Cloud Computing Scenario in India

The Cloud has seen a remarkable growth in the last few years and cloud adoption in India is happening at a rapid pace. If one follows the growth path of cloud in the country, the adoption of cloud services has seen a rise irrespective of the industry type and the size of business. Given its huge potential for different industries, all verticals say manufacturing, railways, banking, retail, education and healthcare are switching to cloud services for optimized reach and performance as well as for elasticity and scalability. Gartner thus predicts that by 2020, a corporate 'no-cloud' policy will be as rare as a 'no-internet' policy is today, which isn’t very difficult to believe considering the current scenario of cloud services growth.

Scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing models are the key benefit provided by cloud services to organizations for enhanced effectiveness through technology. Cloud services curtails barriers to growth by assessing costs and investment in accordance to budget. Cloud computing has gained momentum in India mainly because of assistance to government, vendor contributions, and proven best practices, resulting a mass move to the cloud by big organizations.

Cloud Services in government: The Government of India is implementing cloud computing technology to expand its e-governance initiatives throughout the country. The focus of e-governance is to reduce corruption and guarantee that the government schemes are reaching to people living in rural areas of the country. Initiatives ensure quicker service delivery and eliminate the involvement of middlemen, to decrease discrepancy through ulterior involvement. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology feels positive towards adopting cloud computing in governance and has made plans for the creation of IT enabled services, applications and policies towards achieving full benefits in different government initiatives.

Cloud adoption in manufacturing:  Since 2010, CIOs in Indian manufacturing have started espousing cloud models and this is highlighted through various research studies and industry circles. Some of the most prominent application areas that cloud-based computing assist are CRM and supply chain applications that provide better connectivity to external stakeholders and customers.  Big Data Analytics help the organization in augmented forecast of products range and provide analysis for future investments in diverse business areas.

Cloud adoption in Indian IT industry: The research by IDC titled “Indian Cloud Market Overview 2011-2016” provides approximations that Indian cloud market will grow over 70% from 2014. The cloud is transforming Indian IT industry and some of the highlights include,

With advance in number of IT companies and ISPs in India, cloud IaaS model is helping SMEs to access latestinfrastructure, in turn maintaining the budget.
PaaS model assists software companies in an extensive scale. PaaS hosts developers with different development platforms, in turn preventing organizations from heavy capital expenditure.
Organizations big and small get added leverages through adopting SaaS model.  Indian companies by executing applications such as SAP Business, Office 365, etc.benefit greatly through cutting out hassles of maintaining an additional inventory.

In addition to the above highlighted sectors, cloud service models are used in other industry domains such as finance and banking, advertising, health care, etc., in an increasing pace.

Drawbacks

Migrating an on premise application to cloud involves a number of security risks and threats like protection of intellectual property, trade secrets and personally identifiable information that could fall into wrong hands. Making sensitive information available on the internet requires a considerable investment in security controls and monitoring access to the content. As we know, in a public cloud scenario, the elements of security are in the hands of a third party cloud service provider. Thus, maintaining the public cloud infrastructure becomes the responsibility of these vendors. A mutual agreement between the vendor and client sharing joint responsibility of regular cloud checks in order to enforce a secure environment, is a mandate step in a public cloud scenario. Public cloud is feared for multitenancy, bugs in hypervisors and leakages as everything is connected to internet. Everything can be addressed using a single tenant non shared hardware.

Conclusion

India is the new battle ground for cloud providers and we witness vendors such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, and IBM etc. already opening up. India’s investment climate is bound to improve with regular policy push from the government, considering the Indian government recently launched an innovative initiative called the Smart Cities Mission that enables development by harnessing technology to create smart outcomes, all of this and the base of Digital India is on Cloud! This would also propel in more startups and they would end up using cloud services in one form or another.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 95 percent of cloud security failures will be due to fault at the customer’s end. This means, our technology will be strong and secure, and that the only way data can be compromised will be due to lack of understanding at the user’s side. This is a strong statement to make and it will be interesting to unfold this chapter as we keep moving forward in the cloud growth path.