A Walk In The Cloud
Though Cloud Computing is one of the most discussed topics in the current IT implementations scenario, adoption levels are low globally and especially in India. While organizations across the country, such as Bharti, Ashok Leyland, Asian Paints, Infosys, Maruti, and Tata Elxsi, are tuning in to the cloud computing station, certain concerns prevent them from buying the basket of services that the cloud has to offer.

An organization in the country could essentially opt for any of the services provided by global cloud vendors such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, Cisco, EMC, and others. However, due to certain challenges, the quality of these services within India are debatable. Also, it is only recently that companies such as Netmagic, CSC, and Wipro have looked at offering such services from within India.

There are customers in the country who have adopted cloud services by either global or local cloud providers, but very few are pro-actively talking about it. This nascent level of adoption coupled with the ‘emerging’ image of cloud services has made it difficult to gauge an addressable market in India, the success or failure of these services here, and the associated challenges.

Cloud: Value For Money?
The cost at which the vendor offers these services needs to justify the level of service that will be provided. If the cost of having data and applications on the cloud over a period of time surpasses the cost of having it on premise, it would not really make sense for a customer to adopt a cloud-based solution. Instead it would make better business sense to deploy the necessary infrastructure on the company’s premises and bear the additional investment costs.

“The decision process in most enterprises for cloud computing will start with the economics: Are the total costs likely to be lower than current costs? Total costs will include the raw cost of hardware, storage, and bandwidth, plus usage charges (especially network usage), and software licensing and any systems integration, migration, and service support costs,” says K Ananth Krishnan, VP and CTO, Tata Consultancy Services.

Satish Joshi, Executive Vice President and Global Technology Head, Patni, shares this view. He believes that the primary challenge lies in understanding the real implications of the commercial models offered by cloud providers.

“The primary reason for contemplating a move to the cloud environment is cost savings. There is no point in moving the computing load to the cloud unless what one pays per month to use the cloud is significantly less than the expenses incurred (including cost of capital) of running the same applications in-house,” says Joshi.

Joshi further explains that quantifying this benefit is easier said than done partly because there are no accepted “standard” charging mechanisms and there are no “standard” definitions of what is meant by “computing capacity,” except perhaps in the case of storage and network bandwidth, and there are no “standard” definitions of service levels. This makes it very difficult to compare the “real” benefits of moving to a cloud versus computing in-house and to choose between the competing offers of different cloud providers.

Anand Ramkrishnan, Head, Cloud Computing business, Wipro Infotech, observes that in India, client organizations have native software/solutions to suit their current requirements. The value of such software will depreciate in the future. Hence, such organizations will not be able to build a business case for the cloud.

“Client organizations need to define the features required by their business such as high availability, enhanced service levels for their business, increased features, building flexibility in the solution and so on, and then compare the cost of acquisition of such a solution vis-à-vis a cloud offering, and then build a business case,” says Ramkrishnan.

The Power And Bandwidth Challenge

One of the primary issues in India continues to be bandwidth. In some cases, bandwidth availability and price is an issue; in others, the quality of the available bandwidth is an issue.

“Bandwidth is low in emerging countries such as India. User experience at a speed of 8-10 Mbps is not that great when offering a cloud-based solution. Providing an entire desktop experience to a client via the cloud, in a country like India, would require a high bandwidth pipe which can bring such an experience from the cloud to the user’s dumb client,” says Diptarup Chakraborty, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner.

“Most previous IT models are based on large internal networks and few Internet touch points. Cloud computing changes that model and often requires a much larger connection to the cloud to prevent latency issues,” says Tom Frazier, Strategic Account Director, Verizon Business.

Shoppers Stop’s decision to look at cloud-based services as a solution to some of its business challenges has been affected by bandwidth challenges. Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate and Group CTO, Shoppers Stop, says, “One of the challenges we foresee is the pressure on connectivity and the associated costs with incremental bandwidth.”

Power availability is another issue that could hinder vendors from offering cloud services from within India. Many parts of the country, which are key business centers, face a power shortage. Areas around these towns or cities are plagued by power outages and load shedding to compensate for the higher power demand by locations having a chunk of industries and other commercial infrastructure.

Chakraborty of Gartner explains the power shortage issue using the analogy that while a Google data center effectively consumes 450 Megawatt (MW) of power, the city of Pune in Maharashtra requires around 600 MW of power. With the city having its share of power outages, the country currently lacks the infrastructure required for a large vendor to offer cloud services from within India.

This view is also shared by Prakash Advani, Partner Manager - Central Asia, Canonical. He says, “If the amount of power fluctuation in cities like Mumbai is measured, one will notice that this figure is considerably big. The amount of power fluctuation and outages witnessed in locations outside the city is tremendous when compared to this figure. For organizations, power and bandwidth end up being a major issue in the country and this has had an effect on cloud adoptions within the country.”

Prasad Kompalli, Senior Vice President, SAP Labs India has similar thoughts on the bandwidth issue and says, “The poor internet infrastructure in India discourages having total dependency on connectivity to remote servers for regular operations. Coupled with the poor power infrastructure, this acts as a deterrent to set up private clouds (data centers).”

How Secure Is The Cloud?

An issue which could impede cloud implementations for some time is security. This issue is not only applicable to cloud services in India but also to other countries globally. Since data will be stored outside the premises, the access to this data is a cause of concern for organizations looking to adopt cloud-based solutions. With data being stored remotely, the organization has no control over the security of this data since it is the cloud vendor who enforces the security and compliance measures.

“Having data always in motion is one of the fundamental deliverables of a cloud infrastructure which leaves it vulnerable to attacks from various places. Also, mainstream enterprises are cautious about moving applications or data to the cloud as they would like to retain sensitive data within the boundaries of the enterprise,” explains Shantanu Ghosh, VP – India Product Operations, Symantec.

Kieran Taylor, Senior Director of Global Marketing for Akamai Technologies, observes that a cloud can be highly vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and also informs that the company has seen such attacks on a daily basis.

Says Pankaj K Sinha, Program Director - Lab Services & Solutions, IBM India Software Labs, “As for public clouds, it’s important to remember that like the Web, they may never be completely secure, and there are certain degrees of tolerance based on workloads. A key issue is to guarantee isolation of individual customer data in public clouds, as well as securing and mapping the network.”

Another issue relating to the security aspect of cloud computing is compliance. Within its premises, an organization can have several policies governing the storage of data, the way the data is accessed, and the level of access granted to various stakeholders. In a cloud scenario, the cloud vendor may have its own set of compliance regulations which could be designed to suit a variety of customers deploying that cloud’s services. Hence, they may or may not be tailored to suit the customer’s requirements.

“Customers are worried about the safety of their business critical data at the hands of an outsourced operator in a remote data center not controlled by them. It is also unclear about the kind of data mining and analysis that the service provider is performing. Finally, in several industries, there are legal and regulatory requirements which do not allow company-sensitive data to be stored outside,” explains Kompalli of SAP Labs India.

Further, the location where the data is stored could be an area of concern for certain organizations. Sandeep Menon, Country Head, Novell India, elaborates on this issue by saying, “There are certain government rules that describe how data within their region should be stored or accessed. For example, the EU has data security norms that require European organizations to have data residing within the European geography.”

The Interoperability Factor

Interoperability and vendor lock-in are key issues for organizations looking to offer cloud services and for those looking to adopt them. A cloud vendor may have proprietary file, application, and data formats defined for customers deploying its cloud services. On one hand, this requires the customer to rewrite his applications to port them on the cloud; on the other, this renders him dependent on the cloud for his data and applications. For instance, applications on Salesforce.com are written in Apex while those on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud are written in Ruby; applications on Google App Engine are written in Python and Java.