Cloud and data considerations for new business models

Ensuring the safety of its business. Every cloud vendor offers solutions and services that necessarily comply with government-defined data security and privacy mandates such as the California Consumer Privacy Act. However, enterprises must recognize that the safety of their business depends primarily on the responsibility they take in ensuring their cloud solutions are aligned to the enterprise-level security strategies and to all the relevant international laws on data privacy and usage such as the EU Global Data Protection Regulation.

Only the organization can identify and define what constitutes sensitive information in its business, or what should be the policy for migrating data to the cloud or the approach to managing its multi-cloud environment to ensure data integrity. Companies must take charge of their employees to make sure they have the necessary skills to work with the cloud solutions and are adequately security aware.

The first step that companies could take toward building a data security plan is to get a data governance maturity assessment, allowing them to arrive at the best possible plan Managing data with efficiency. Moving to the cloud can add scale, efficiency and cost savings but only when enterprises build the necessary policies around access management, data storage, data backup and recovery. They must strategize to balance easy access with security needs. They need to plan for each kind of data — in transit, on the cloud, on premises, structured and unstructured.

Optimizing data storage to reduce costs and improve security. Massive data can lead to enormous storage costs. How well organizations optimize their data storage using the cloud can not only contribute significantly to reducing the cost of storage, but it can also maximize security and accessibility. Cloud adds flexibility and scale. Companies must look out for features such as automatic syncing, viewing and editing tools for the cloud, collaboration capabilities, security and encryption features and flexible pricing based on storage used when choosing a cloud storage solution. Last but not the least, they must also consider the kind of technical support the cloud storage provider promises.

The responsibilities of an organization are not limited to the above mentioned three areas; they also need to think about data governance and risk management. Exploring cognitive capabilities to find new opportunities in data or experimenting with new technologies that a cloud-native data platform can support are other areas to look at. With multi-vendor cloud services, companies need to manage a whole range of services, including streamlining resources, to ensuring that they meet the enterprise workload’s technical and fiduciary requirements.

Enterprises need to manage complex data structures in a hybrid cloud ecosystem without compromising security and compliance. They also need to ensure they are meeting service level agreements. Partnering with a managed services provider that can ensure the smooth functioning of IT applications and enterprise operations while optimizing cloud not only makes it easier but more importantly, it leaves enterprises with the bandwidth to focus on innovation and growth instead of managing the nuts and bolts of a cloud platform.

About the author
Anant Adya is the senior vice president of cloud, infrastructure and security at Infosys. He is responsible for growth of the CIS service line in the Americas and Asia Pacific regions for Infosys. In his 25 years of professional experience, he has worked closely with many global clients to help define and build their cloud and infrastructure strategies and run end-to-end IT operations. Currently, he works with customers and the industry sales/engagement teams on the digital transformation journey. He defines digital transformation as helping customers to determine the location of workloads, leveraging new age development tools for cloud apps, enabling DevOps and most importantly keeping the environment secure and enhancing customer experience.