Amol Sawarkar: Cloud-First - Blessings for Continued Humanitarian Work

So good afternoon. I assume all of us are from Europe zone. So I'm starting with good, good afternoon. I'm from IFRC as I can short name the organization name. So it is easy to pronounce and practice in the full presentation. So I don't need to discuss anything differently. We have seen an unprecedented global crisis, which no one thought will appear. Even the last year, past three months, we have been working from home. Undoubtedly, we are doing a successful job in normal circumstances. It would not have been possible. Most of the office stuff has been working from home.

Meetings are becoming online and these meetings have gone multifold in the quantity or number of meetings happening. As you can see on the screen, there are more, there are increase of cloud facilities, which we experienced over last few months, and this is actually what the advantage of cloud, but that is not only the reason why I foresee dived into the cloud environment. So let's try to see first what that, what the IFC does. So IFC is one of the largest humanitarian sector, nonprofit organization. We work with hundred 92 member national societies. That means 192 countries.

I first secretary has offices in 60 countries, helping operations in various places to assist victims of disasters, diseases strengthens the capacity of member national societies and the number of operation centers. Beneficiaries volunteers keep on increasing, decreasing, depending on the operations going on their criticality and the relativity because of this size. We have this business, sorry.

Yeah, because of the size, the traditional it focus has been on the core of it systems, which is spending 80% of time in operational and keeping lights on. Whereas more business focus is on beneficiaries and running the programs.

However, IFRS is not an organization which should keep on running the it systems. They are not, this is not a technical company to run the technical Resources always. So there had to be a shift required to allow more business oriented development happening within the existing team. And that's exactly. We started in the discussion in the beginning that we have limited number of people in it teams worldwide 40 50 is the, the team members size. So that is not substantial to support the size, which we just discussed some time ago.

So this was the strategy to get out of the bottom, not spending enough, not spending the time on making sure the lights are on and trying to get on top, which is to help the beneficiaries. We'll revisit this slide little later. So what happened in the initial days, the business users would talk about their peers. They learn about more capabilities since all, all was just to get started. Curiosity from business users was increasing. This was the start of cloud from business side within it department seen was not very different.

We were receiving ever increasing service requirements, no real control possible with the resource levels in hand. And obviously the cloud strategy. One from this situation, this was a scene is in 2011, 2012. Obviously then the studies started and various advantages seen the cloud services can be scaled up, scaled down where changes needed. And that was exactly what I foresee expects during the emergency support. As the services can be accessed from variety of users, endpoint, user endpoint users can access them from anywhere from, even from their mobile phone or their own home computer.

Generally the services are developed to suit more or most of the industry standard processes. So there is no need to customize drastically. So that was another advantage. And always application services are updated with new features. They are patched for security maintained regularly. So the responsibility of maintaining uptime is transferred to the provider. Obviously we see advantages, but there are challenges as well. So looking the financial was one change CapEx to OPEX.

Moving is not that easy and straightforward to happen in overnight, as well as there were legal risks, privacy pet attack. And since the IC is more independent and without any impact from government, we wanted to keep the independence. So it was very much important to preserve the data privacy.

We had to deploy certain services in parallel, in addition to existing ones to keep the confidentiality table as well as we have some countries difficult to reach from different locations because of political, because of legal, because of technical issues, we work in different difficult countries to reach even to the internet services, basic internet services. So that was another challenge. And obviously the balancing act to prioritize between re refreshing the resting applications, as well as addressing the new requirements and keeping these balances always a challenge.

So these are challenges, risks. We came across, we mitigated some of them, some of them reflected in the cloud adoption progression, and that's how we can see here. So we started in 2011, we could move first 5, 4, 5 years as planned, but they were quite easy hanging fruits. And that was not a challenge. The challenge started coming when we had one thing, new and new services coming in. So there was a competition between whether we should roll out new services or should we look after renewing life cycling, resting services to go to cloud.

Somehow the, the roadmap slowed down during some 2016, 2019, we had to move out of the building to, for the reconstruction of the place. And that forced us to move our infrastructure to colocated facilities.

Now, do you call colocated as cloud? That is a question. So I will not call that as a cloud because this is co-location. And then we started, we had a kind of pause in between, and now we have started again, hopefully to finish by 2020 end of 2021. We are expecting to go most of the services to cloud. This is current state of cloud.

If you see left hand side, there are, there is a co-location, which is still having 15% application services, mostly the test environment in the headquarter and in the, in some of the offices, we only keep local file and print services also plan to be moved to the cloud, but there is no, there is no solution ready to be moved. Yet. There are some applications in Azure cloud, and most of the services are in private ES cloud in clarinet. On the right hand side, there are multiple services.

I didn't mention all, but there are roughly around 30 plus percent of services running out of cloud SAS cloud today. So we subscribe to a service per use and we pay, there is a change in priority required. So this allowed us not building yet another office 365 type of environment. This didn't force us to set up the file, print sharing again and again, and keep them updated with latest facilities, make them available on internet. We simply subscribe to office 365 and we offer user services to train and to guide them which tool to use for their regular day to day requirements.

Instead, we decided to invest the time to build office business specific systems, similar something like reporting services for donors, our, the preparedness system to we have Federation wide data bank, which collects the information about all the international societies, their capabilities, the status around their area. And that allows us to build our next next set of application services, which are more useful for reaching more beneficiaries, doing the business more effectively. So this is what I was talking that we wanted to go pyramid transition from one to other.

Now 80% is called the per law. You may have heard. So it is always 80 20, doing 80% is easy and doing 20% takes more 80% of energy. And that's what is happening. Now. We are at the end of the tunnel, but we, the last 20% remaining are more or less the core I core services, which are finance HR at logistics. If I re revisit the transition we could in word or flip the pyramid, this is of course the target we are reaching there, but it'll take a couple of years more. What we remaining systems are delivering the core services.

As I mentioned for finance, HR logistics, and they are very interlinked, complex, and heavy to migrate. And that is what is remaining big effort. We have started a project to move all to SaaS E R P to replace them. And this is the two years more or less, more two years activities spending. But this allows us to, to business, to receive benefits. We are undertaking, undertaking the building humanitarian ecosystem, which will create a core for all our business services. So this will be yet another enterprise management system, but specific to our business, not for the core business.

And this allows us to continue more with the same resources because we are getting away from the day to day jobs of maintaining hardware, maintaining operating system, and doing day to day maintenance work. So that has gone. And we have got all the benefits from the cloud. So we don't need to discuss all the benefits. We have already seen the benefits from the cloud coming to us, but just to revisit once that is what we call the cloud first for IFRC because we can scale up as needed.

And that is the advantage which IFRC needs during the operational support for disaster response, we constantly need updated, managed our secure security improved application services made for industry standard processes. Our technology agnostic services allow us to use any platform connect from anywhere and in any circumstances, even with the low bandwidth at times, it gives us ability to work, work with national society member, staff, and scaling up to 200,000 different employees of national societies, 2000 users of secreted itself and potential.

As we discuss 150 million beneficiaries in we, this also allows us to increase capabilities with limited efforts to get started. So we have to only invest little bit to get started in the cloud. And when we are there, we have to just scale up scale down. Obviously there is some customization to be, to be done every time we adopt any cloud, but that is normal. Like any other service, just the integration, which is more to focus on. And finally, the focus on business support could be achieved because of cloud. And that is one more reason why we want to stay and prefer cloud as first.

If we get any more requirements for any services, we always prefer cloud first SaaS first. And why SaaS first, because when we go to SaaS, we don't have to worry about what is underlying platform, their updates, their patches, the security, everything is taken care of. And this has been working well in, in the past few years. And I'm sure we will keep on working on this to reach the final goal of inverted pyramid. I think I have covered most of them. Just last thing is since we are moving to cloud and cloud is now offering different advantages.

We are now looking at the future additional services, like internet of things, cloud information, sharing for building proper report system, artificial intelligence, to forecast some epidemics and disasters and few others. To keep the, to keep one step ahead in the business advantages with this, I will stop my presentation part. I'll be happy. Touse some questions. Here are my details to contact. Feel free to connect to me for any more details. So thank you.