How ‘Cloud’ Is Changing Grounds Of Indian Businesses

Myths of non-security, complexity, and loss of control have outdated and the Indian businesses are rapidly adapting to cloud technology to boost performance and innovation levels. According to Gartner, India’s Public Cloud services market is projected to grow 38 per cent in 2017 to hit $1.81 billion.

In brief, cloud is essentially a bunch of commodity computers networked together in same or different geographical locations, operating together to serve a number of customers with different need and workload on demand basis with the help of virtualization.

The Indian businesses are saving money, cutting complexity and driving exciting innovation due to the new and modern cloud infrastructure services available to them.

According to a report by Confederation of Indian Industry, “Enabled by Information Technologies and riding on the back of telecommunications network, the Cloud can herald a myriad of solutions ranging from enabling telemedicine, setting up remote-classrooms, creating national citizen health and skills databases and creating a new Cloud based services industry for generating employment.”

Kunal Nagarkatti, chief operating officer, Clover Infotech told BW Businessworld, “Cloud adoption in India is very encouraging. Cloud spending in India is expected to grow to US$10 billion by 2020 as per Zinnov. The clear benefits of cloud adoption are in terms of initial capital investment as companies will have to pay for what they use. Operationally, companies could save a lot on physical infrastructure (server rooms, security systems, ACs etc.) and IT infrastructure (servers, datacenters etc.). They will also save on human resources deployed to manage their on-premise IT Infrastructure and applications. These resources could be used for critical business functions thereby enhancing the employee utilization as well as the top line.”

Cloud Services is broadly present in three forms: Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Coming to their practical usage, SaaS is what is offered by Facebook and Twitter, PaaS is used by software developers to build and manage a software over a cloud infrastructure and IaaS gives access to infrastructures such as server space, network connections, and hardware, so one does not need to physically be present at the place of work to maintain or modify.

Each of the three categories is witnessing a substantial surge in popularity. According to Gartner, IaaS is projected to grow at 49.2 per cent in 2017 in India, followed by 33 per cent in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and 32.1 per cent in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

According to Nagarkatti, the key points driving the growth of cloud adoption are:

1. Mature organizations are looking at reducing their Capex and moving to a pay-as-you-use model. Hence, we are seeing a lot of demand across software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

2. The burgeoning economy in India is also giving a significant boost to the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The SMEs that use Cloud technologies will benefit from lower technology costs and lesser initial investment in technology.

3. A strong push from the government towards "Make in India" and towards startups will enhance the adoption of Cloud, especially SaaS by start-ups.

4. Creation of local data centers will enable companies to cater to regulatory compliance mandates and give a fillip to migration to the cloud.

According to a report by IIT Bombay, “In recent times the business enterprises are interested in discovering customers’ needs, buying patterns, supply chains to take top management decisions. These require analysis of the very large amount of online data. This can be done with the help of cloud very easily. Yahoo! Homepage is a very good example of such thing.”

The cloud is already an integral part of our lives be it in the form of Gmail or Netflix. Very soon, the businesses will also be getting on the grid and switching to cloud technology.