Exclusive - Manoj Chitgopeker-Senior Director South1, NTT Ltd India

Deploying Cloud involves collaborating with different segments of the IT sector. Manoj Chitgopeker, Senior Director & Region Head, South 1, NTT Ltd. India tells us about this aspect in this interaction

 How are you collaborating with Cloud Service Providers in India?

 We are collaborating with all the major Cloud companies such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud etc. to bring together our global infrastructure and services expertise across industries. By integrating our productivity tools with Cloud service providers, we have created new opportunities and value for our clients, helping them quickly digitally transform their business. The Cloud, analytics and artificial intelligence enable organisations to gain access to insights and solutions needed to foster meaningful business outcomes.

As CIOs grapple with a pervasive and disparate ecosystem of Cloud computing technologies, they need to find a structured approach to govern their information assets. They also recognise that the traditional model of centrally provisioned IT may not be agile enough to meet rapidly changing customer needs. Companies have been astute enough to liberalise IT deployment and management, so that departments can take the initiative and have their own Cloud developments.

How can the Cloud Service Providers capitalise on the booming datacentre opportunity in the country?

 Demand from global Hyper-scalers like Cloud service providers, regulatory policies such as data localisation and the acceleration in the number of enterprises moving to the Cloud have elevated the scope of the datacentre market in India.

CSPs can help customers improve business delivery by modernising their infrastructure, ensuring that it is secure by design, with an architecture that breaks down datacentre silos and exploits automation to align IT delivery to their business needs. They can help their increase operational efficiency, reduce risk and optimise Cloud and technology infrastructure investments. This is the approach we follow at NTT Ltd India.

How can the challenges of security while using a remote server, complexity of costs while managing multi-Cloud options and post-deployment challenges be met?

 Leaders must accelerate their journey to the Cloud in order to digitise quickly and effectively, especially in the wake of COVD-19. However, security instilled abruptly will come into the forefront of the discussion, because the operation will scale in new normal. Some of the challenges faced by organisations revolve around data leakage, it's residency, privacy and inability to identify which Cloud is more secure. Most of the issue arise from misconfiguration of the Cloud, credential leakage, account hijacking, API integration and loosely coupled interfaces. Lack of qualified staff is another big challenge. The biggest worry moving forward however, will be around selection of appropriate security tools- whether Cloud native security solutions available in the marketplace should be deployed or if replication of the on prem security solutions be undertaken. NTT Ltd has seen that Many on-prem security solutions do not work in the Cloud or have limited functionality. Organisations on their Cloud journey can resolve this challenge in two ways- Zero trust and secure by design.

Zero trust refers to not allowing anyone and verifying everyone. It is not only about accessing the Cloud network, but also the application and its data, along with verifying access given to legitimate users. To do this, we need secure by design methods where security is embedded in the application to control access using business logic, only on a need to know basis. This shaves off many external security controls and can automatically secure the API integration and interfaces. All this is possible with one common orchestration, visibility and security framework to manage this hybrid setup, a single pane of security glass for both on premise and Cloud setup and a combination of security tools on premise and on Cloud that integrate and exchange context to keep the same policy and experience to the user. Lastly, all this must be in the realm of investment that an organisation can afford for securing the business. Hence, a methodical business impact analysis needs to be done so that we do not under or over deliver on security parameters.

What has been the graph of Cloud infrastructure performance after deployment?

 An increasing number of tech-savvy businesses and their management are recognising the multiple benefits of Cloud-computing. Additionally, they are using this technology to run their organisations more efficiently, better serve their customers, and radically increase their overall profit margin. 80-85 percent of our clients are already in various stages of their Cloud journey, both public and hybrid. From a performance standpoint, they are realising a 30-40% increase in utilisation factor compared to classical DC deployments. They have observed 70% improvement in deployment times due to instant provisioning and scale. Reduced IT cost and the cost of managing IT systems of the Cloud are resulting in leaner organisations. Opex models are providing at-least a 25% cost leverage vis-à-vis conventional CAPEX models for well-defined and designed workloads. NTT Ltd India has found that the use of DevOps has enabled faster releases, scalability and flexibility.