Should You Move Mission Critical Apps to the Cloud?
We have already put mission critical applications in the cloud and haven't faced too many problems.
Jyotish Chandra Mohanty
OERC, Joint Director-IT
Putting the mission critical application on the cloud is putting the business at risk
Sanjay Gupta
Omaxe India , GM-IT
I don’t think organizations should be apprehensive about putting mission critical apps on the cloud. Take our organization, for example. The Orissa Electricity Regulatory Commission (OERC) is a judiciary body. As a civil court, we deal with cases between transmission and distribution companies, resolves conflicts between distributors and generators and between consumer and other power companies.
Any regulatory commission has to deal with a dynamic environment. To meet these demands, commissions need to deploy systems that quickly respond to change. To that end, we found that the initial investment required for our systems was prohibitive, which is why we thought of hosting our mission critical apps on the cloud. Initially, we hosted our regulatory information management system (RIMS) on the cloud. Then in 2007, we migrated our case tracking system (CTS) and more recently, our data warehousing system.
This has brought several benefits. Recently, the state load information management system (SLIM) decided to implement intra-state ABT (availability-based tariff). Our cloud platform helped us put up a system (for ABT) within a quick two months. We uploaded data and it was automatically processed and analyzed online.
Also, the cloud has shrunk our manpower needs. We only have five people taking care of our systems. It has also helped us lower capex. Organizations that want to move mission critical apps to the cloud should deliberate well before zeroing in on a service provider. The cloud provider must have a track record of high performance and good service levels.
I agree that downtime could be a big obstacle but this challenge can be tackled with a two-pronged strategy. Companies should create very stringent SLAs with their cloud provider. CSPs should be penalized for downtime and if it persists, there should be a provision to terminate a contract.
Similarly, unreliable public bandwidth can also be tackled. One must realize that in the long run, bandwidth availability is definitely going to improve. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, while presenting the budget, promised that reliable bandwidth will be made available at the gram panchayat level within two years. This means that bandwidth issues will hopefully be rectified in the coming years.
To migrate mission-critical apps successfully to the cloud, organizations should classify and analyze their data and then chalk out a clear-cut strategy. It is critical for enterprises to do due diligence to ensure efficient and smooth migration and obviate chances of productivity loss.
After considering all the above factors, organizations can host their mission critical apps on the cloud.
I am quite apprehensive about migrating my enterprise’s mission critical applications—applications that are used by business for their day-to-day transactions, like ERP, CRM, etcetera—to the cloud. I don’t think public cloud computing, as a platform, is secure and reliable enough to host my mission-critical applications. And that is one of my biggest concerns, other than losing control over business critical information, and getting locked-in with a single vendor. That’s why I feel that moving my mission critical applications to a hosted environment would increase my vulnerability and put my data at risk.
If these applications become inaccessible they can impact business operations in a big way. That’s why business users also resist hosting enterprise critical applications in a cloud environment. As a CIO, my job is to ensure the security of data and its availability. I don’t want to host my application outside my network because then it’s outside my control.
The other reason that discourages me from moving mission critical applications to the cloud is bandwidth. It is a huge problem in India. It’s impossible to know when your network will go down. If the network goes down and you’re on the cloud, mission-critical applications won’t work. In a cloud environment, uptime is not guaranteed and neither is it under my control. I will have to depend on my ISP for everything. Also, bandwidth in India is very expensive and this poses another big challenge: Affordability.
That said, I believe—and reiterate—that security is the most ominous challenge that stops me from putting mission critical applications on the cloud. I am not sure about the security at the cloud provider’s backend where my application is hosted. And in the past, there have been several cases where critical customer information has been leaked and security has been compromised despite a signed agreement.
Forget public cloud, I am not confident even about a private cloud because I feel that my data will still be vulnerable. However, in the future, if public cloud service providers enhance their security posture then I could deploy the technology to host mission critical applications. Apart from security, I feel that service providers should also bring in more transparency.
CIOs need to develop a strong understanding about the cloud environment through seminars and workshops. Once they are confident that security nets are in place then they can go ahead with it. But before that, they should also ensure that the Internet bandwidth is robust and downtime is zero.
As of now, I don’t see a steady increase in the number of Indian companies running their mission critical applications on a public cloud. However, I believe that this status quo could change if proper security mechanisms are put in place.
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