Despite a rising interest in cloud-based services and the benefits they offer, organizations have been adopting a cautious approach towards deploying these services. So where does India stand on the cloud computing map and what lies ahead for organizations looking to walk towards the clouds?
A Walk In The Cloud
Though Cloud Computing is one of the most discussed topics in the current IT implementations scenario, adoption levels are low globally and especially in India. While organizations across the country, such as Bharti, Ashok Leyland, Asian Paints, Infosys, Maruti, and Tata Elxsi, are tuning in to the cloud computing station, certain concerns prevent them from buying the basket of services that the cloud has to offer.
An organization in the country could essentially opt for any of the services provided by global cloud vendors such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, Cisco, EMC, and others. However, due to certain challenges, the quality of these services within India are debatable. Also, it is only recently that companies such as Netmagic, CSC, and Wipro have looked at offering such services from within India.
There are customers in the country who have adopted cloud services by either global or local cloud providers, but very few are pro-actively talking about it. This nascent level of adoption coupled with the ‘emerging’ image of cloud services has made it difficult to gauge an addressable market in India, the success or failure of these services here, and the associated challenges.
Cloud: Value For Money?
The cost at which the vendor offers these services needs to justify the level of service that will be provided. If the cost of having data and applications on the cloud over a period of time surpasses the cost of having it on premise, it would not really make sense for a customer to adopt a cloud-based solution. Instead it would make better business sense to deploy the necessary infrastructure on the company’s premises and bear the additional investment costs.
The Power And Bandwidth Challenge
One of the primary issues in India continues to be bandwidth. In some cases, bandwidth availability and price is an issue; in others, the quality of the available bandwidth is an issue.
“Bandwidth is low in emerging countries such as India. User experience at a speed of 8-10 Mbps is not that great when offering a cloud-based solution. Providing an entire desktop experience to a client via the cloud, in a country like India, would require a high bandwidth pipe which can bring such an experience from the cloud to the user’s dumb client,” says Diptarup Chakraborty, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner.
“Most previous IT models are based on large internal networks and few Internet touch points. Cloud computing changes that model and often requires a much larger connection to the cloud to prevent latency issues,” says Tom Frazier, Strategic Account Director, Verizon Business.
Shoppers Stop’s decision to look at cloud-based services as a solution to some of its business challenges has been affected by bandwidth challenges. Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate and Group CTO, Shoppers Stop, says, “One of the challenges we foresee is the pressure on connectivity and the associated costs with incremental bandwidth.”
Power availability is another issue that could hinder vendors from offering cloud services from within India. Many parts of the country, which are key business centers, face a power shortage. Areas around these towns or cities are plagued by power outages and load shedding to compensate for the higher power demand by locations having a chunk of industries and other commercial infrastructure.
How Secure Is The Cloud?
An issue which could impede cloud implementations for some time is security. This issue is not only applicable to cloud services in India but also to other countries globally. Since data will be stored outside the premises, the access to this data is a cause of concern for organizations looking to adopt cloud-based solutions. With data being stored remotely, the organization has no control over the security of this data since it is the cloud vendor who enforces the security and compliance measures.
The Interoperability Factor
Interoperability and vendor lock-in are key issues for organizations looking to offer cloud services and for those looking to adopt them. A cloud vendor may have proprietary file, application, and data formats defined for customers deploying its cloud services. On one hand, this requires the customer to rewrite his applications to port them on the cloud; on the other, this renders him dependent on the cloud for his data and applications. For instance, applications on Salesforce.com are written in Apex while those on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud are written in Ruby; applications on Google App Engine are written in Python and Java.
Service Level Agreements
Service Level Agreement (SLA) in itself poses a challenge since customers already have apprehensions about the aforementioned risks when migrating to a cloud-based architecture. Having the infrastructure internal to the organization ensures that demands in terms of performance, security of applications and data, network speed and latency are met. However, if data and applications are stored in a third party data center, the vendor will be required to provide an additional level of assurance that requirements will be met, well within the costs.
The Case For Public Versus Private Cloud
In spite of the challenges surrounding the adoption of cloud services, it is not really the end of the road for organizations looking to adopt cloud services. To deploy services on a cloud, an organization needs to first decide whether it really needs to deploy cloud-based services. While the decision to deploy a cloud-based service is generally driven by the need to reduce the cost associated with growing storage or computing requirements, it is also necessary to decide whether cloud services are the best possible solution to an organization’s growing infrastructure demands.
‘Cloud’ Is The New Buzzword
Most analysts and vendors believe that India is still a nascent market for cloud-based services. However, with the large SME/SMB population and the emergence of many start-ups, the scope for growth is huge, provided the concerns over the adoption of these services are addressed. While there is a certain level of awareness about what services and benefits the cloud has to offer, organizations are taking a cautious approach and are still experimenting and testing both public and private cloud services.
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