it is time to introduce the most disruptive force in IT at this point: cloud computing. In cloud computing - software, platform and infrastructure - are located in a server in some part of the world. What is needed is just to connect to that server and use software-as-a-service (SaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and just pay for the usage. This allows using resources without owning it, like we consume electricity and pay as per our consumption without owning it.

Keeping the above things in mind let's go through the present scenario at the marketplace:

·         Few countries in Europe and the USA are struggling on the economy front.

·         Growth rate of countries, industries etc. have been stagnant which resulted in miniscule job growth in US and many part of the world.

This time many of the governments may not have anything to provide as stimulus to bring their economies back on track. In my personal opinion, a county's growth has to be self-sustainable.   Economy should grow and create opportunities/ jobs for the people. If people are getting jobs then they will create opportunities for other workers (like constructor, carpenter etc.).

After having all the competency and education if a person is sitting idle then it is very depressing and not a healthy sign for any economy. The only solution in this type of situation is self-employment.

I think a model is required which can create self-employment at the same time sustain a profitable business. In my opinion we should adopt crowdsourcing leveraging cloud computing (2C), to address this   problem.

Benefits for the companies:

·         Companies do not need to outsource huge work and simultaneously do not need to invest heavily. Based on need and budget work will be crowd sourced in small quantity.

·         Lowest bid and best quality work can be selected.

·         Work can be broken in to pieces and can be distributed in such a manner that throughout the clock people will be working.

·         No need to open physical offices in different part of the world.

·         Companies can work with negligible CAPEX and low OPEX model.

·         Can provide software, platform and infrastructure as service.

Benefits from a worker perspective:

·         No need to own any asset and can use any software, platform and infrastructure.

·         Pay for usage saves lots of expenses.

·         Allows broadening learning and skill sets.

·         Work based on comfort time zone and from any place.

·         Creates employment.

Of course, there are few limitations like:

·         Security Issues - Can't outsource financial/defense/ IP related work.

·         In the age of global terrorism, there will be not many means to put a check on who is contributing to our work.

·         We have to check whether this model is sustainable in large scale.

·         Employee motivation and drive is totally based on individuals as there will always be a virtual team.

Cloud adoption is basically a thought process which needs to be imbibed and digested by both business and IT stakeholders alike to unleash it's true potential. The need is to identify Cloud Champions in both organizations who act as change agents or evangelists to awaken the workforce to the benefits the Cloud model has to offer.

For the Business intrapreneur, Cloud presents a perfect think pad to look beyond the traditional business growth models and identify opportunities to maximize enterprise assets, best practices through innovative IT leverage models e.g. SaaS and offer Cloud based business service delivery.

For the IT intrapreneur,  Cloud is the platform for effecting a transformational change for IT resources planning, procurement, provisioning and management thus making business more accountable for IT resources consumption while also providing the business required agility in consuming IT resources on tap through Cloud Service Delivery models such as IaaS and PaaS.

Enterprises need to look inward for accelerating their cloud adoption journey and also identify a Cloud services partner who has subject matter expertise in Cloud, who can advise and partner with the enterprise intrapreneurs for making  a smoother transition to Cloud.

The content is located under the Architects track on Day 3 under the session titled "Architectural Considerations for Moving LOB Applications to Cloud" (3:00 pm to 4:00 pm).

Abstract from the presentation
Most enterprise customers are looking for ways to leverage Cloud Computing, including moving or migrating existing Line of Business (LoB) applications to the Cloud. This session will outline various scenarios on whether a certain set of LoB apps would be a good fit (or not a fit) for Cloud Computing. We will focus our discussion on key architectural considerations such as business drivers, costs/benefits analysis, information architecture, application architecture and SOA, migration, performance/scalability, deployment and operations. We will then discuss a case study, i.e., how to apply these architectural considerations to a real-world project.

Hope you find the session useful.

Every Industry at small, medium and big scale are embracing cloud in big or small way, some are already on cloud and reaping the benefits it has got to offer. Some are in the process of getting on to the Cloud bandwagon, while some are following the wait and watch approach. There is intense competition of who gets their first.

Some of the Top cloud computing providers are Amazon, Verizon, IBM, Salesforce, CSC, Rackspace, Google, Bluelock, Microsoft & Joyent. With some of the biggest names out there it has already generated the necessary interest and captured the imagination of the techworld.

Cloud computing has been identified as one the top strategic technology which is going to re-shape the world in this decade. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221

According to the survey by Global Industry Analysts & Gartner's, cloud computing is one of the fastest growing markets, the market size is forecast to touch $222.5 billion by 2015.

Cloud computing is going to change the way the world is today, the way pervasive devices store, communicate, connect and operate today, going to change the way tomorrow's products are going to be designed and developed. It is going to change the way business is conducted as on today. Many of existing technologies would be converging into cloud. Today the storage occupies biggest space in all of the connected and disconnected electronic devices. For every device which is connected to net, the storage is going to diminish and at some point there is not going any storage on these devices, they are going to be using cloud and devices would become much smaller, thinner and sleeker.  More and more devices would get connected to cloud, changing the way we talk, we function & the way we work.

Now that we have set the context about how Cloud computing is going to be way of life, let's discuss about what are the issues that may hold back or slow down the progress,  what are the issues that are causing worry lines and making the consumers think...

One of the biggest concerns that the consumers around the world have is of security.

When our data, business process, applications are deployed to Cloud, how secure are our data, business process & applications going to be. This is one of the top most questions by the customers. What are security solutions that are provided by cloud service provider, what are the security solutions that can be built into products, Business applications, and Enterprise applications by different IT vendors?

"Cloud security market is forecasted to touch $1.5bn by 2015" according to a Forrester report.

Security in Cloud computing would need to consider and address following areas. Come up with secure Governance model, Address how the Compliance framework is going to be addressed and managed, now that the application boundary is no more on-premise, it is going to cut across states, countries & international boundaries. In this context how will the state, country, region specific laws & regulations apply? How to establish a trusted environment in which all the stakeholders can operate seamlessly, how to secure the cloud computing architecture,  how to operate securely in the multitenant environment, what are the authentication, authorization and access control techniques going to be, how to develop and maintain applications which are cloud secure, how to develop applications which can counter the threats/vulnerabilities, how to achieve secure isolation between the different VMs, Data protection and how to ensure 100% availability.

Let us look at how applications can be created, maintained which are cloud secure. Firstly for the existing applications which are planning to be migrated to cloud, it will first need to go through a security assessment and find out where does it stand on the vulnerability and threat index. Based on the recommendation it will then need to pass through security testing process which includes secure code analysis, threat modeling, security testing to identify all the vulnerabilities. Fix the identified vulnerabilities. Once the applications are verified to have the vulnerabilities fixed, it can then be deployed to Cloud.

Secondly for the new applications which are developed for cloud it has to follow the secure development life cycle model. Security requirements will need to be captured along with project requirements at beginning stage, security features will have to be built into the design, performing threat modeling at the design stage would help to identify the possible threats and help in secure design, perform secure code analysis during the coding stage, plan for security testing during the testing stages. Security will need to be built in at every stage throughout the life cycle of the project. It is always recommended to plan for security at the beginning of the project and throughout the project life cycle rather than trying to fix it at the end of the project. Fixing the vulnerabilities at the end of the project is lot more difficult and will escalate the cost throwing your project budgeting and scheduling off track.

TADM team at Infosys Labs has been working on application security for years now and we are currently focusing on how to develop secure cloud applications. Currently we are in the process of developing the processes, methodology, creating checklists, establishing guidelines, designing solutions, IPs and papers to secure applications for cloud.

Your applications on cloud without having taken security into consideration is like driving a car without wearing your seat belt, it is like flying in a plane without wearing your seat belt. There are chances that you may reach your destination, but there is no guarantee that you will reach in one piece.

Does your applications have the seat belt on, if not it is time to wear one and we at Infosys labs have the resources, solutions to make your seat belt as secure as possible

In my next blogs, I will talk more about different aspects of cloud security, top threats, vulnerabilities, counter measures, secure SDLC process and about our solutions.

Getting Business insights from Big Data is becoming main stream. Cloud is becoming an ideal choice for that.

The journal featuring this article can be downloaded from here