South Asia News

Are Core Applications moving to the Cloud

Organisations are still very skeptical about shifting their core applications to cloud as there are security issues that are important for organisations to address.

But the question is how do organisations make a decision about moving their core applications to cloud? W.Media’s ‘South Asia Cloud Security Market Insights’ in a panel discussion titled ‘Securing your cloud environment- Outlook for the future’, discussed these issues in detail. The panel was moderated by Nanda Mohan Shenoy, Director- Bestfit Solutions Pvt Ltd, Past President, ISACA Mumbai Chapter. The panellists included Ambarish Singh, CISO, Godrej & Boyce. Thilini Wijewardhana, Head of Security Operations & Technology, Cryptogen. Sapan Talwar, SVP & CISO, Tower Research Capital. Satyanandan Atyam, CRO, Tata AIG General Insurance Co. Ltd and Vikram Mehta, Ex- CISO, MakeMyTrip/Goibibo. This is part 1 of this series.

“Core business applications are of most importance today, specifically for the customer-facing organisation. In the past few years we have seen many enterprises migrating some of their applications to cloud-native applications further integrating it to the hybrid multi cloud.

There is an advantage of flexibility, scalability and some potential of cost-saving. But I would say that considering the kind of business companies are running and the impact any issues could have on cloud business I think that businesses would still want to stay on premise and not move everything to cloud. This is something I have seen,” said Sapan Talwar, SVP & CISO, Tower Research Capital.

He further pointed out that the reason why organisations do not wish to shift everything to cloud is because the integrated security approach is difficult to attain when one has to deal with multiple cloud options and vendors. This is something which the organisations need to look into.

The other aspect is that cloud security and compliance need to be thought through, specifically for the companies who come under the regulatory authorities.

All these aspects prevent enterprises from moving their core business applications. SaaS based applications which are shared environment applications which provide services related to HR, finance and others which most of the companies have started adopting which is the first step toward cloud, but enterprises today are taking one step at a time when it comes to moving their core applications to cloud.

Migration to Cloud

“The subject of applications moving to cloud is twofold. It is the core application, is the copy of the core application which does some other work from a peripheral standpoint of integrating.

Your customer integrating with your partner or getting other peripheral services or peripheral customer acquisition service life cycles, retention life cycles or customer growth life cycles.

I think those applications are migrating to cloud. If we talk about the BFSI sector, the core applications become a sensitive and critical application for companies to move the core applications to cloud,” said Satyanandan Atyam, CRO, Tata AIG General Insurance Co. Ltd.

He further added that a lot of peripheral applications have been there and implemented from a point of view of customer acquisition, disengagement and growth. All such applications are definitely moving to cloud because the benefit of agility, cost and flexibility is there and faster time to market.

“We are in times where the faster time to market, the ability to acquire and provide services to the customer is important and if the core data which is a part of the core application is a part of the internal risk management approach being part of the data centre itself and we move the copy of the data which is required for you to do the other acquisition strategies from a servicing and acquiring standpoint.

As the peripheral applications are in communication with the core applications via a right architecture, that is where there is a huge amount of cloud adoption. This strategy is clear and this is something I have seen across industries,” said Satyanandan Atyam, CRO, Tata AIG General Insurance Co. Ltd.

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