Over the past few years, cloud computing has taken the business world by storm with its influential benefits that bring productivity, flexibility, and cost savings. A large number of organizations that look forward to outsource IT solutions is now turning to cloud tiers, particularly Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), to automate and virtualize their IT functionalities.

IaaS provides clients with an access to computing stacks, such as compute capacity, bandwidth, and storage capacity. Sensing the future of this cloud tier, many service providers have stepped in and enlisted IaaS as the part of their offerings. These benefactors are making efforts to prove that they are the best from the rest by designing developer-friendly features to augment the agility of end-users. Typically, every IaaS vendors follow similar pricing points and offers network, cloud storage, and computing capabilities.

The logical question that arises here is – if pricing and offerings are similar, then what factors differentiate leaders from the laggards?

The answer is, – services that empower the development and alleviate the intricacies of underlying IT tasks, like failover, orchestration, and automation.

According to a report, the market for IaaS cloud is in a state of upheaval. A number of companies are already running their business-critical applications or experimenting with Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The driving force behind this increased adoption is the positive ROI and reduced IT complexities, coupled by above-mentioned key business objectives.

Let us glean through some strategic benefits that businesses can derive from IaaS adoption:

Don’t let your focus be a growth cutter: Cloud IaaS providers are putting major efforts in making deployment and operational tasks easy to manage for their clients. They provide ultimate level of abstraction that eliminates the complexities, allied to both underlying applications and application stacks. This, in turn, frees IT teams from mundane infrastructure maintenance activities and lets them focus on other core projects that need their most attention. In this connection, a recent study conducted by a research firm suggests that businesses anticipating cloud IaaS admit that their IT professionals were able to focus on more their business strategies and goals.

Don’t let resource crisis to curtail performance: Other major benefits of switching to the cloud IaaS include rapid scale out and scale in. Most of the IaaS providers offer scaling of computing resources to meet emerging influx of data. Organizations can simply scale their computing resources to sustain the rapid upgrades and growth in performance. Let’s say, if you are running 1/O intensive workloads, you will get access to a long-term, and performance-driven storage to VMs without experiencing any downtime issues. Gain – resources can be provisioned on an on-demand basis that keeps your business’s performance uncompromised.

Total Cost of Ownership: It goes without saying that businesses that gear up for cloud IaaS save a lot. The costs allied – to hiring IT personnel, building, management, and planning, including the costs of IT infrastructure management and maintenance – get eliminated. Moreover, the Infrastructure as a Service is based on pay per use billing model. All such capital expenses are transferred to the IaaS vendor, allowing organizations to turn their capital expenses into operating expenses. The service can be customized as per the needs of the enterprise.

Guaranteed Uptime: Besides ensuring that customers’ needs are always met, the IaaS service providers guarantee high service availability, which is clearly mentioned in their service-level agreement (SLA). Partnering with a vendor – that not only supports dynamic infrastructure scaling, but also monitors and manages virtual server pools – makes IaaS a viable solution for businesses.

Curtails Catastrophic Circumstances: Every organization strives to put a well-documented disaster recovery plan, however, the technology supporting the same objective is often expensive. Companies that operate in different remote locations have different disaster recovery strategies and business continuity plans – which make the management virtually intricate. Here, IaaS is to rescue. It provides a holistic DR architecture, which slashes down operating costs and makes the management simple.

“A research determines that DR and BCP is one of the prime drivers behind IaaS adoption.”

— Frost & Sullivan

IaaS enables employees to gain access to the same infrastructure, such as email, web servers, and applications over a network, no matter what unforeseen situation may arrive. This, in turn, curtails the loss of critical data, thereby, improving the agility of a business.

Access to Advancing Technology: IaaS eliminates the need for procuring and managing IT equipment, and frees businesses from the hassle of upgrading and updating technologies. It goes without saying that buying upgrades can be a costly proposition, and clients that rely on their on-premise IT infrastructure are required to upgrade their equipment, or add capacity/features. In such cases, IaaS proves a beneficial bet as an organization does not need to worry about equipment, everything is taken care at service provider’s end.

Above and all, businesses adopting for IaaS cloud hosting model benefit from unilateral resource provisioning capabilities, rapid elasticity, latest technologies, and improved cash flow. Besides offering these business critical features, it also eliminates technology obsolescence and mundane management tasks, allowing organizations to grow and outflank their competitors.

There is hardly any doubt that modern businesses would not have achieved seamless flexibility and agility in absence of SaaS or any other cloud computing service. Cloud services enhance growth prospects of enterprises by allowing stricter control of document versions, improving accessibility, and facilitating automatic updates. Any small or medium business or an enterprise can look forward to compete with large organizations by adopting cloud capabilities. 

Providers of Software as a Service must improve their abilities of protecting and encrypting huge volumes of data that is processed, handled, and generated by their clients. This is especially significant with the proposed reforms in the domain of data regulation by European Union, which will come into effect by 2018. 

Impact of GDPR on Cloud & Employment Services

European Union is going to overhaul all existing set of articles as well as principles pertaining to data security by redefining data privacy requirements, which are recommended by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The set of new regulations will span any and every enterprise, which is going to handle personal data of visitors or residents of European Union. Needless to mention, GDPR is set to revamp the paradigms of data regulations across the globe. 

GDPR and its reach

Entrepreneurs and IT leaders need to understand that any organization irrespective of their size or country will be influenced by GDPR if it is going to process data that has originated in the European Union. 

Complying with GDPR

It is necessary to understand factors that need to be considered while ensuring GDPR compliance. The most fundamental requirement while beginning with the compliance process is to perform data classification and data discovery processes by gaining deeper insights into the entire gamut of public and cloud hosting services. Scanning of data is a must for every organization in order to conduct flawless inventory of data and to eliminate scope for missing out privacy data. 

Apart from Data Discovery, the process of data classification is more critical due to the fact that GDPR assigns high importance to Personal Identifiable Information that is far more sensitive and privileged as compared with data which falls under the non-privacy category. 

Assessing the level of preparedness for GDPR

The impact of violating GDPR guidelines could be devastating as the fine can run into millions of dollars. This necessitates review of security practices by organizations that have anything to do with personal data that may originate from EU.

Unfortunately, there is large divide between general awareness of GDPR and the actual level of preparedness as confirmed by a major population of IT security professionals. 

It is found that less than forty five percent of IT security professionals have understood the gravity of the impending regulation and are exploring ways to prepare for accommodating these new sets of security guidelines in their respective organizations. 

Thankfully, the proposed regulation is not going to come into effect anytime before May 2018. This allows a sufficient leeway for internet organizations to put the required plans in place for achieving effective compliance with GDPR guidelines. 

These plans must be designed to cover notification processes, procedures of data inventory, and data flow. Secondly, all systems must be geared up to deliver options for data transfer, data analysis and data protection. The plan for GDPR compliance should be backed by revised procedures as well as policies in addition to robust guidelines for status reporting and compliance audits. 

GDPR and new job avenues 

Tech professionals in IT sector can look forward to a whole new set of job opportunities because as per the article number 37 of GDPR, a data protection officer must be hired for overall monitoring of core activities on regular basis.

A Data Protection Officer will be assigned multiple functions including assessment of privacy impact on audits, new products, vendors, and so forth. He will also have to understand the level of risk assessment pertaining to sensitive data in the current business scenario. These functions will be in addition to retention, pseudonymization and anonymization of sensitive data. 

It is roughly estimated that as many as 75000 new vacancies will be created by GDPR for the post of Data Protection Officer across the globe in addition to 28000 positions in Europe alone. In fact, many organizations have already begun the process of appointing DPOs.

Things to remember

Most of the new DPO positions will be of contractual in nature and the US and UK will be major countries to focus on as there will be far more job openings than all the rest of European nations combined together. The speed of appointments will be accelerated as the day of enforcement of the regulation nears. 

As the new GDPR guidelines will be rolled out, we can witness greater implementation of privacy as well as security measures. The entire process of compliance with the new set of guidelines will leave a significant footprint on the global data security landscape.