'Cloud' holds the promise of 'rain'

Though the standardised nature of solutions offered in cloud computing model is initially seen as a limiting factor, its benefits for enterprises outweigh the barriers, experts said at a panel discussion organised by TiE-Hyderabad today.

While the benefits are cost savings, shorter time to market, faster operational expansion, among others, the potential barriers to migration to the cloud are loss of control, reliance on one vendor, data security risk and interoperability issues.

Vijay Prasad, an advisor to Mahindra Satyam, said that for users, the cost of cloud services would go up with the degree of customisation, as may be required for large companies, while start-ups can go for standard applications like those from salesforce.com. On the seller side, there is space for a lot of small niche solution providers to create bits of applications to be added to the standard product.

Prasad said the client-server model, ie, the ‘conven-tional’ model being used now, too had seen similar hype a decade ago, but had not delivered as expected. As of now, the 'cloud' model seems to be a promising architec-ture and could hold some ‘rain,’ he said.

Though large enterprises and government are taking to the cloud model, the SME sector will benefit more from it, according to CA Technologies’ vice president Manmohan Jain.

He said standards for cloud products may take a year to develop, but for the present, ratings by the user community on sites like cloudcommons.com were one indicator.