Legacy is one of the major changes that organisations face on their journey to hybrid cloud adoption as a part of their digital transformation, according to Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice-President, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software and Services, IBM India/South Asia.
“Legacy probably would be one of the pending challenges, which could be a dampener to an immediate adoption to a hybrid cloud,” Ramaswamy told BusinessLine.
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“The primary challenge is how do you modernise services? Clients have been running on applications and standards which are pretty legacy. They were modern at that point in time. But when you start moving to the journey of the state of hybrid cloud, you first need to start looking at those workloads or applications, which would fall under the characteristics of being ‘cloudified’ if there was a word of that size,” he explained.
“To do that, you need to modernise the application. You need to make those applications even more open,” he added.
Increased investments in hybrid cloud
According to a recent survey conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), businesses in India are increasingly moving towards investing in hybrid multi-cloud platform strategies and capabilities “to drive business transformation and to unlock value.”
“Every organisation, when they transform, have to get on the journey of this hybrid cloud. That's inevitable. How fast you get there? That is the million-dollar question,” Ramaswamy said.
According to the survey, which was based on responses from 6,000 executives globally including 412 executives from India, 17 per cent of businesses’ IT spend is allocated to cloud. The respondents plan to increase the share of spend on hybrid from 42 per cent to 49 per cent by 2023.
Amid the cloud transformation, the majority of the cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms.
Making cloud accessible
Talking about making cloud accessible to small businesses as they jump on the cloud transformation bandwagon, the IBM executive said: “Irrespective of whether the organisations are looking at with a small-medium or large, there are offerings for every single section.”
He further suggested that small businesses start off with a SaaS (software as a service) model.
“They will probably gradually gravitate towards entirely or partially on to a hybrid cloud kind of environment. So, for SMBs, SaaS would be a good starting point,” he said.
Multiple vendors
With the increased cloud adoption, the industry is also facing massive competition with multiple players entering the cloud space. However, according to Ramaswamy, the hybrid cloud space will be more about collaboration rather than competition.
“Hybrid cloud is a state. It’s not us versus them, or IBM. It is a state where clients are going to not have one single cloud vendor,” he said. “Every organisation is going to have about 10 cloud vendors by 2023,” he added, quoting the survey findings.
“Most industries will exhibit growth in the number of clouds they will deploy, which can go up to 10 clouds particularly in insurance, telecommunications and retail as these industries will continue to expand multiple cloud deployments in the next three years,” read the survey report.
Talking about cybersecurity in the space, Ramaswamy said it can be streamlined. “Security fundamentally focusses on two pillars of technical and digital and something that a lot of companies are moving on the digital transformation journey. Both are equally important,” he said.