At a large industry seminar last year, the CIO of one of India’s growing FMCG company proudly shared how he had made IT “Sasta and Tikaoo” by incorporating opensource and virtualization in his IT layout.
“Sasta” in Hindi translates to “inexpensive” and “Tikaoo” translates to “longevity and inadvertently of good quality”
Allowing myself the liberty of differing in certain areas and extending this innuendo, I would like to propose how IT can actually be “Sasta, Sundar, Tikaoo” where “Sundar” means “pretty”.
However, before I do that, I would like to start from where I begun. Why I see problems with the “Sasta and Tikaoo” option proposed.
1. Why re-invent the wheel?
The process of re-laying of the entire IT infrastructure and applying “Virtualization” itself costs time and efforts. Not to mention the licensing costs associated with the virtualization software that you use. Ok, you use opensource to cut down on your costs, but that does come at the cost of customization and implementation efforts. Read this very informative article on why OpenSource is not Freeware.
2. Put the squeeze on, and on?
Well, I need not spend digital ink on explaining this, but Virtualization is to get the most out of the hardware resource by running multiple servers on it. These servers themselves are sure to deliver some services. Oh yes, I can now run another layer of services on my servers. Hang on. Do I need to go to science school to understand that loading up something thinking that it is capable of going to infinity is stuff of fairytale, right? I mean what happened of those short stories of the “overburdened donkey” back in kindergarten.
My virtualization capabilities and performance will slow down eventually with load or I bite that magic bullet – buy new hardware.
3. Stitch my own clothes?
Surely, why not ? Only, if I am a tailor. What If I am not ? Get the tailor to do it for me, or buy it off the shelf. My take on it is, organizational focus and energies should be directed on the primary organizational goal or objective. And I did not take it off from an MBA class. It makes absolute logic to me to be focused on my IT support system and administration objectives to help business not only function normally but also grow.
Experiences show, R&D IT teams in industries such as manufacturing or FMCG are pulled out of the operational IT teams and also take longer cycles that R&D organizations in IT companies would take, for obvious reasons.
Having put my thoughts in place, I would now like to propose my “Sundar” part of the IT that I see in the clouds.
Cloud computing is designed and implemented to be elastic, ubiquitous, readily available and easily usable to make for efficient and cost-effective IT.
Not my definition. Look at what the National Institute of Standards & Technology, US department of Commerce say about the definition of cloud :
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. “
I will not go into the details of these and much has been said about it. Read this very interesting blog on Cloud Computing for Non-Techies
English: Cloud computing stack showing infrastructure, platform and application layers as well as clients and servers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Varoon earlier.
My simple 2 cents on advocacy for the adoption of the Cloud is that it actually solves your cost-effective lean IT parameters quite well. Most public cloud services are known to be cheaper than traditional IT setups, in cases even virtualized setups. Most public cloud services like AWS have reduced their prices year on year & clearly their business model seems to be low margin & high growth.
Cloud Computing certainly uses the best practices of virtualization and presents itself as a superset , providing along with it the added advantages of elasticity and flexibility.
Go ahead, make your IT not only “Cheap & Steady” but “Pretty” too – “Sasta, Sundar aur Tikaoo”
