"The first step in evaluating risk for the cloud is to determine exactly what data or function is  being considered"

Use And Implementation Of Cloud In Business

After merging the various digital businesses to a group 'Reliance Entertainment – Digital', became essential for us to look at common solutions for traditional setups, which are running for each of our Digital businesses. Thereby the consolidation and cloud project is conceptualized.

Challenges of moving to cloud:
1. We need to analyze each app for resource utilization. Testing apps to see if it works on virtualized environment, and consolidate all types of digital businesses to common platform and infra architecture.
2. Migration to new setup with minimum disturbance to business, moving volume of data in to new setup and switch over to new setup from current setup.
3. Post project issues and how to reduce the potential and expected downtime of business.

Project:
We have built a private cloud with virtualized environment at our IDC for critical apps and moved non critical apps to public cloud. We have tightened the connectivity mechanism to both the clouds so that it becomes lacks as one Hybrid cloud. This step brought lot of flexibility to us by reducing our physical server footprint to 80 percent, thereby contributed to environment by reducing power/cooling/space requirements.

Assets supported by the cloud fall into two general categories:
1. Data
2. Application/Functions/Process

The first step in evaluating risk for the cloud is to determine exactly what data or function is being considered. This should include potential uses of the assets once it moves to the cloud to account for the scope, especially when data and transactions volumes are very high.

Asset evaluation:
Parameters considered:
• if the assets became widely public and widely distributed?
• if an employee of our cloud provider accessed the asset?
• if the process or function were manipulated by outsider?
• if the information/data were unexpectedly changed?
• if the asset was unavailable for the period of time and didnot give expected results on cloud?

Ways of deployment:
1. Public
2. Private, internal/on premise
3. Private external (including dedicated share infrastructure)
4. Hybrid, the combination of Public and Private.

Next steps of Deployment:
1. Evaluate the potential cloud service models needed for business and find out the suitable providers.
2. Map out the potential data flow – While most of these steps are high-level, before making a final decision it is absolutely essential to understand how data moves in and out of the cloud. The understanding of each app’s working and data flow is necessary to take these decisions.

What to set before moving?
• Service levels, security, Governance, compliance, SLA.
• Who should manage assets and how? Sensitive assets kept in private cloud.
• We are controlling sensitive assets by internal dedicated team
• It is easy to apply compliances in private cloud and we have extended the same to hybrid model.