We are constantly talking about the development of cloud
technologies. Gartner estimates the global cloud market for more than $ 200
billion (of which traditional 2% belongs to Russia), IDC predicts for the near
future the growth of global spending on public services by 20% per year - six
times faster than the IT market. But what really stands behind these words is
that they are spoken about not only by service providers, but also by
customers? Our Conferences and Analytics provided an opportunity for them to
meet and speak at the conference "Cloud Market in Russia".
During the conference, its participants discussed many of
the problems that concern them. One of them was the topic of responsibility of
the cloud provider for violation of the SLA. Today, even if the contract
contains a clause on financial responsibility, the service provider only
compensates the customer for the cost of subscribing to their services: the
longer the simple, the higher the amount of the return amount. But this does
not compare with the sometimes huge financial and reputation losses of the
customers themselves. Naturally, in such cases they require "blood",
receiving in return a pittance.
Is there a universal solution? Participants in the
discussion came to the conclusion that so far it has not been invented. The
situation could be saved by insurance of risks of using cloud services, but so
far there is no methodology from the assessment, and insurance companies are
not taken for this work. In the end, if someone does not fit SaaS, he can order
IaaS with replication at once from several providers to ensure reliability, and
deploy services independently.
Another issue is when the clouds become a means of
production, not an infrastructure location. According to the conference participants,
this will happen only after service providers provide not just cloud-based ERP
or office packages, but ready-made tools for improving the customer's business
processes. The cloud should change the work of the business, and there are such
examples - they were told about it by their own example. But there is a
problem: automating and creating in the cloud providers can only standardized
processes, because they are not able to develop unique customer business
processes. But providers still have to show more initiative in this direction,
because customers often do not even guess about all their capabilities.
"The cloud has changed our business"
Can clouds change not only business processes, but also the
business model itself? Undoubtedly, the IT director of the Russian division of
the international company ABB, Vladimir Shevchenko, believes. Until 2013, ABB
lived in the paradigm of strict control of its own information resources, using
only private clouds. Then a new strategy was adopted, such as Cloud First,
aimed at quickly responding to IT changes in business, mobility, reducing
operating costs, integrating new businesses, attention to UX, BYOD and other
useful trends. As a result, fundamental changes occurred not only in the IT
infrastructure, but also in the company itself.
"In Russia, we have 28 offices and 7 industrial
sites," said Vladimir Shevchenko. - We switched to the use of hybrid
clouds, Office 365 solutions, Salesforce.com, Skype for Business and others.
The effect is not only economic. We saw that cloud mobility has more
capabilities than simply organizing a VPN channel on a laptop. One of our top
managers conducted an urgent audit of the contract directly from their iPhone,
standing in line for landing at the airport in Zurich. Our contact center now
flexibly regulates the number of operators, connecting their workplaces
directly at home. And in the building we have fewer jobs than the number of
employees, because some part stopped going to the office, participating in
groups remotely. This is unusual for ABB, but it works. "
IT giants come with new services
Oracle develops sales and plans to launch the first Russian
projects Oracle Cloud Machine - services, which removes a number of regulatory
restrictions that prevented businesses from using public clouds. This was
announced at the conference by Pavel Zakharov, vice president of technology
business in Russia.
Cloud service Oracle Cloud Machine allows customers to place
their data on a cloud platform vendor inside their own data center. In fact,
these services are "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) and
"platform as a service" (PaaS), thanks to which customers can
"register" the Oracle public cloud in their data centers on the
territory of our country - by renting hardware and software systems. Such
removal of a part of the operator cloud into the perimeter of the customer
allows to comply with the requirements of the legislation, in particular,
regarding personal data of citizens, trade secrets and secret information.
According to Pavel Zakharov, "in our country there is a huge interest and
the first customers of this service", because Oracle Cloud Machine gives
each customer the opportunity to open their data center with Oracle.
From private to general
In general, the conference participants noted the growing
interest of customers in cloud technologies. Due to this, in particular, in
about two years the capacity of the cloud platform of Rostelecom doubled.
"Our platform was launched in 2011 as a small solution for providing internal
services, then we began to offer it to our clients," said Eduard Gorbunov,
an expert at the Center for Competence for Cloud Solutions at the Center for
Rostelecom. - In 2015, it was already a large solution, consisting of 20,000
computing cores. Thanks to the development of services on the basis of this
platform, by the end of 2016 we have increased it to more than 40,000 cores
located on four sites, which serve more than 400 customers. "
Also in the cloud of Rostelecom infrastructure solutions
were introduced at SDN, but this new technology for the domestic market has yet
to be rolled over: "Everything was fine on paper, but once the first
customers" landed ", some questions appeared - now we have them We
decide. However, this technology is promising, and with the help of SDN we will
launch the second stage of development of our services. "
Vendoram never tires of talking about clouds. They can be
understood: this, on the one hand, is an old paradigm, studied along and
across, on the other - a large and capacious market, far from saturation. Not
surprisingly, in the direction of providing cloud services, every second
integrator and telecom provider goes, year after year including clouds into
their IT and business strategies. IBS DataFort company has been developing
these technologies since 2001, that is, it is one of the oldest providers of
cloud services in Russia, and naturally it has its own view on them. The head
of the technical development direction Andrey Krasnov drew the attention of the
participants to the current trends, which his company singled out within a vast
"cloud" theme. This development of data storage technologies,
disaster recovery, testing and development, as well as solutions for SMB.
Speaking about the services of providing environments for testing and
development, he noted them as one of the most popular areas: "Clients come
with formalized requirements, but they do not have a testing budget, and it's
unclear whether the project will" fire "or not. At the same time they
need to deploy a test solution urgently, literally on the day of treatment.
Thanks to the capabilities of the clouds, we quickly provide them with an
environment, they check their decisions for as long as they need. At any time,
they can turn off the project and pay only what they used in fact. "
Use standard solutions
A service provider can develop own services, or can use
ready-made industrial solutions for this. The company LanCloud decided to go on
the second path, focusing on the classic services - mainly from Microsoft. The
calculation for the demand for standard solutions of Cloud Server, Cloud
Exchange, Cloud Skype4B, Office 365 and others was fully justified: 5 years
after the start the business grows by almost 100% per year, according to the
director of cloud services development Sergey Erin. "The basic idea was
that Microsoft's solutions use almost everything," he says. "But
Microsoft does not have the full range of specific services that Russian
clients need. For example, they do not provide services in data centers on the
territory of Russia, therefore, customers are forced to look for ways to comply
with the requirements of the law "On Personal Data". And we have
deployed services in our country on their servers, and we can provide resources
for processing and storing data. " As an example, he also cited the
possibility of connecting Russian telephone numbers to Office 365. As a result,
the same Skype replaces all of the customer's telephone - the PBX is no longer
needed.
"Give, and quickly"
Problems with infrastructure - that's what often causes the
company to move to cloud solutions, whether it's private, hybrid or public
clouds. Several years ago, the business of logistics company Pony Express was
experiencing rapid growth. Accordingly, the IT service required fast, very fast
and even faster start-up of new products, constantly be ready to integrate with
client resources, and support ever-increasing amounts of data. Foreign
customers demanded an audit of the company's IT infrastructure. "Our team
always heard one word: give it," Ilya Arsentiev told CIO. - Give new
servers, more disk space, "sandboxes" for integration, and give it
urgently. "
In 2016, the IT team assessed the available resources. They
were based on physical servers in a single engine room without territorial
redundancy. Each region "lived" on its own server with a copy of the
main ERP-system, a separate mail domain and its own Active Directory. Most of
the time and resources "eaten" the support of the existing economy,
there was almost no investment left. Yes, and the network infrastructure was
also at the limit of opportunities - recently in the company have found a
switch that worked for 15 years. It was not advisable to modernize this, a new
design was required. The logical and optimal output was the clouds in their
hybrid incarnation. They helped to solve both the server and user parts of the
task in just 4 months of the active phase of the project. "They say that
it's easy to switch to cloud infrastructure. It's not easy - the project was
complicated, with a lot of detail and increased attention to the inherited
systems. But it was worth it, "Ilya Arsentyev summed up.
Modern technologies accelerate processes tens of times. The
speed that the clouds provide to banks, dedicated a significant part of his
speech to the head of the productivity department of Alfa-Bank Anton Isanin.
"We can not imagine life without clouds," he says. - Alfa-Bank has
4000 servers that provide services to 13 million natural persons and hundreds
of thousands of organizations. This is a huge farm, which without cloud
technology is extremely slow. Earlier, the passage of the business process of
server allocation for business tasks took 1440 minutes - 3 working days were
required for the application to be entered, agreed, passed the examination, it
was allocated the server and conducted procedural procedures. Now, when using
cloud services, this same procedure takes 15 minutes. "
Clouds: what are and why are needed
Anton Isanin is convinced that the ability to use cloud
technologies directly affects the competitiveness of banks. And the transition
to the use of cloud technologies should be accompanied by cultural changes in
the company, otherwise there will be a reverse effect, because people
experience a "cultural shock" from accelerating processes to order.
In addition, the speaker said that Alfa Bank may soon become a SaaS supplier
after it publishes the API and begins to provide services to customers.
DIY Cloud
Not everyone needs public clouds. There are many examples
where a private cloud becomes the most optimal, or even the only option. This
was followed by TGC-1, the largest generating company in the North-West of
Russia. For her, as for many industrial enterprises, information technologies
have become business-critical. The experience of building your own cloud was
told by the head of IT in the branch "Nevsky" Alexei Malafeev.
"In 2008, there was a need to move from the center of St. Petersburg,
accordingly, it was necessary to build a new modern data center. To do this, we
had all the prerequisites, including our own channels of communication between
the objects. " The company decided to build a distributed data center at
two sites, with ultra-dense equipment placement and the constant use of all
computing resources.
To ensure disaster-resistant data centers were built at a
distance of 50 km one from the other. All storage, servers, data networks,
routers and firewalls have decided to virtualize. "The conclusions are
that it is quite possible to spread two data centers at such a distance.
Virtual machines themselves migrate between data centers, with delays not
exceeding 1 ms. For the normal load, two 8Gb SAN links and two 10Gb LAN links
were sufficient. Thanks to the chosen configuration and the use of full-flash
arrays, a full backup of the data center takes one night, and an incremental
backup takes several hours. And the entire data center can be placed in a
"single file" together with all the virtualized equipment, - Aleksey
Malafeev shared his experience. "For five years, the company has not
increased the number of units it takes, despite the multiple growth in storage
performance and capacity."
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