Cloud Metering and Billing

Background

Cloud computing is not an option anymore, rather it is the standard for businesses to run their applications. Cloud computing helps orchestrates IT infrastructure and provide IT services as a commodity on a services based model. For businesses either renting these services or owning them privately, it is implied that the Cloud Services Provider provide insights with respect to resource utilization and metering for capital management and auditing.

Each cloud services provider has its own way of deploying resources and metering them, and that differs from the traditional IT business model, from procuring resources to providing them for deploying services. Improved IT infrastructure management, granularity in resources metering and ability to determine expenditure per service, changes the capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model. 

CIOs who know where their money comes from are in better control of their finances. Chargeback or show back can help to engage the business in IT spending and value, but the effort must be worthwhile. Some CIOs simply want to stop the business consuming more and more IT while blaming them for the cost and asking them to make it cost less.

Well-implemented chargeback can make the relationship between spending and revenue more transparent and intuitive. This reduces the need for expensive governance committee meetings and management interventions, freeing the organization to focus on optimizing all business spending.

Chargeback is often a source of contention between IT executives and business leaders, but it need not be. CIOs can use chargeback to transform their team's relationships with business stakeholders, improve financial transparency, and gain additional funding.

As a cost-center, IT budget always comes from chargeback against the organization's business revenue, even in cases where the IT organization does not directly chargeback for IT services.
Organizations that lack financial transparency in their services delivery are vulnerable to time consuming audits and unbudgeted tax invoices.

Public cloud service providers, handle the overhead of managing IT hardware infrastructure while organizations can focus on their core business functionality. Private cloud owned by organizations, the entire stack is managed by the owner or outsourced to third party service integrators. In both cases regular insights on resources metering with respect to cost is required for planning and correct strategic decisions. 

Efficient IT infrastructure management is incomplete without aligning IT resources with cost. It is also essential to map the consumption of these resources per user in order to determine efficiency and profitability. Gathering data and generating insights is necessary for continuous improvement and getting maximum returns on investments. 

Multi-Billing in eNlight 360

eNlight 360 come out of the box with cloud metering and billing. Being a leader in Cloud orchestration software, eNlight 360 provides IT infrastructure management, enables application deployment on virtualized resources, multi-tenant operations and Multi-Billing models. 

At the base level eNlight 360 provides virtual machine resources metering. Real time processor, memory, disk and bandwidth utilization is provided for static as well as dynamically auto-scalable virtual machines. These resources can be directly mapped with per unit utilization and that provides statistics with respect to monetary utilization of resources.

eNlight 360’s Multi-Billing module combined with multi-tenant architecture, enables businesses gather monetary resource consumption statistics at a business unit, department and individual user level. eNlight 360 provides multiple billing models, which suite almost all business models, they are –

1. Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume
2. Fixed Pay-Per-Use
3. Service Based Billing

Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing

Charging resources based upon consumption against allocation is Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing. Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume billing leverages eNlight 360’s Auto scaling technology to provide chargeback mechanism for IT resources based upon consumption rather than allocated resources.

eNlight 360 enables users to deploy auto-scalable virtual machines that scale dynamically as per resource requirement. Compute resources are allocated and deallocated from the virtual machine in real-time. Due to auto scaling virtual machines can run at bare minimum resources and can demand resources as and when required. For example, a virtual machine can run with minimum 2 vCPU and 2GB RAM at 02.00 am and can demand 4 to 6 vCPU and 12 to 16GB RAM in the peak time at 12.00 pm. This leads to dynamic resources utilization, having wavy resource utilization graphs.

eNlight 360 allows billing of such dynamic resources at the granularity of minutes. Dynamic virtual machines are provisioned with min / max resource capping. These virtual machines scale between the min / max resource caps. At any point the virtual machine would be consuming resources in between that resource capping. In this case dynamic Pay-Per-Consume billing allows dynamic resource metering and charge these consumed resources based upon the per unit rates defined in eNlight 360’s chargeback system.

eNlight 360’s Auto scaling enables to achieve greater server consolidation ratio while Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing enables cloud resource metering based upon consumption for these auto scalable virtual machines.

Fixed Pay-Per-Use Billing

Charging resources based upon allocation is Pay-Per-Use Billing. Essentially it is direct billing based upon the units allocated from the pool of cloud resources. As opposed to Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume billing, Fixed Pay-Per-Use billing charges resources based upon their allocation. This is the conventional billing model that the entire cloud market implements.

In eNlight 360, a virtual machine with fixed resources can be provisioned which are known as Static Virtual Machine. For example, a VM with 8 vCPU and 12 GB RAM. The resource consumption of static virtual machine is equals to the allocated resources. This leads to fixed resource utilization, where the resources can be charged on fixed flat rates.

Services Based Billing

Charging tenants based upon service deployment is Service Based Billing.

In eNlight 360, a service can be deployed in the form of group of related resources. For example, Mail service which consists of email server and backup servers. And this group of resources can be charged flat based upon the charges and policies defined in eNlight 360’s Billing system.
Service Based Billing is different from Pay-Per-Consume and Pay-Per-Use in a sense that it enables to set flat rates and charge group of services based upon these rates defined in the system. This flat chargeback model allows to group application deployments and resources under one common financial entity and simplify billing of related resources.

Conclusion

Cloud is de facto approach to deploy services and manage IT infrastructure, and having a clear view of resource metering from a financial perspective is critical. eNlight 360 provides multiple options a chargeback models that suits almost all business requirements. Service Based Billing enables charging group of resources with fixed flat rates across different services deployed across departments or business units. 
 
eNlight 360 provides highly granular resource utilization metering which can be charged using Pay-Per-Consume and Pay-Per-Use billing models. Pay-Per-Use billing provides more control and better granularity in terms of charging IT resources. These resources are charged against static utilization while different rates per unit can be configured in the system. Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume billing model is exclusive to eNlight 360 which leverages the eNlight 360’s patented Auto scaling technology to provide chargeback mechanism for dynamically scaled resources in real time.

With eNlight 360’s, Multi-Billing combined with Multi-Tenant architecture CxO’s can experience the next generation IT resource management from a single cloud management portal.

About US:

With eNlight 360’s, Multi-Billing combined with Multi-Tenant architecture CxO’s can experience the next generation IT resource management from a single cloud management portal. For more information, visit us at: cloud services India AND eNlight 360

ESDS is proud to be Indian government’s digital partner in empowering MSMEs

With a view to enlarge its foot print in delivery of products and services in MSME eco-system, a series of digital initiatives involving various portals such as sidbi.in, startupmitra.in, cgtmse.in, mudra.org.in and udyamimitra.in has been launched by SIDBI in the recent past. ESDS is proud to be associated with these initiatives… 

SIDBI
 
Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) set up on 2nd April 1990 under an Act of Indian Parliament, acts as the Principal Financial Institution for Promotion, Financing and Development of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) sector as well as for co-ordination of functions of institutions engaged in similar activities. 

Stand-Up India
 
Stand-Up India scheme aims at promoting entrepreneurship among women and scheduled castes and tribes. The scheme is anchored by Department of Financial Services (DFS), Ministry of Finance, Government of India. It facilitates bank loans between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 1 Crore to at least one Scheduled Caste (SC) or Scheduled Tribe (ST) borrower and at least one-woman borrower per bank branch for setting up a greenfield enterprise. 

Mudra Loans
 
Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) is a scheme for providing loans up to 10 lakh to non-corporate, non-farm small/micro enterprises. These loans are classified as MUDRA loans under PMMY. These loans are given by Commercial Banks, RRBs, Small Finance Banks, Cooperative Banks, MFIs and NBFCs. The borrower can approach any of the lending institutions mentioned above or can apply online through this portal. 

CGTMSE
 
Availability of bank credit without the hassles of collaterals/third party guarantees is a major source of support to the first generation entrepreneurs to realize their dream of setting up a unit of their own Micro and Small Enterprise. Keeping this objective in view, MSME ministry launched Credit Guarantee Scheme to strengthen credit delivery system and facilitate flow of credit to MSE sector. To operationalize the scheme, Government of India and SIDBI set up the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE). 

Udyami Mitra
 
SIDBI Udyami mitra is an enabling platform which leverages IT architecture of Stand-Up Mitra portal and aims at instilling ease of access to MSMEs financial and non-financial service needs. The portal, as a virtual market place, endeavors to provide ‘End to End’ solutions not only for credit delivery but also for the host of Credit-plus services by way of hand holding support, application tracking and multiple interface with stakeholders. 

About US:

ESDS Core Banking software offers end to end core banking hosting services at lowest cost. For more information, visit us at: Core Banking Software Solutions

Cloud Computing Can Help Your Business Reach the Next Level

If you know what cloud computing is then it isn’t too hard for you to recognize the real benefits of cloud technology. Since the introduction of cloud computing, there have been many organizations and individuals who have implemented it in their lives and have noticed the difference in ease of using the service and enhanced business processes. There are many benefits of cloud computing like storing data on cloud, being able to retrieve the data stored on cloud from any location and using various software’s and application on the cloud platform. Small businesses can make use of this kind of technology which weren’t affordable to them previously. Big businesses usually spend more but small businesses cannot do the same and thus cloud computing has been a boon for the business owners. Moving your business to the cloud is safe and a smart step because a lot of benefits can be reaped through the implementation of cloud technology.

Let’s look at the business benefits achieved through migrating on cloud:

1. Enhanced Collaboration

When any type of device is connected to an internet connection, a cloud-based application can be easily used by multiple personnels through any location. Employees who work in remote locations an easily collaborate their documents with other employees while being connected with the concerned person at the same time. Anyone who is going to use this service should make use of the portal connected to the application to share files and exchange data on the cloud.

2. Security

Data breach is a common thing now-a-days but it is definitely not a good thing because the one who has been affected by such action is in a great loss. We don’t understand until it doesn’t happen to us and so prevention is better than cure. Cloud provides the best security when it comes to storage. There are multiple layers of security when a user’s data is on cloud and it is nearly impossible for an attacker to steal that data. The size of business doesn’t matter when there the issue is regarding data theft because it leaves the owner vulnerable and desperate to recover the lost data. So in order to stay on the safe side, keeping your data on the cloud will be a huge benefit in case of data security.

3. Data Recovery

Cloud Disaster Recovery is a term which is associated with backing up the data stored on cloud so that there is a duplicate file in case the original data file is lost, corrupted or misplaced. For higher security purposes, it is suggested to store your data on cloud because the service provider takes regular backs of your data which ensures optimum safety. In case there is a fire, flood or any type of natural disaster, the cloud service can easily provide the data affected by the disaster.

4. Reduced IT Costs

Cloud infrastructure considerably eliminates the cost of purchasing expensive IT equipment, maintenance charges, consulting fees and energy consumption. There are various cost cutting areas when a user decides to move their business on cloud. Cloud computing also lowers costs of software upgrades and software licenses which eliminates the high upfront costs. The money needed to pay experts and staff to look after and manage the equipment is saved because with cloud there is no need to hire dedicated personnel. Thus, moving to cloud is a very economical option as compared to traditional IT systems.

5. Scalability & Flexibility

Business demand fluctuates according to the needs of changing times and cloud is a perfect fit for situations of such kind. Cloud resources are scalable according to the need of the hour. Through Vertical and Horizontal scaling, business demands can be matched with appropriate resource allocation so that the business is not affected in any way. Some cloud providers offer Pay-Per-Use cloud model which is a good option as it reduces unnecessary use of resources by saving a lot of costs. Through flexibility of resource allocation, a business can match peak demands of his business.

6. Mobility

Multiple employees of a firm work in various locations across the country and cloud efficiently connects all the employees to the main office so that any type of data can be shared or retrieved through cloud computing. Employees who work remotely or who work on the go can easily make use of cloud service to access any kind of data through an established internet connection. This is one of the main advantages of cloud computing which allows an individual to work remotely and still connect to the main office.

7. Business Continuity

Natural disasters have destroyed many businesses till now and we cannot possibly stop them but what we can do is keep a backup plan in case a disaster strikes. Big or small businesses are often affected by a natural disaster occurrence because they haven’t planned for such an event which leads them to lose their business and mission critical data. When data is stored on hard drives and stored in office premises itself, the chances of data loss increases because there isn’t a proper system to back up all the data. Cloud services always take backups of your data to ensure that you do not lose your data in a disaster. The historical data is always referred so that the business can be continued efficiently.

Conclusion

As technology upgrades day-by-day, there will be always newer innovations which can be applied in any field so that new techniques can improve the current processes. Cloud Computing has been a ground breaking technology which has changed the way storage needs are met and businesses are run through faster computing power. A huge scope is offered by cloud computing to the organizations.

ESDS’s Disaster Recovery offering comes to DNDCCB’s rescue

Circular from RBI mandated all co-operative banks to implement CBS that would assist in providing round the clock processing for all the products, services, and information of a bank. DNDCCB opted for Datacenter setup in their own premises and ESDS was selected as end-to-end solution provider for setting up the Datacenter, redundant network connectivity to all branches and Disaster Recovery at ESDS Datacenter on Cloud Hosting model.

Incident

On Sunday, April 17, 2016, the officials at Dhule & Nandurbar District Central Co-operative Bank Limited were thrown into turmoil when they saw fumes coming out of the windows of their Head office. The fire started at around 8:30 am on the third and fourth floor of the bank where the corporate offices were located. DNDCCB’s on-site DC located in the same place hosted all the critical data and client information along with all the transactions and banking operation information. Losing this data could have resulted in some serious consequences. The fire was so intense that it took around 70 fire brigades and 5 hours to get the situation under control. The Bank lost all of its IT assets and important documents in the accident but thankfully the DC was on the second floor so it was unharmed. While there was no harm to the Servers and Storages in the DC, but the outdoor units of PAC’s and Electrical Systems had got damaged, so the DC became completely inaccessible. 

Since the Business Continuity Plan was already in place by ESDS, all the data was safe and business operations could be resumed without any loss of data.

Execution Framework

ESDS’s dedicated monitoring team caught site of the scenario and immediately instructed the bank officials to shut down the DC operations on priority & have it sealed.

DC Security team contacts BCP Committee for DR Approval:

The incident took place around 8:30 am and the data was backed up at DR Site (ESDS Datacenter) till 8:28 am. As soon as the Security team informed ESDS about the Scenario, the 24/7 support team contacted DNDCCB BCP Committee. After investigating the complete situation of the fire disaster at DNDCCB, it was concluded that the bank head office has taken a major toll due to the catastrophe and it can take weeks, if not months for the bank to completely resume its standard operations. In the meantime, ESDS’s “Service Delivery” team took charge of the situation and made sure that DNDCCB DC infrastructure is secured by taking preventive measures on-site and took consent of the BCP committee to initiate DR process.

After DNDCCB’s BCP Committees consent, ESDS was able to immediately initiate the DR switch over within 2 hours of the disaster. Dhule BCP team was then updated about the DR activation and requested to verify data integrity and application accessibility at their end.

Service Delivery

After successful switchover to DR site at ESDS, the Service delivery team took a follow up for another 4 hours and made sure that all 90 branches of DNDCCB are connected to the DR site and the operations are running smoothly at all branches. “Complete Disaster Recovery” was achieved with near zero data loss.

Operations Recovered from DR Site:
 
The Dhule & Nandurbar DCCB was successful in transitioning all of its 90 branches to the DR site and was able to make sure the banks operations don’t get hampered. To the outside world, the bank was open for business as usual. The Bank has been able to curve paths towards achieving business benefits by offering state-of-the-art services to customers through their branches across Dhule & Nandurbar districts with no hindrances in its work processes.

Best DR practices every organization needs to consider before implementing a DR solution:
It is very important that the DR location ought to be no less than 150 km’s from the DC site and not so far that it hampers the required RPO & RTO. The required RPO can be determined by calculating the cost of downtime for the business and weighing it against the respective investments in DR infrastructure. It should be noted that while there are tangible costs that results from business interruption, there are also intangible costs that would surface in the form of lost opportunities for new business to the competitors, loss of reputation etc.

Importance of DR Drills:
 
DR Drills plays a vital role in the whole process but its importance is often ignored by many organizations. ESDS makes sure to perform at least two DR drills every year with DNDCCB team in order to test all the applications, creating solutions for ways to access the critical applications and programs in the event of a disaster. This is done in order to rectify any discrepancies found during the drill thereby eliminating them during the actual Disaster. This is one of the most crucial parts of the disaster recovery plan for any organization. In the event of disaster, where the operations from HO as in the case of DNCCB are down, RBI has very strict policies to adhere in CBS, as it can result in the voiding of SLA’s and cancellations of Licenses.

In this article, we have sketched out DNDCCB’s present business continuity arrangements, in terms of various requests from the financial institutes. It ought to likewise be noticed that, in spite of the fact that the Bank’s DR plan incorporate arrangements to address extremely severe conditions resulting due to a disaster, it is not necessary that all the financial institutions be prepared for such conditions in the same manner.

Significance of DR
 
The 17th April Fire Incident at DNDCCB head office have demonstrated the significance of business continuity planning/Disaster Recovery addressing wide-range interruptions and prompted numerous financial institutes to audit and fortify their own DR arrangements. To empower and help these moves by financial institutions, and along these lines guarantee the viable functioning of payment and settlement systems, security & stability of the financial market in India even in times of disasters.

“Disaster Recovery isn’t a one size fits all methodology. Every business is distinctive and every application, a group of clients and organization will have distinct necessities. Our real-time auto scaling Cloud platform is a perfect fit for all types of Organizations and all such DR setups are managed and monitored 24×7” says Piyush Somani, MD & CEO, ESDS Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Disaster recovery and business Continuity planning are basic parts of the overall risk management for an organization. Since the majority of the threats can’t be dispensed, organizations are executing disaster recovery and business continuity plan to get ready for possibly unexpected disasters. Both procedures are similarly critical on the grounds that they give detail strategies on how the business will proceed after extreme interferences and catastrophes.

In the case of a disaster, the proceedings with operations of your organization rely upon the capacity to replicate your IT frameworks and information. The disaster recovery arrangement stipulates how an organization will plan for a disaster, how the organization will respond, and what steps it will take to guarantee that operations can be reestablished. Disaster recovery depicts the greater part of the strides required in making arrangements for and adjusting to a potential disaster with a guide that will reestablish operations while minimizing the long haul negative effect on the organization.

On the other hand, Business continuity plan recommends a more thorough way of ensuring your business is operational, after a characteristic calamity, as well as in the case of littler disruptions. Business continuity includes keeping all parts of a business functioning as opposed to simply technology systems. DR arrangement is a genuinely new approach that teaches what steps an organization must take to minimize the impacts of administration interference. This will restrict the transient negative effect on the organization.

Key Takeaways:

• DNDCCB was able to tackle a crucial disaster situation which could have hampered the entire operation of the bank.

• 100% uptime for Data Center, DR, and 99.95% connectivity uptime achieved for all branches

• The entire set-up deployed for DR is capable of recovering in case of disasters at a primary location within an hour (RTO = 1 hour).

• Secure Connectivity solution from 90 branches to the DC

• Prior DR Drills Assured Smooth & Secured move to the DR Site after the incident.

• Disaster Recovery monitoring with eMagic DCIM tool made it easy to address the calamity the

moment it happened and take appropriate actions.

• Short RPO helped in zero transaction loss.

• Bank was able to continue regular operations within an hour after the incidence.
The objective behind this article is to enlighten all the banks & financial institutions with the importance of DR/Business continuity plans. It is very important to have the right approach, well-defined DR plans and an experienced technology partner in place. DNDCCB was smart enough to do so, are you?

DNDCCB
Mr. Dhiraj Chaudhary
CEO, DNDCCB

Data Sensitivity is an integral part of any organization and DNDCCB being a co-operative bank had all their critical data hosted at Dhule Data Center. DNDCCB had a forecast and vision for the requirement of a DR solution. DNDCCB with the help of ESDS pro-actively Implemented DR Solution around 2 years back. DR site was up and fully functional with regular DR Drills & Testing performed by ESDS at least twice a year. DNDCCB was never prepared for any Disaster, but the mandate from RBI to have a fully functional Disaster Recovery site is what saved us from a major Fire hazard that completely destroyed our Head office and the Data Center at Dhule also got badly affected. The bank highly appreciates ESDS support with the successful & efficient transition of its 90 branches to the DR site and made sure the banks operations doesn’t get hampered due to the Fire scenario happened at its head office. The Bank has been able to curve paths towards achieving business benefits by offering state-of-the-art services to customers through their 40+ branches across Dhule and Nandurbar districts with no hindrances in its work processes. The bank was fully functional from the very next day without any data or transaction loss. Network service was scaled to other 50 branches within few days and all 90 branches started running from the Disaster Recovery Cloud hosting solution provided by ESDS. All our branches continue to function from the DR solution of ESDS from last 2 months.

Mr. Rajvardhan Kadambande
Hon. Chairman, DNDCCB

After the Fire incidence, ESDS’s DR Rescue team was available at the incident site within 2 hrs. The support team after analyzing the complete scenario and understanding the criticality of the situation worked 24/7 on the DR Activation process ensuring all the branches were fully operational the very next day of the incidence. I would like to extend my gratitude on behalf of the bank. We are really thankful for ESDS’s Exuberant support in such a crucial moment of time. Loss of any data would have created major problems for the DNDCCB Bank, but we were fortunate enough that ESDS restored entire banking operation from the DR site with 0 data loss.

About US:

ESDS restored entire banking operation from the DR site with 0 data loss.

For more information, visit us at: Disaster Recovery AND Data Center