It would be safe to say that today, cloud computing is a reality in India. Once regarded with great apprehension, this IT delivery model is slowly beginning to find a fair share of takers in the country.

Over the past few months major software and hardware vendors announced partnerships with telecom and data center service providers to provide a cloud-based service-oriented IT delivery model in India. Organizations such as Reliance Communications, Tata Communications, Wipro, IBM and Sify recently announced their cloud-based services. Other organizations such as Netmagic have been offering cloudbased services for almost a year now.

Private Cloud: the stairway to the Public Cloud

With most cloud computing environments running on some kind of a virtualized infrastructure, vendors believe that organizations today are looking at creating a cloud within their premise, testing its credibility and then making a move towards the public cloud.

"Enterprises and large midmarket customers have made large IT investments in hardware, software and services. They want to see if a cloud can be created from these existing investments, within the firewall. This is what one would call a private cloud,” says Pallavi Kathuria, Director – Server Business Group, Microsoft India.

“The three key capabilities that describe a private cloud are self-service provisioning, standardized IT capabilities and a billing engine. Our Dynamic Data Center toolkit helps organizations enable these capabilities on existing IT investments and thus build a private cloud,” adds Kathuria.

The cloud model presents the premise of provisioning or deprovisioning IT resources on the fly. However, as Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware points out, companies stay away from public clouds since they are uncomfortable storing confidential data in a public space. Organizations want to have a cloud-like infrastructure within their firewall so that they can enjoy the benefits of a public cloud—while ensuring data protection and compliance requirements are met.

Herrod says that through a private cloud environment, an organization can deliver IT as a service to its various departments, which would then be billed for its usage. The IT department would then be able to provision resources to departments based on their requirements.

Both VMware and Microsoft, among other vendors, are working towards providing the integration, orchestration and management tools to manage a cloud infrastructure—internal or external. With the very nature of IT delivery changing, a new set of management requirements would need to be tackled by the internal IT team.

Vendors believe that add-on tools offered along with their virtualization, integration and billing offerings will allow the IT team to provide a flexible pay-per-use IT infrastructure to internal consumers. The IT department will hence transform into an internal service provider of IT-as-a-service to various business departments with a charge back mechanism.

Public Clouds surge ahead

Many vendors have started offering public cloud services in India. While Salesforce.com has been offering its products through the SaaS model, other vendors have recently forayed into cloud-based services. Ramco announced its ERP offerings through a cloud-based delivery mode. SAP made a very recent announcement of having launched its BI solution on demand in the country.

Microsoft has gone one step ahead and launched its Azure cloud platform. The company claims that organizations will have access to more than 3,500 applications via its platform. Microsoft has also partnered with other vendors to offer specific solutions for the SMB/SME crowd.

“The vision of the company and what we are moving towards, is that every product we have, that we will create or innovate, will be available with an option for consumption via the cloud,” says Tarun Gulati, GM, Business Strategy, Marketing & Operations, Microsoft India.

India has also recently seen a growth of telecom operators and hosted IT service providers turning into cloud services providers. Most of these service vendors have partnered with other vendors to offer SaaS and Infrastructureas- a-service (IaaS) from the public cloud. They are seeing an increase in the number of IaaS users for both public and private cloud deployments.

“Hosted service providers, whose business traditionally was co-location— where they would give out data center or rack space to  customers for hosting their servers and applications—are now moving co-location to the cloud. Their business model is changing from offering infrastructure services from one-to one to one-to-many,” says Kathuria of Microsoft.