Are we ready yet?

Cloud Computing ....Most of us are familiar with the Service Oriented Architecture and corporate making a big buzz about these services and their consumption. Recently the jargons like Cloud Computing, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS are making rounds …. so what exactly is cloud computing - is it another name for grid computing, utility computing or virtualization?

The research study shows that cloud computing in India currently stands at US$ 100Million. According to a Gartner survey, Indian companies expect to adopt new cloud services in 2011 much faster than originally anticipated, with two-thirds of CIOs expecting the majority of IT to be running in the cloud within the next four years. In earlier news, IDC reported that the Indian cloud computing market would grow at a CAGR of 40 percent by 2014, and to become a $3 billion dollar market by 2015.

We're still relatively early in the cloud computing hype cycle but I strongly believe that in the future, most if not all server-side software applications will be deployed in a cloud-computing-like manner. That is not to say that all applications will be run in one of exactly five global clouds. On the contrary, every enterprise will have one or more 'clouds' into which they deploy applications.How is the Cloud Computing posed in India?The term cloud computing, at least based on it's image apprears to be derived from the availablity of these services, from anywhere on the internet (just like the cloud) or possibly the wireless network environment, in general term. We don’t care much what’s in the cloud or what goes in there, all we care about the reliability in sending the data to and receiving data from the destination server. With this basic principle now the cloud computing is associated with a high-level abstraction. Instead of having data pipes, routers and servers, there are just services. The underlying hardware and software or networking will of course be there but there is now higher-level service capabilities available and used for building the applications. Behind this services there is a data and the infrastructure/resources. User of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how they are implemented, what technologies are used or how are they managed. As long as users have an access to them and have a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements, they won't need to know anything about the recipe.

A study for EMC, conducted by Zinnov Management Consulting, finds that private cloud in India will deliver up to 50% saving to Indian enterprises creating in the process 100,000 additional jobs by 2015

SaaS (Software as a Service) has witnessed the most rapid pace and likely to reach US$ 650Million by 2015, while PaaS (Platform as a service) and IaaS (Infra as a Service) could touch to US$ 450Million by them. As a testament to this development, several research analysts have published predictions on the cloud growth in India:

There are several multinational and Indian companies entering the cloud space and trying to drive business's relevance of its solutions for the Indian customers. Cloud computing has allowed the smaller ISVs access to global customers, thereby, significantly reducing their cost of sales. On the other hand, this has also increased the flexibility for end customers and increased the choice of products and services.

Additionally, the global providers of PaaS, Indian companies have also sprung up offering cloud based platform-as-a-service. India being the world's fastest growing mobile market with over 20million subscribers added every month and the money the companies have invested for 3G services showcases the belief the large telecom providers have on data services in the Indian market.
Also for Indian small business, since there is always a pinch of budget, want to improve and digitize the process but cannot do that with the internal IT resources but are looking for the rapid growth in few years. For this entire if we put together, then 'Cloud Computing' may be the right solution.

1. Public Clouds 2. Private clouds 3. Hybrid clouds

Needless to say that, each type needs a different level of security.

1. Public Clouds:
Public cloud is the one in which the services and infrastructure are provided at off-site over the Internet. These clouds offer the greatest level of efficiency in shared resources, however they are more vulnerable than private cloud. Public cloud is good choice when - 
a. Your standardized workload for application is used by lots of people, for e.g. email.
b. You need to test and develop application  code.
c. You believe that you have well implemented governance and security strategy.
d. Your data volume growth is exponential
e. You need incremental capacity
f. You are doing collaboration projects
*c: Many IT executives are concerned about public cloud security and reliability. Take extra time to ensure that you have security and governance issues well planned.

2. Private Cloud:
A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network. These clouds offer the greatest level of security and control, but they require the company to still purchase and maintain all the software and infrastructure, which reduces the cost savings. A private cloud is the obvious choice when -
a. Your business is your data and your applications, Therefore control and security are paramount.
b. Your business is part of an industry that must conform to strict security and data privacy issues
c. Your company is large enough to run next generation cloud data center efficiently and effectively on it's own.
The public clouds companies are offering private versions of their public clouds. Some companies that only offered private cloud technologies are now offering public version of those same capabilities.

3. Hybrid Clouds:
A hybrid cloud includes a variety of public and private options with multiple providers. By spreading things out over a hybrid cloud, you keep each aspect at your business in the most efficient environment possible. The downside is that you have to keep track of multiple different security platforms and ensure that all spaces of your business can communicate with each other. Here are a couple of situations where a hybrid environment is best.
a. Your company wants to use a SaaS application but is concerned about security. Your SaaS vendor can create a private cloud just for your company inside their firewall. They provide you with a virtual private network (VPN) for additional security.
b. Your company offers services that are tailored for different vertical markets. You can user a public cloud to interact with the clients but keep their data secured within a private cloud.

Benefits that Cloud computing provides -Cloud computing comes in 3 variants depending on the type of the data that you are working :

• Reduced Cost: Cloud technology is paid incrementally, saving organizations money.
• Increased Storage: Organizations can store more data than on private computer systems.
• Highly Automated :No longer do IT personnel need to worry about keeping software up to date.
• Flexibility: Cloud computing offers much more flexibility than past computing methods.
• More Mobility
  Employees can access information wherever they are, rather than having to remain at their desks.
• Allows IT to Shift Focus: No longer having to worry about constant server updates and other computing issues, government organizations will be free to concentrate on innovation.

Inhibitors:

Despite its innate value, cloud computing has a few inhibitors that seems to impact the speed at which the implementation takes place in India. From the infrastructure stand point five major parameters that can enable or inhibit enterprise customers from moving to cloud.

·         Performance: Application performance needs to be same or better than before

·         Reliability: Mission critical applications have a very high level of reliability

·         Security: This is the biggest inhibitor of adoption at this stage, where organizations are not yet comfortable of moving their data to public environments outside their firewalls or even visibility and control of the cloud infrastructure (for users) - The cloud environment needs to provide extensive monitoring, logging and reporting support to troubleshoot the environment.

·         SLA - Cloud computing although claiming more robust, but have to provide service guarantees at operational level and security level.

·         Org level decision on  Application/solutions: At org level lack of knowledge or clarity on what application makes more sense to move to cloud.

·         Cost: Although at application level the cloud is very economical, the transformation to be 'In cloud' can be expensive and time consuming if not scoped and managed very well.