“Article written by Md. Jawed Ahmed, Head IT at Sterlite Technologies for the Company Annual Report for 2010”
Gartner claims that in the year 2011 IT organisations world over will spend around 18 percent of their total IT spend on the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation. At Sterlite we are not surprised by this report. We have anticipated this and for the last two years we have been moving towards these technologies in a gradual and planned manner.
As businesses grow beyond the conventional boundaries of region, geography and physical structure, it becomes imperative for the support functions like Information Technology to keep pace. Services have to be available throughout the enterprise in a seamless manner irrespective of whether its the corporate office, a manufacturing plant or a 2 person SOHO. This provides a twin challenge to the IT department. First is to ensure that the reach of the IT function grows along side the business. The second is to manage the security challenges arising out the greater boundary and increased access. One without the other is meaningless.
All of these have to be seen in the context of the Confidentiality, Integrity and the Availability of data. Which means that we have to provide the right data to the right persons at the right time without compromising on the data security or the ease of access.
One technology that provides all of this is the Cloud. Seen from the perspective of business IT, the cloud has the potential to be a game changer. Both, commercially as well as technically the benefits of cloud are difficult to beat. It has the capability to provide best of the breed solutions at a fraction of the cost of similar non-cloud solutions.
You will be glad to know we, at Sterlite Technologies have started harnessing the power of cloud in a major way. We are the first large manufacturing orrganisation in India to have shifted Collaboration(which includes Email) totally to the cloud. Today we are using a suite of cloud based communication technologies, which are providing to us, in addition to e-mailing, personal video chat, real-time document sharing and editing,online calendaring and scheduling for people as well as shared resources, personal information portals. All of this takes place in a safe and secure manner with the highest forms of encryption. Additionally we are able to save each and every bit of data at a different cloud based service provider. This helps us in fulfilling our statutory as well business continuity requirements. The entire concept of cloud is based on "use-what-you-want" and "pay-what-you-use". Thus, for the cloud based communication system which we just mentioned, we did not have to spend a single rupee on capital expenses. Its a service for which we are paying a monthly fee.
The cloud services which Sterlite Technologies is using are online meetings and training sessions, pre-sales and sales information systems and management and tracking of the business projects. All of these applications are hosted on public cloud and are accessible to Sterlite employees from across the world. We have a private cloud as well, on which we have put our employee performance management and business analytic systems.
To enable our users to access the cloud based services we have had to revamp our IT Security systems totally. Since the services run on Internet we have put up robust and high end perimeter firewalls at all of our locations. These firewalls are controlled centrally and all data passing through is logged and recorded.
Along with cloud, we have also placed faith on the technology of Virtualisation. We have done virtualisation of end user computers at our Shendra plant and we are about to complete the virtualisation of servers at our Waluj OF Plant and at our Data Centre. Normally it been seen that the percentage utilisation of the processors of servers and desktops is in the region of 10-15%(desktops) to 30-40%(servers). And this figure is like to come down further as computer hardware becomes more and more powerful.
Virtualisation is a technique of using one single physical machine for multiple applications. We take one physical server and turn it into multiple virtual servers, each for a dedicated application. Virtualisation increases the utilisation of computer hardware manifold leading to increased Returns-on-investment and decreased Total-cost-of-ownership. Other than the commercial advantages, Virtualisation also makes administration and management of servers easier and more efficient. It makes IT more responsive and agile. Based on requirements we can for example increase the power of a few servers during the month-end and keep it reduced at rest of the times. Whenever requirements for new server come up, they can be provisioned virtually in minutes instead of days or weeks which might be required for a physical server.
At Sterlite Technologies the focus of the IT services has been on employing the best technologies to provide enablement to business. The job of IT is complete in the true sense only when people don't have to think of IT at all. Everything, from business applications to the IT infrastructure has to work all the time, in all places, under all conditions. We believe that by using cloud computing and virtualisation we have taken the first steps towards this objective.
