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Such computing (see box) offers several advantages over setting up your own infrastructure. For a growing business it means that new storage and processing capacity can be added incrementally without making capital investments. The approach is growing in popularity as the big guns of internet — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon — sign up customers in their effort to find profits in the cloud.
Although it is becoming popular, there is a rising debate in the IT circles and legislatures on issues such as privacy and security of data. The policy issues still being worked out on cloud computing are: How secure is the data on the network? How reliable is the service? Who owns the data? Should law enforcement agencies have easier access to information in the cloud than data on a personal computer?
In India, vendors such as Sun Microsystems India, IBM India and HP, apart from Microsoft and Google, swear by the architecture, saying that not only is the data in the clouds secure, it brings in more value and efficiency. Big Indian service providers such as Infosys and Wipro have chosen to provide services and consulting based on cloud computing to global and Indian customers.
According to Souma Das, area vice president for the subcontinent at Citrix, Indian companies are widely using traditional web-based services. So, they would be comfortable with the basic productivity applications being offered. “Cloud computing revolutionises computing in the same way that industrialisation revolutionised goods production: it creates large, extremely efficient service providers which can give high volumes at low cost.”
Sharad Sanghi, CEO and MD of Delhi-based Netmagic Solutions, which recently launched cloud consultancy, says cloud computing has the potential to completely revamp the way an organisation works. “We will enable Indian enterprises to carry out their operations economically whilst maintaining high standards, even during times of downturn,” he said.
According to Gartner, the worldwide cloud services revenue is likely to cross $56 billion in 2009, a 21 per cent increase over 2008. The cloud market is expected to reach $150 billion in 2013. Although estimates for the Indian market are not available, most IT analysts believe the addressable market to be around $1 billion.
Infosys is working with several clients in the financial services, automotive and entertainment verticals to help companies adapt to cloud computing. Says an Infosys spokesperson, “The costs savings are under three broad areas — reducing infrastructure management; optimising resource utilisation and significantly reducing the time to market.’’
IBM India recently set up a cloud-computing centre at Bangalore. The company said the centre will serve as an experimental platform for businesses and academic institutions to test applications. The platform is being offered free to academic institutions that IBM partners with.
The advantages of cloud computing has attracted even a government organisation, C-Dac, which considers the technology to be amongst the most promising. Its Chennai-based personnel are developing a software-as-a-service model, which will be available for government departments on a pilot basis. “The technology next in line is cloud computing,” said C-Dac director MR Rajagopal.
But will privacy and security issues affect growth of the cloud computing? Govind Rammurthy, CEO and managing director of MicroWorld, which provides consumer and enterprise security, raised questions such as how much trust a company can place if it’s unaware where the data resides? “Data in the cloud is in a shared environment where you have a danger of losing the data or its integrity,” he said. He also pointed to the issue of legal compliances.
But such concerns, experts say, may be a bit overblown. Says Kartik Hosanagar, assistant professor of Information and Operations Management at The Wharton School in Pennsylvania: “One solution being adopted is that of a ‘private cloud’. The idea is for data and applications to sit at a centralised location within a corporate firewall rather than in the data center of a third-party.” Netmagic’s Sanghi says large internet company and enterprise application requirement are being addressed through private cloud services.
Moreover, says Santosh D’Souza, chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems India, cloud computing is largely safe from malicious acts such as phishing, which is directed to a particular property to harvest passwords from innocent users, not at computers holding data.
But will the data be open to searches by law enforcement agencies. In the US, consumers expect their information to be treated as if it were stored at home on their computers, although, US courts have generally ruled that private data in the cloud does not enjoy the same level of protection. Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it is being hosted on behalf of another independent state, say India. In a survey conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project, 49 per cent of US residents, who use cloud computing services, said they would be very concerned if cloud vendors shared their files with law enforcement agencies.
Also, there are those who feel that cloud computing is a already a much hyped service. Says Mark Haynie, chief technology officer for applications modernisation at Micro Focus International, a UK-based company: “With all its promise, the question is whether cloud will get stuck in the ‘trough of disillusionment’ as many technologies in the past have. The key is to provide additional incentives to software vendors and system integrators that will allow business applications to take advantage of this technology,”
A McKinsey study done early this month for the US-based Uptime Institute, an organisation focusing on improving efficiency of data centers, says outsourcing for the larger companies such as data centers would increase their cost. “Clouds can make a lot of sense for small and medium-sized companies, typically with revenue of $500 million or less,” it says. Hype or not, with so many companies in the fray, cloud computing appears to be here to stay.
With inputs from Shyamala Seetharaman in Chennai, and Bhaskar Hazarika & Dhiren Dhuku in New Delhi
Varun Dutt is a doctoral scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, PA
