Clould computing, true to its name, has been something shrouded in a misty haze despite several years of its advent into the mainstream IT industry. While its proponents uphold its superior efficiency and cost effectiveness, its opponents have pointed out its inadequacy in security. “In a post-recession economy that is recovering and stabilising, cloud offers a good business model for the vendor as well as the user. Its challenges are all technical and hence rectifiable,” said experts who spoke at the seminar on ‘demystifying cloud computing’ organised by the federation of Indian chambers of commerce and industry (FICCI) at Chennai.

“The sharing of costs and resources among so many users will allow for efficiencies and savings around things like performance, load balancing, and even locations – locating data centres at lower real estate cost,” notes a background paper prepared for the seminar. This is apart from the principal gain of the company focusing on its business rather than on the infrastructure to run it.

“There is reduction and relief from administrative overhead and complexities,” said Netmagic Solutions chief architect Jayabalan Subramanian. His company is one of the very few dedicated data centre providers in India. “Cloud has made the process of entrepreneurship and starting a new company less risky,” Infosys associate vice president Raghavan Subramaniam pointed out. But, the technology needn’t be relegated to SMEs and start-ups alone.

“When a diversified company is trying to consolidate its businesses or just take stock of them, the different IT solutions employed in each of its arms may not be compatible. In such a scenario, cloud computing can be employed, if only temporarily,” Jayabalan said. This is particularly relevant as companies are trying to cut flab and consolidate their business interests now.

Contrary to perception, cloud computing is a developing proprietary business and not a free for all internet cloud only. “Amazon.com has been at the forefront of the cloud computing movement,” the background paper notes. “Google and Microsoft have also been publicly working on such offerings.” Also, large companies needn’t go for a public cloud. They can go for a private cloud within their premises, otherwise called virtualisation or DAAS (desktop as a service), using thin clients connected to a central server (the cloud) where the operational and memory functions are performed.

But, the challenges to cloud are not cost, scalability or reliability, but rather technology itself. The issues that crop up against cloud are physical security of data locations, data security for content, resource starvation etc.

But, Jayabalan assured, “These are all perceptions due to which cloud computing hasn’t matured enough to overcome itself. The next generation, which is already on the cloud all the time – on twitter, on salesforce, on social networking, are likely to be less apprehensive about operating from a cloud. They are likely to develop systems which will be mature clouds.”