Cloud in India
In the last 10–15 years, India has been growing constantly with technology innovation and business practices. India has always kept its pace in adopting new technologies and has remained attractive to foreign investors. Recent trends in Cloud computing opens up a huge opportunity for both domestic and foreign customers in India.
This article consolidates the progress in India with respect to opportunities, market growth, connectivity and legal compliance for Cloud adoption.
Opportunities
When legacy infrastructure can pose a hindrance to cloud adoption in some nations, India is a green field with minimal legacy infrastructure and the fastest growing telecommunications market.
These opportunities are visible in some of the recent government initiatives that are geared towards consolidating the citizen information and providing a centralized e-Governance. One such initiative is the Gujarat state e-governance project. This projectpromises increased connectivity within the state and tries to centralize:
- Revenue
- Health
- Agriculture & Environment
- Governance
- Education services
The solution will be hosted on the Gujarat State Datacenter GSDC, one of the best of the breed data centers with VCE(Virtual Cloud Environment)/VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) solutions.
When the above is a statewide initiative, Aadhaar is a nationwide initiative to provide personal Unique Identification (UID) Card for the citizens. Over 10 Million Aadhaar cards have been issued since 2011. Aadhaar will have applications like enrollment, authentication, fraud detection, administration etc and will be hosted on a Tier III data center at National Informatics Center Services, New Delhi.
The above two initiatives not only bring out the centralized management challenges but also pose a big data opportunity.
Broadband Connectivity and Personal access
India has the fastest growing telecommunications market with 13.54 M broadband base and 670.61M mobile base as on Feb 2012. Leading telecom providers like Airtel, Reliance launched 4G in India. On the other side, Tablet PC (Aakash) priced lesser than a mobile was launched on Oct 5 2011 targeting the Indian students. Till now its trial version has sold 1Million units. Faster connectivity with personal access to internet at an affordable price can bring in a revolutionary change in India.
Market growth
According to a study by Zinnov Management Consulting, the cloud computing market in India is estimated at around $400 mn and is expected to reach $4.5 bn by 2015.
NASSCOM says domestic cloud to grow by16bn$ by 2020. It states:
Software application vendors who provide packaged business suites, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), payroll, HR, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and collaborative applications are expected to outpace traditional software licensing vendors by nearly 800% in India.
Regulatory & Legal Compliance
Though the opportunities and predictions are attractive, India stands 19th in the Cloud Score card. The drag in the score is mainly due to the privacy & Intellectual Property legislation.While cloud is just another form of computing, legislators and regulators are looking at formulating new rules to control the data piracy and bring in more security in a Indian cloud ecosystem. As per the “Regulation of the Cloud in India” whitepaper By Patrick S. Ryan, Ronak Merchant, and Sarah Falvey, the 2011 Information Technology Rules mandates
any organization processing personal information in India requires written consent before undertaking certain activities and must implement reasonable security policies and procedures.
At the same time SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) recommends the below for the Cloud Computing Policy Makers.
Embrace a global approach to cybersecurity that recognizes the global nature of interconnected systems and provides for data to be protected regardless of where it is located, and that seeks international consensus standards that avoid fragmented, unpredictable national requirements.
Since cloud works on subscription model, processing the personal information is crucial for Cloud adoption. The above stated ITR rules might slow down the adoption of cloud in India by adding more processes and stringent rules.
Conclusion
Cloud is no longer an unfamiliar technology in India. Some of the initiatives mentioned in this article show that centralized applications and increased connectivity with personalized access are paving the way for cloud in India, while the pace of adoption is determined by the policy makers.
