Cloud services make an organisation more agile and flexible

Sandeep Jamdagni
Head IT, Ashiana Housing

“Cloud services bring opportunity of building on demand or pay-as-you-go model for the business continuity program. Traditional business continue program (BCP) require redundant resources and big budget to keep the BCP operational. Cloud-managed service providers, provides customers with more flexibility and much less cost/maintenance. Already some of the organizations only use the cloud as an alternate operating site. 

Organizations maintain their own data centre for normal operations and switches to the cloud during contingencies.

In the COVID-19 lockdowns, most of Business continuity programs were redesigned for the new normal of Work From Home. Flexibility of increasing or decreasing resources as per demand, make cloud infrastructure most suitable solution for the WFH scenario. Cloud provides the actual resource consumption details on any particular time of operation, which help in managing the cost and budgets. Real time resource and cost management is the benefit of cloud services.

Cloud services make an organisation more agile and flexible in terms of IT resources. One can customize what is required and till when it will be required. No long term commitments. Resources can be increased or decreased at anytime without any lead time.  Organization hesitate on doing capital investments in infrastructure and services which may or may not be required in future, as its to difficult to predict exact growth. Cloud services provided OPEX model of investment, which is purely as per consumption. One have to pay for what they have consumed.

Moving to cloud from on premises will definitely increasing your attack surface area, but that doesn’t mean that cloud is unsecure. Data security on cloud is joint responsibility of Cloud service provider and customer. Service provider is responsible for the availability of cloud infrastructure and customer is responsible for the implementation of correct and required data security solutions.

Most of the cloud data breaches happened either due to miss-configuration or customer didn’t work on securing the resources and just relied on basic security provided by the cloud service provider. 

Data security is an serious affair, it should be properly understood and implemented by the organisations, without relying 100% on the third party service providers. 

Data security plan should be reviewed continuously and improvements to be done as per new emerging threats.”