Thompson P. Gnanam, Managing Director and Global CEO, 3i Infotech Limited
We had a lot to learn from the year 2020 as new trends emerged across sectors and work from home (WFH) became the new normal. For many enterprises, the impact of Covid-19 has brought forth the benefits and limitations of their IT landscape into the open. While some were more prepared to take on the new challenges, many struggled and learnt the hard way. As companies look ahead to a post-pandemic era, many will need to consider ways to meet different needs and priorities with potentially limited resources, with WFH being the new norm.
Organisations are still overly reliant on legacy infrastructure and business models. This needs to be addressed in order to accelerate the cloud journey. Companies need to develop a proactive strategy that explores the use of cloud (hybrid or multi) and the transition from legacy systems towards modern technologies to embrace the digital podium. It is equally important for a partner to ensure that the adoption is seamless and successful in the end.
At 3i Infotech, our cloud lifecycle management services partner with new and existing enterprises to transform their technology to the cloud faster and without risk. Our industry leading automation delivers 10x acceleration with complete ease, governance, efficiency and better control of multi-cloud environments based on a customer’s business and IT ecosystem. We leverage our global delivery capabilities and strong partnerships with Oracle (OCI), Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) to deliver cloud computing services that help organisations enjoy a substantial reduction in capex across hardware, licensing and software. With increased agility and flexibility offered by our cloud computing services, organisations are able to cut opex costs such as cooling and power supply, and build affordable, tested business continuity and disaster recovery plans. 3i Infotech provides a wide choice of engagement models – shared, hybrid, SLA-based and project-based that help organisations to experiment and innovate as IT resources are freed up from operational tasks.
Broadly speaking there are three dimensions to the cloud adoption journey:
Discover the apps and IT infrastructure
In this phase, there is a 360 degree analysis of the infrastructure and application to map the dependencies and existing workload performance. We will need to ensure that there is a full hierarchical view of the application and its dependencies as that will help facilitate easy migration, asset management and meet any compliance needs. It is in this phase that 3i Infotech as a partner, with its single comprehensive cloud management platform, will help build a roadmap, prepare an automated discovery plan for the business environment, create a set of cloud transformation sprints and formulate a structured roadmap to address the subsequent sprints to comprehend what should be considered for cloud transformation.
Accelerate cloud migration
Typically, the cloud migration phase is known to be fraught with complications and tedious tasks. The objective is to facilitate a seamless migration of the existing on-premises workloads to hybrid or multi-cloud environments with an aim to provide uninterrupted services to end-users. Be it migration of monolithic applications to a hosted cloud environment or housing them in containers, the virtual resources need to be available in minutes and should be able to manage deployments across multiple cloud providers such as public, private and hybrid at the same time. It is in this phase that 3i Infotech, with a 360 degree overview of the application, the cloud management platform, identifies the required virtual infrastructure (OS, supporting software, servers, network) and gets the target cloud environment ready. This simple step accelerates the migration and achieves faster time-to-market and optimised cost to migrate.
Continuous optimisation and management
One major concern post cloud adoption is what is required to have a full-stack visibility across the required platforms by factoring in unforeseen demands and failure scenarios. Multi-cloud application monitoring is rendered in a detailed and effective method by gathering cloud-specific insights. Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) are the critical paradigm shifts that are required to handle these digital transformation issues.
While ensuring round-the-clock availability of the cloud environment, it is equally important to optimise cloud costs. One needs to ensure the reporting of cloud usage at the application and services level, dynamic scaling up and down of cloud resources, and intelligent rebalancing of workloads are available on a real-time basis. This helps companies to stay ahead of the cloud expenses by providing comprehensive chargeback/ reports on resource consumption and enables cost reduction by making recommendations based on the actual usage. Be it public, hybrid or multi-cloud, periodic analysis of cloud usage and associated costs need to be carried out to prevent overspending.
