Market XaaS: Even the car will turn into a cloud service

Experts, service providers and customers who participated in the roundtable on cloud technologies at Forum 2015 told how they save migration to the clouds, discussed in what new industries cloud applications and virtualization will be used, and shared their vision of how the cloud technology market was affected The devaluation of the ruble and the introduction of a new version of the law on personal data.

Clouds are a new service way of organizing an economy in which information technology plays a key role in business processes. This approach is used in a variety of industries. "Even such a product as a car turns into a software-defined device," said independent expert Alexander Gerasimov. "In the field of education, the traditional approach will be preserved in the training of scientists, and to obtain typical occupations, for example, an accountant, only cloud platforms will be used," said Vladimir Soloviev, Director of Information Technologies at the Finance University under the Government of the Russian Federation.

Clouds mean that the customer does not need to build their own infrastructure, and IT is provided as an on-demand service from a remote data center. As a rule, there are several requirements to the clouds: the availability of standardized and user-friendly services, access to the service through various devices, instantaneous change in the volume of the consumed service and the ability to measure the amount of the service used.

From a technical point of view, there are two ways to build clouds: services of public providers, when IT is completely outsourced, as well as insourcing, when a territorially distributed company builds a common private cloud for all its departments. From the point of view of the "depth" of the cloud service, two key approaches can be distinguished: the lease of virtualized computing capacities and storage capacity (IaaS) and the provision of ready-made applications (SaaS) as a service.

The difficulty in defining the cloud and the absence of clear boundaries in the filling of this term make it difficult to estimate the volume of this market. For example, according to the results of 2013, analytical calculations for the Russian segment ranged from p6.2 billion (Orange Business Services) to p20.5 billion (Parallels). Nevertheless, all experts agree that the market is growing in double digits and this trend will continue in the medium term. For example, according to iKS-Consulting, by 2018 the revenue from the sale of cloud services will increase 2.5 times to p32 billion compared to 2014.

Why go to the clouds?

The main incentive for switching to the clouds is a reduction in costs, which is especially important in the context of the crisis and devaluation of the ruble. This approach allows you to completely abandon the capital investment in "hardware", as all physical resources are owned by the provider. "We compared the model of our own data center with the placement of our own equipment in a foreign data center and came to the conclusion that the public cloud is a more economical option," said Denis Rudakov, director of IT in the hypermarket chain Hoff.

In this case, as a rule, public providers offer reservation services, which in the case of building their own infrastructure involves the construction of a separate data center, which will stand idle for most of the time. "With a cloudy approach, you, roughly speaking, pay only for the time it will take to back up the systems in the event of an accident using the pay-as-you-go model," Denis Rudakov said. He also shared that emergency situations in his organization had occurred twice, and the recovery time was not more than 15 minutes, while the SLA allows for a simple up to 30 minutes.

The size of savings from the clouds can be very significant, said Axel Schulte, representing the German Institute of Material Flow and Logistics them. Fraunhofer: "We implemented our cloud solution Logistiсs Mall in the company WM-Logistik, resulting in the customer's IT costs decreased by 50%, and at this point the client is ready to replicate this experience on three new sites."

Disadvantages of the clouds

Despite the examples of successful cases and forecasts on the positive dynamics of the market, the panelists paid much attention to the problems of cloud solutions. The general trend is that the larger the customer, the more flaws he sees in public cloud services. The main concerns are related to the confidentiality of data, and for the corporate sector, the risks in this area are particularly high.

"The main principle is to keep critical processes in our own way, but to bring to the cloud non-critical functions that large companies have in abundance," shared Anton Isanin, head of performance management at Alfa-Bank's Architecture and Strategy Directorate. - In particular, this concerns testing, where it is important to quickly create a development environment that allows you to make a public cloud. We are a large bank that has its own network of data centers, but we would not like to be hammered by uncritical business processes. "

Moreover, even during testing, Alfa-Bank displays only 10% of works in external clouds. The reason lies in the pricing policy of providers, says Anton Isanin: "We recommend using public services only if their cost is more than 10% cheaper than the cost of using internal resources." On the other hand, Denis Rudakov noted that the cloud providers are flexible enough with pricing: "The market is just beginning, there are not many customers, so many cloud service providers are ready to provide discounts and deferred payments, so-called rental vacations."

In addition to privacy and pricing, customers also have questions about the performance of cloud systems. If several customers use one pool of the provider's resources, there is a risk of slowing down due to a high load.

In addition, sometimes application performance in a virtualised environment is reduced compared to the use of dedicated hardware: "To minimize such risks, testing should be carried out before migration. If the loss of productivity is significant, you should consider the possibility of building a hybrid cloud, "- recommended Denis Rudakov.

Digital sovereignty

Although in general the domestic cloud market repeats global trends, there are several local features that determine the specifics of the industry development in Russia. Participants of the roundtable identified three such trends. The first point is connected with the so-called digital sovereignty, which became relevant in connection with the introduction of sanctions against Russia. If the cloud infrastructure is built on foreign solutions, then there are certain risks related to security (Western vendors' refusal to cooperate, the existence of hidden bookmarks). To ensure digital sovereignty since 2015, federal law No. 188 and by-laws prohibit the acquisition by state structures of foreign software, if there are Russian counterparts.

The change in the legislation gives an impetus to the development of Russian cloud platforms. "Parallels has created a new legal entity, Rosplatforma, which fully meets the requirements for Russian software, while it will be very difficult for foreign vendors to fulfill the points about the availability of development infrastructure and R & D in Russia," said Vladimir Rubanov, vice president for The development of the server virtualization business of Odin (Parallels).

The idea of ​​digital sovereignty was developed in her speech by Olga Strelova, the head of the "Cloud Services" section of the IT cluster of the Skolkovo Foundation, which noted that among the participants of the innovation center there are cloud developers at all levels, including SaaS ("Yaklass", BoardMap), PaaS (Jelastic), IaaS (Nginx, Raidix), as well as infrastructure services (Center for Applied Computer Network Research, CPICS).

Law on PDD: do you transfer information systems to Russia?

The second feature of the construction of cloud architecture in Russia is related to the need to store personal data of citizens on the territory of the country, this provision entered into force on September 1, 2015. A number of companies have already transferred their information systems (IP) to the territory of Russia in order to meet the new requirement (for example, (Previously the hypermarket network used a data center in Vienna), but so far there are a minority of such enterprises. "Only about a third to a quarter of enterprises decided to move their systems to Russia, the rest While waiting for, as in the interpretation, what is the PDN, is uncertainty, "said Sergei Wolfson, partner of Jones Day, law firm," There are two approaches to the solution of this problem in the market: the conservative, according to which the PDD includes any data on citizens , And aggressive, in which the regulator requires proof that it is these data refer to PDD. "

The delay in the transfer of databases to Russia is due to the high cost of migration. For example, some large transnational corporation estimated the transfer of its HR-system to Russia at 20 million euros. Having weighed the pros and cons, the management decided to wait for real enforcement practice to understand what consequences to expect in case of inaction.

Data centers of Siberia

The third aspect of cloud development in Russia is the use of economic and geographical advantages of the country for the delivery of cloud services abroad. As a result of the devaluation of the ruble in Russia, very low prices for electricity turned out to be, and they constitute up to half of the operating costs of the data center. In addition, because of the low temperatures for cooling, cold air from the street can be used, which reduces the need for electricity. Such conditions make Russia a convenient "hub" for cloud services of foreign clients.

Director of the project "East" of En + Group Alexander Sergeev believes that China will be the main foreign customer of cloud services in Russia. In September 2015, his company signed an agreement on the construction of a data center in Irkutsk in 1800 racks, which will focus on working with companies of Russian-Chinese cooperation and on the backup storage of data center providers from China. "The cost of storage and processing and storage of data will be several times lower than in Hong Kong, and 20% cheaper than in Inner Mongolia in China," the expert said.

Telecommunication clouds

Maximum attention was paid to the virtualization of network functions (NFV, Network Functions Virtualization) and the construction of software-defined networks (SDN, Software Defined Networking). In data centers, virtualization of resources and configuration of services with the help of special utilities have already become the norm, now the telecommunications component of the infrastructure is waiting for a similar transformation. "Virtualization and SDN allow you to configure the network according to your needs and create complex network configurations based on already established simple functions," said Vitaly Antonenko, Head of Cloud Technologies at the Center for Applied Computer Network Research (NP CPICS).

Dmitry Timerkhanov, head of the strategic analysis group for CIS countries Alcatel-Lucent, spoke about the advantages of the new paradigm of building networks: "One-time investments in the system are reduced by an order of magnitude, the speed of introducing new network services on a virtualized platform, as shown by the experience of Telefonica, is reduced from 4 months Up to 4 weeks. In addition, there is a scaling effect "down". The traditional infrastructure is designed for millions of subscribers, while the new approach allows segmenting the network to thousands of subscribers, while preserving economic expediency. " According to Dmitry Timerhanov, promotion of SDN products began in Russia a year and a half ago. In particular, a new generation network was tested with Rostelecom.

The future of the clouds

Clouds are a key prerequisite for a new technology platform, the emergence of which analysts predict (the fourth technology platform, IDC defines). It will unite billions of users (people, as well as Internet of things), billions of applications, and trillions of virtual objects based on artificial intelligence, 3D printing and synthetic biology. "Large IT companies are now actively investing in the biotech segment, which is at the junction of information technologies and biological problems," said Vladislav Shershulsky, Microsoft's

technology cooperation director in Russia.

Now the world is anthropocentric, since the number of people is still more than the number of telephones and computers, but in a few years the situation will change and passive identifiable objects and purely digital entities will be added to active digital devices that will also be part of the infosphere, representing value for the surrounding people, And for themselves. "There will be a crossing of the Internet of things and the economics of cooperation, as a result, individual devices and objects will communicate directly with each other, for example, light bulbs and sensors will negotiate with the power station themselves, at what tariff will electricity flow into this or that room," predicts Vladislav Shershulsky.