Cloud is projected like that ray of light that CIOs have been looking for. But, like many technologies that promise freedom from regular pain points of technology, it's filled with holes. A lot of refinement and ironing out is needed before we go in for adoption.

People say that production environments are difficult. The easiest thing to take to the cloud is e-mail and collaboration services. So, we started off by talking to a few cloud service providers, specifically for e-mail and collaboration services. But the offerings are plagued with loopholes that transfer into concerns for us, and users in our companies.

Some of the concerns that are stopping us from moving ahead are:

Security and confidentiality: How do we ensure security and confidentiality of the communication? An assurance about compliance standards of service provider may not convince the management. We need to see a few like-minded case studies. Though there is a lot of talk about people using these services, there are still no convincing cases of use that can be quoted. We certainly do not want to be the guinea pigs.

No cost advantage: Cloud providers harp on the fact that e-mail on the cloud is extremely cheap, compared to an in-house solution. We don't see a major cost advantage. In the past two years we have been focusing on cost optimisation. At the current spend level; we need to negotiate hard to get a significant cost advantage.

Vendor lock-in: We will have to go through a painstaking exercise to port our solutions to cloud as it is, we do not want to be locked in to the vendor–and that is a major concern. If we go to a different vendor today for cost advantage, can we move to any other solution without any loss of data? How fast will we be able to move?

Bandwidth usage: In the current scenario, our e-mail and collaboration network works on leased lines. With cloud, the load will be on internet links. There is no way to find out how much more bandwidth do we need. Yes, there are some calculations, but no way to validate the calculations.

Data availability: Yes, the data will be available for employees to access from anywhere, but is there a way to ensure data availability over the long-term? Today, we maintain backup of all communications of separated employees. Will we have similar options in the cloud?

Integration: How will we integrate cloud environment with business applications? Will all work flows get transferred to new environment? Or, will we need to create costly new work flows?

Statutory requirements: Where would our data be stored? Will we be able to meet statutory requirements of countries? Is there any data to support that the solution meets those requirements?

These are the host of questions that have no plausible answers, as we learnt from our experiences.

We are using hosted services for collaboration with vendors and customers alike in the Middle East since the past two years. Though this was a business need, we saw a lot of challenges, with the internet bandwidth chocking, and also sensed people’s apprehensions about data security.

Yes, we see a lot of promise–but, it is high time that we saw some results also.

—Asmita Junnarkar
Chief Information Officer, Voltas Limited