The top obstacle (to cloud) is psychology of control

How is the Indian cloud computing market performing vis-a-vis the global market?

There are fast growing interests in India, especially with millions of SMEs, start-ups, and many local talents as well as software developers in India who are constantly developing and testing new ideas. At Amazon Web Services (AWS) we enable the Indian talent and businesses to innovate and move faster to accelerate their speed to market. This applies across businesses of all sizes including enterprises in freeing up their precious engineering resources to focus on work that truly differentiate their customer offerings and their core business, rather than worrying about the infrastructure.

The early adopters for Amazon Web Services in India have already grown very fast because we have enabled them to test ideas quickly, innovate fast, and reach out to a wider scope of customers across the world to roll out their products or services within a short timeframethis has definitely given them the competitive edge. Companies in India like Hungama Digital Media, Rediff, MarketSimplified, redBus, Indiagames, 8K Miles are only a few of the examples of early adopters of Amazon Web Services in India that are growing very successfully and rapidly.

There is also great momentum happening across the world now, regardless of the regions, and that is because we believe that Amazon Web Services is changing the way that companies have acquired IT for the last three decades. The old world of IT meant incurring lots of capital expenses and wasted time, over-provisioning infrastructure that was underutilized, and focusing on undifferentiated IT that did not add value to the business. The new world of IT using Amazon Web Services cloud platform means companies do not have to incur capital expenses, pay for what you use, and the ability to focus on what differentiates your core business.

How can enterprises leverage cloud computing for reducing time to market?

The enterprises in India are beginning to realize the benefits and are taking steps to test development work and projects to learn how to work on the cloud. What most enterprises are doing is that they are moving more methodically. They are picking a diverse set of initial applications to try as proofs of concepts in the cloud. They then run them from a few weeks to a few months to see how the cloud is different and understand how they could operate inside the cloud. They are normally pretty excited by the results and they start trying to figure out how they can peel off more and more of their applications into the Amazon Web Services cloud. They then build a 12-to-36-month migration plan.

We have actually seen and experienced good progress in the enterprise segment because the enterprises are the ones that spend more total capital on the infrastructure than the smaller companies. It is attractive for enterprises to turn capital expenditure into operating expenditure and if they do it more quickly, it offers them a huge advantage including much faster time to market. Large enterprise companies around the world including NASA, NASDAQ, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Virgin Atlantic, Newsweek, New York Times, The Guardian, Adobe, Twitter, and Netflix are among many enterprises that are using AWS.

What are the unique challenges facing the Indian CIOs? And, how are these different from their global counterparts?

I believe that the challenges of Indian companies and CIOs are very similar to their global counterparts. I think the top major obstacles are psychology of control. Most large enterprises have several thousand applications for which CIOs/CTOs are responsible for their performance and security. There is a certain comfort in knowing you can take some action if there is a problem, and relinquishing that control and ability to take action is understandably hard.

You also have large technology players feeding this fear to sell expensive private installations that cost tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. But, neither keeping this infrastructure in its current status quo nor private installations allow companies to enjoy the most powerful benefits of the cloud.

The second challenge is legacy software and applications. Most large companies that have been around for a while have many existing applicationsmany of which werent written to take advantage of the cloud or horizontally scale. Some of these applications have dependencies on other internal applications that need to move to the cloud too before they can function correctly.

To address these concerns, I would suggest that Indian enterprises which have a lot of legacy applications and systems should move to the cloud more methodically. They need to pick a diverse set of initial applications to try as proofs of concepts in the cloud. Then run them over a period of time to see how the cloud is different and understand how they could operate inside the cloud. They can then move more of their applications with a migration plan. Very soon, these enterprises would appreciate both the economics as well as the business benefits that the cloud can bring to their company and realize that their initial concerns are no longer valid, which would accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in India. CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs owe it to their shareholders to take a hard look at their existing technology infrastructure and make sure that it is really differentiated and adding value because it is likely to cost them a lot of money.

Can you give references of a few Indian customers who are using AWS Cloud Computing?

Companies in India like Hungama Digital Media, Rediff, MarketSimplified, redBus, Indiagames, 8K Miles, Patni, and NDTV are examples of early adopters of Amazon Web Services in India that are growing very successfully and rapidly. Hungama Digital Media, the largest aggregator, developer, publisher, and distributor of Bollywood and South-Asian entertainment content in the world, runs about 80% of its websites and applications on Amazon Web Services. They formulated their cloud strategy since 2008. The pace of AWS innovation, pay-as-you-go pricing model, and the overall flexibility has helped Hungama create a very flexible infrastructure to meet its business dynamics of rolling out products and services speedily to the market.

Rediff.com, a premier worldwide provider of online news, information, communication, entertainment, and shopping services also uses AWS. RedBus is an Indian travel agency that specializes in bus travel throughout India by selling bus tickets throughout the country. Tickets are purchased through its website or through the web services of its agents and partners.

Most Indian CIOs shy away from cloud citing reasons of data privacy, security, and confidentiality. How do you at AWS tackle these concerns?

For us at Amazon Web Services, reliability and security are always our first priority. This is one of the reasons that the AWS business has grown this fast because the security and reliability we offer to customers have been good, and we would not be satisfied until were statistically indistinguishable from perfect. We use all the same security tactics and strategies that enterprise data centers have used for the last 30 years. We have very tight physical access to our data centers. We do network and packet level security, we make sure that nothing is intercepting those packets. We take great pains to make sure the data on hard disks are wiped clean if someone replicates an instance and we run constant tests to make sure the wiping process are successful. Enterprises have found that when they put their infrastructure on our platform, security actually improves.

Most companies do not have the luxury of dedicating resources on security, unlike cloud providers like us who have been doing this for years. We have a team of people who all they do is spend time looking at security and most companies do not have that luxury of resources to just focus on security. CIOs are also worried that over time, services are propagated all over the company but they do not know where those services are. We make sure that the CIO has to just make one API call to see everyone of those instances and who provisioned it.

Where do you see cloud progressing in the next few years in India?

We are seeing increased interests and curiosity on cloud computing across business of all sizes. However, we have heard a lot of buzz and myths about cloud computing with creative terms such as the public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud that add to the complexity. For an offering to be truly cloud computing, it needs to have the following five characteristicsno capital expenditure on servers or data centers. Whats more you get to turn capital expense to variable expense, which is a huge advantage for companies that either do not have a lot of capital or those who simply do not want to tie capital to infrastructure. The second is pay for what you use with no upfront fee, no contract or commitment, only pay for what you actually consume and have the flexibilities to choose the pricing model that best meets your business requirement. Third is the true elastic capacity for scaling both up and down, and not sit on unneeded, excess capacity. Also, a cloud allows your applications and your business to seamlessly grow as quickly as you need. When you no longer need that capacity you can shed it just as quickly. Besides the CIOs can move much more quickly with whatever projects you have and spin up large amounts of server capacity in minutes instead of waiting for days or weeks for capacity to be assigned.

And last but not the least, focus on your core competence. You can take scarce engineering resources and instead of applying them to running infrastructure which is undifferentiated for most companies, you can spend time on projects that add value to your customer offerings or areas that differentiate your business.
If one or more of the above benefits do not exist, then it is not really cloud computing.

When people talk about private or internal clouds, they are usually very expensive fixed cost, private installation of infrastructure which lacks all the key benefits of the cloud. Companies that build these types of internal clouds still own all the capital expense at the data centers and incur ongoing high maintenance costs. Companies should consider the notion of what really is private cloud because it is a term with cloud in it but lacks all the key benefits of the cloud.

However, what we are now seeing in India is that the broader enterprise adoption is beginning to happen at a much faster rate than we anticipate. The most obvious reasons are that Amazon Web Services have performed well operationally and we continued to innovate, add features and new services at a very quick rate for our customers. The recent economic crisis accelerated the inertia of enterprises looking at using cloud for better efficiency and cost savings. In the fullness of time, not sure if it will be 5, 10, or 20 years, but we believe that fewer companies will have their own data centers and those that do will have much smaller footprints.

Mobile is an important platform in the future of business in India and we have already seen in other regions that Amazon Web Services is the platform of choice for mobile developers.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in