Wacker and its Indian partner company Metroark founded the silicones joint venture Wacker Metroark Chemicals Pvt Ltd in 1998. Headquartered in Kolkata, the company has offices all over India and operated in the country’s major commercial centres. Its key markets are adhesives, automotive, coatings, construction, packaging, plastics, personal care and textile segments. The company also markets WACKER silicone sealants, silanes and pyrogenic silica in India. Amitava Mukherjee, Manager, IT and ERP systems, Wacker Metroark Chemicals, talks about how cloud computing is helping his company become more efficient and what are the points to take care of while choosing your service provider. Excerpts from an interview:
As an IT person, what according to you are the areas where cloud can work seamlessly, especially in the Indian IT scenario?
Cloud computing means hosted services, where the user needs a PC or any internet enabled device. It's an on-demand service as per the contract with the service provider. Customers only pay for the usage as per their contract. Cloud computing is cost efficient because of its increased efficiencies. By controlled technologies such as virtualization, the business will achieve more productive use of computing resources.
Businesses can easily reduce the capital investments and have to pay only for what is actually needed and consumed. It can thus convert capital expenses to operating expenses. It is sure to emerge as cost-effective solution, especially for a country like India. It allows a flexible business model with applications being deployed in the cloud today. The developers can commission servers at a very low price on the internet to have their application up and running fast. Cloud helps developers to do lot more testing quickly and scale it up. A faster development and testing mean businesses can accomplish in hours what would otherwise have taken months.
How is a technology like cloud working for a company like yours?
Here are some instances:
a. Better utilization: Less units lead to less free capacity for peak load. Bigger units for lower cost.
b. More flexibility: Changes in requirements can be realised very easily and quickly. Deployment is also much faster way and without CAPEX.
c. Less complexity: Consolidation of servers and resources is very easy.
d. Reduce Risk : Reduces risk and extremely reliable solutions. Our data is now secured in a professional global data center.
How is your company using cloud?
We are using a private cloud for business. Which means there is a Wacker cloud and on the web, we have one global data centre and two regional data centres that serve our world-wide business. We are looking at using more cloud computing in future as it is an extremely reliable as well as cost effective solution.
There are a few doubts and misgivings people have about the technology when it comes to availability and security. What are your views on the same?
Yes, cloud computing is still a fairly new market and still growing. Many cloud providers are now SAS 70 Type II certified, and the new SSAE 16 audit is coming. It means that at least some level of security controls are in place. It is also recommended that clear SLAs be attained.
Things are still not as clear as people would like them, especially those with compliance mandates and the government sectors. Look for a vendor that uses standard access mechanisms (i.e. HTTP, REST or SOAP API).
How do you think a service provider can dissipate the myth or amend these loopholes?
Those interested in the technology should not forget to ask these questions to the service providers and include the same in SLAs. According to statistics, only 62 per cent believe that their data is indeed safe. Consider for instance:
a. How can I encrypt my data?
b. Check if the service provider is SAS 70 Type II, SSAE 16, or ISO 27001 certified?
c. What are the mechanisms and controls that are in place to deal with a catastrophic event?
