A Private Affair?

Cloud ceased to be a hype quite some time back—it’s very much real now. Organizations large and small have all been evaluating or deploying it for different reasons—for reducing capital expenditure, shortening time to deployment, or staying updated with latest versions of applications.

No, that doesn’t mean everybody is in a rush to jump bag-and-baggage onto the cloud bandwagon. On the contrary, there continue to be many pockets of resistance. And to be fair to the naysayers, there are certain genuine areas of concern—information security and compliance being the primary ones of course.

And yet, a survey by ICT market research and advisory firm Current Analysis showed that the cloud adoption across enterprises in India, at 68%, is in a sense statistically comparable with that in the more developed and mature markets like the US.

So in other words, while cloud has gone mainstream across enterprises globally at a rate faster than one would have hoped for, the enterprises are also challenged to manage their IT security and privacy concerns before moving their IT workloads to the cloud.

THE BALANCING ACT

The IT folks at enterprises have been known to be so painstakingly particular about IT security that they could at times risk being labelled as fastidious. Security and privacy concerns have long been rightly suspected as a key reason behind organizations’ resistance to the newer computing paradigms like cloud.

So it does comes as a bit of a surprise when Current Analysis noted that cloud adoption across enterprises in India with employee-size ranging from 100 to 10,000-plus was as high as 68%. Even more, India fared better than the Asia Pacific average, where the cloud adoption hovered at 65%. (Interestingly, the study also showed that North America had the same level of adoption as India, at 68%.)

Does that imply that enterprises are shedding away their ‘security’ guards and embracing cloud while setting aside all inhibitions? Not really.

Indian organizations have opted largely in favour of private clouds and not the public clouds. These private clouds can be highly controlled IT environments and give enterprises a huge comfort in terms of adherence to their IT security policies and compliance requirements.

Interestingly, the study also notes that these private clouds have mostly been set up by IT service providers (the likes of TCS, IBM, HP, Wipro and Tech Mahindra), which have been long-standing and trusted partners for enterprises in India.

That relationship of trust also explains why Indian enterprises seem to be favouring IT service players over public cloud players or consulting companies when it comes to choosing partners for the deployment of cloud, big data, network security, enterprise mobility and other such various solutions.

PUBLIC CLOUD ADOPTION IN INDIA

Does that mean Indian enterprise will not be opening up to public clouds in the near future?

Well, while security concerns will indeed continue to weigh upon any cloud-related decision making, it could be naïve to assume that enterprises will chose to close their eyes to the benefits of public clouds.

Yet, it does mean that public cloud players like IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and NTT Communications will have to work harder to alleviate enterprises’ concerns around security, privacy and compliance.

Some of the questions that the cloud players need to ask: what are the key priorities of the enterprises when it comes to deciding on their partners for various cloud service needs, ranging not just from IaaS, PaaS or SaaS but also for unified communication, big data, analytics, and enterprise mobility solutions.

HYBRID A NEXT STOP?

As public cloud offerings become more mature and secure, the resistance for adoption will expectedly come down. Having said that, not all workloads across organizations will move to a public environment. Much would need to settle along a continuum between on-premises and the public cloud.

It may be reasonable to hypothesize that hybrid clouds would be increasingly frequented hops in the course of enterprises’ cloud journeys. The assumption here is that hybrid clouds are considered a good way to ensure that the mission-critical workloads and sensitive information is limited to a private cloud implementation while the routine and generic pieces are moved to the public clouds.

Hybrid models are increasingly being seen as an effective IT strategy to further optimize costs by way of, say, leveraging the public cloud for compute and other infrastructure resources or for hosting applications like office productivity and unified communications and collaboration (UCC).

It is also worth emphasizing that there is relatively low resistance in moving IT infrastructure like storage and compute power to the cloud. No wonder, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is understood to have been the fastest growing cloud segments followed by software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

The supply side landscape is maturing rapidly. All the major cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and IBM SoftLayer are now present in India, which is helping to mature the overall cloud market in an accelerated manner. Some of them are even setting up their local data centers in India, which is expected to further alleviate the security and compliance concerns. Presence of local datacenters is a key measure for service providers to assure that enterprise data would be residing within the country, which is an important compliance requirement for many organizations.

Interestingly, newer models are emerging for the delivery of cloud, with cloud-in-a-box being an important development to watch for. It holds the potential to simplify cloud usage and encourage adoption.