Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of CDP (India) Pvt. Ltd.

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered  Mumbai based company CDP (India) Pvt. Ltd. becoming a Cloud Partner from a traditional Channel Partner. Nikesh Sakaria, Chairman and Founder shared his entire journey about how did he move to the cloud business, challenges, growth, and future vision.

When and how did you move to Cloud Business?

Unknowingly, the journey of Cloud had started in 2013, where we were helping our customers build data centers, which gradually started shaping as private clouds for those customers.

We started public cloud business about 3 years ago, we foresaw the sudden boom in cloud adoption, especially in the SME and Mid Market.

Initially, it was difficult considering the Data Security and many other compliances along with higher costs, newer technology, and technical skillset availability. We started a consulting approach with the help of OEMs and distributors. Slowly started moving customers on the public cloud.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

Usually, we recommend a hybrid cloud approach. We are offering multiple services depending on what cloud setup and applications are required.

For private clouds: We offer consultation, design, supply, implementation, and migration services of various solutions like HCI, servers, storage, networking, security, monitoring tools.

Previously on Cloud Journey: WinMethods Technologies

For Public clouds: We offer IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) for their various workloads like files, applications, backup, and databases. We help customers migrate different workloads on the cloud. We support our customers with managed services to help them in their daily operations and the adoption of the cloud. We also provide consultation on security solutions for data protection on the cloud.

We have our own software solutions for Office Automation, which we offer on the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model.

What sort of changes have you done to move to the cloud within the organization in terms of Team, skill set, infrastructure, and others?

Our cloud migration was driven by our new vertical Business Software Solutions. We started offering our Solutions in the SaaS model. We created a secure infrastructure on-premise and provided secure access to the Solutions to all our customers. As customers grew, we needed scalability, which was better available on the public cloud.

We got our team trained on various public clouds to set up secure environments. We first moved our software solutions and followed it with other workloads like files, accounting Systems. We made sure the infra is highly available, easily accessible, and scalable.

How your old and new customers adopting the new technology and moving to the cloud?

Everyone is adopting cloud in various ways as per their segment.

• Customers with major compliances to be followed are building private clouds where the mission-critical applications reside, while the general-purpose or non-critical applications reside on the public cloud. Thus, making an ideal hybrid cloud strategy
• Some customers are moving the entire data center on the cloud
• Some customers use DR or backup services of cloud, considering the pay-as-you-go model reduces the cost of setting up DR site
• Some customers who want control on hardware and don’t want to build private datacenters go for collocation services with public cloud datacenters

Post COVID-19, a lot of customers have started moving on the cloud for temporary storage, backups, file services or virtual desktops

What are the different challenges did you face in this journey?

More than 70% of our customers are from the BFSI industry. BFSI industry was one of the hardest to crack because of the compliances and misconceptions. Data localization is the major talking point of entire conversations.

The major misconception was while moving on the cloud was, once you are on the cloud, there is no need to worry about the data. This misconception created a lot of challenges initially.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

Cloud has complemented our existing solutions very well. It has enabled us to add various value-added services with respect to migration, security, monitoring, etc. We can consult our customers with a much better approach and the time to deployment has reduced drastically. A hybrid cloud approach has helped provide better solutions and fit the customer expectations with respect to cost as well as delivery timelines.

What are your future goals?

We are creating templates of common services required by our clients for cloud deployments. These templates can be used by our customers to further reduce the deployment timelines. We are also bundling various security solutions which would further reduce customers' need to evaluate various solutions.

We already have 2 teams, one focused on the infra side while others on the software side. By creating a synergy between these 2 teams, we are creating customized solutions and services for turnkey projects of our customers.