16 Apr Covid, Cloud and Indian IT : An overnight change of perspective
It was the 16th of March 2020, I was talking to a client’s friendly IT manager. After we discussed business, we got onto the hot topic of the time – Covid epidemic coming from China. As a casual question I asked the IT manager about the possibility of companies to work from home / managing IT systems remotely. For someone like me who has worked remotely all my career in India and abroad. This was a logical and necessary alternative.
The response was a monologue for next 15 minutes from the IT manager, explaining work from home /remotely was a fanciful idea with no feasibility in India and definitely not in his company. Hence they will come to office everyday whether there is covid or any other calamity. Well, since the client is always right, so I nodded and agreed. In any case it was his company and he will know it better.
Lockdown Announced by Indian Government
A week later PM Modi announced a country wide lock down. A few days from later from that I just called the same client IT manager asking them how they are coping up and how are they managing to go to office.
Voila ! Again, I had a 15 minute monologue from the friendly IT manager talking how they were working from home perfectly for last 10 days and explaining how IT systems can all be managed remotely in todays day and age … where is the need to go to office at all?
I smiled to myself and since the client is always right, I nodded and agreed.
Covid has almost overnight changed the old mindset of the Indian IT managers from
- have to sit in office
- oversee the team member from 9am to 6pm
- plan capex budget for weeks to procure infrastructure
- deploy systems on-premises
- get a sense of security by hosting the server in a room (data center) in the office
to New Age mindset
- Utilize new age cloud systems and services
- Manage systems remotely
- Plan Opex budgets with flexibility changing cost any time
- Agile systems
- Start, stop and terminate servers at will
- Security through architecture and not physical proximity
Today (just an year down the line) when we have discussions with the clients on the cloud hosting. The questions of ‘why cloud?’ is not there. It is only a question of getting the architecture right, the pricing optimized and lets start the project. Even the common bugbear on security, is now just an issue which is to discussed/resolved and not to be used as a roadblock.
While Covid might have devastated the world, it has also generated a change in the IT systems design and planning which is revolutionary.
Rahul Guleria
CEO & Co-founder, Zimble One
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