The adoption of cloud is purely contextual to the organisation and difficult to generalise. It depends upon the extent to which IT has penetrated into an organisation, and the types of systems- ERP or shop floor management in manufacturing—are being used in business. It also depends upon the number of legacy systems that are being used. If there are a lot of legacy systems, then it is generally difficult to integrate them with standard systems and the cloud may not be the immediate answer.

Another aspect to consider is the value system of IT in an organisation. It depends upon whether the organisation uses IT as a transformational tool. Or, simply as a transaction tool to achieve operating compliance. If it uses IT as a transformational tool, and if IT gives the organisation the benefit of bringing some breakthrough initiatives to improve operational excellence, or bring strategic impact to it—then taking IT into cloud is out of the question.

If the organisation considers IT just as a transaction tool and would like to look at IT for ensuring operational adherence, or operational compliance, then IT can get into the cloud without any hindrance.

The questions whether processes are all standardised, or they are subject to change with the business context, affect the adoption of the cloud, too. A good example of standardised processes is a petrol bunkwhen a vehicle comes into a petrol bunk, employees there have to fill petrol, take money, clean the vehicle—there is no innovation required in the process. These simple situations are best suited for the cloud.

There are certain organisations where innovation is constantly a challenge—in order to bring cost competency and productivity improvement, or to bring improvements in top and bottom-line performances. Here things are so dynamic that an organisation has no scope of getting into the cloud.

But, one good opportunity for using the cloud is in strategic initiatives. When an organisation is getting into a new business it is risky, It does not want to commit to expensive IT resources for it. Also, it would like to get out of business, as and when it wants. Here, the cloud is extremely beneficial since the entry barrier is negligible.

But for regular processes, to get into the cloud, the exit point is more important than the entry point. When migrating from a particular vendor, or cloud, how an organisation is able to get the data out is important. It should be able to get data out on the day it wants and the times want because the business cannot wait. This clarity is one of the major concern and a decision-making factor for an organisation opting for a cloud offering.

Vendors may be pretty excited about the cloud and are using this as a big marketing push, but the adoption by individual organisation is based upon the cultural values, or the business context, as mentioned. There has been a lot of talk regarding the cloud—let us see when we see the actual thunder in form of deployments.

—TG Dhandapani
Group CIO, TVS Motor Company