Is the cloud ready for India?

Cloud service is a simple technology with a complicated name. Verticals that predominantly have security aspect on top of their mind are now exploring this seemingly cost-effective and secure system. To a geek it is ubiquitous servers storing valuable data, for a corporation it is a managed service with complete control. Whatever it may be, it certainly appears to be the next-generation technology

-A report by Team Inclusion

No one wants to come under a cloud. But it is time to change the idiom. Governments, corporations and individuals, all want to be under the cloud. That’s the power of could service.

 

In India, this technology and its processes are being closely watched. But, sooner than later, cloud service promises to become all pervasive in the land considered one of the leading IT superpowers.

Cloud service or for that matter any technology is not constant; technology is dynamic, it changes, some slowly and some fast. “You need to see the relevance of that particular technology with respect to your applications,” says N Vijayaditya, controller of Certifying Authorities.

Despite the teething troubles, cloud service technology can be used to improve services like better financial inclusion across the country. The challenges are many but so are the opportunities.

One of the virtues of cloud service is the ability to have very nimble and agile infrastructure. This means a reduced pressure on the capital expenditure that the customers have made traditionally. We are living in an environment that is conducive for growth, despite the pressure of a global economic slowdown. Cloud service offers an excellent opportunity under such trying times.

It is like electricity. The consumer does not bother where it is generated, how it is transmitted. To the end consumer, it is the availability that matters. T Srinivasan, managing director, VMWare Software India, a leading player in the virtualisation and cloud space says, “From an IT point of view, it provides the elasticity and drives down the cost of IT.”

This makes cloud service responsive to the requirement, while providing the control to manage the relevant security and service models.

So, enterprise customers are exploring the private cloud and public cloud seriously. It has been established that the private cloud increases utilisation.

But is the cloud ready for the enterprise?
In an enterprise, apart from increasing the utilisation, cloud service increases the automation which allows surplus money and infrastructure at the disposal of companies. It also means companies could channel same investments for better gains. That offers two advantages — one is to increase utilisation and increase automation.

There will be a time when telecos will offer hybrid services. Even enterprises will need to avail of services from cloud-service providers on a demand basis. In terms of interoperability between every individual internal private cloud and the external service providers, is the next big investment.

These standards could be drawn by the industry or let the telecom regulator examine it.

The whole opportunity that a cloud is offering today has a paradigm. It really is something that the government can consider for deployment of e-services in the country, “because that is the only way governments can deliver an ambitious project or mission,“ says D Krishnan, principal consultant and advisor, National e-Governance Division in Department of Information Technology.

He points that the National e- Governance Plan has around 27 mission mode projects. About 11 projects are in the state sector, and five over that the states can choose, which makes it 16 projects in the state sector alone. When these 16 projects will be executed across 35 states, it will become 600 projects. Further, a single project in the municipalities sends the number of projects to thousands.

There is a huge opportunity in the government, due to the amount of time and resources that are wasted for doing a standard way of procurement, as no alternative is available. Cost cutting is another issue. “The way forward is to have a private cloud,” says Krishnan.

If it can address a few parameters like how government looks at every such project, how much of control does the government have, over what is actually the data, the applications and procedures, — there is a huge opportunity.

A few successful projects in the recent past have happened. They have happened entirely through outsourcing.

Today the government has got stuck with those programme because it just does not know what is there in the programmes.

As a result, decision-making is all in the hands of the private vendor. So, if the government were to resort to a different paradigm like cloud it has to fulfill this essential prerequisite that it should provide the sufficient strategic control over the application and data.

Therefore, the data or the infrastructure may reside wherever, as long as the strategic control is with the government. We have a good story going here in terms of cloud service.

But even today we have over 6,000 websites and out of them 4,000 to 5,000 websites are being shared across small number of servers. With each department having direct control over its data, direct control on the websites, they are really not concerned on which computer they are putting the data on and which particular database server.

Government departments follow their own course of action. They have a simple form where they come and put their request in terms of platform, in terms of their requirement, indicate their traffic and the infrastructure is provisioned to them. They don’t even have a cloud.

They do have a management service available. So, when we say that self-provisioning of cloud is good but for many small organisations, the cost increases, and that is where government departments have to really look at the cost.

Cloud service enables what is called server consolidation. Umesh Bellur, associate professor, IIT- Bombay, is not confident of a successful rollout of the cloud network. However, he is quick to point, “I am not saying no solutions exist, but I believe we can do far better in this space.”

NIC has offered information and communication technology services to the government, across central government, state government as well as district administrations and even panchayats for over three decades now.

A number of projects that have to be delivered through the various schemes, despite using NIC infrastructure have been slow. One of the reasons is the delay in procuring hardware and software for the projects. For example, in many states, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has not been successful.

Despite computerising the systems for clean monitoring and speedy action, the beneficiaries have felt alienated due to the failure of various departments to locate the relevant data to offer benefits from other schemes.

Opportunity for cloud service
Further, anything which is around document management or information handling is all being done in islands.Many a time the interlinkages are missing. So it is very important to look at this whole issue holistically.

“Whether it is information handling, documents, hard copy, images, any multimedia content,” says Alok Bharadwaj, senior vice-president of Canon India, “all information needs to be digitised.” It is only with digitised information that people can source in any department that would help them take actions on their issues and concerns. The second thing is the deployment of the content management system. Both are crucial links in cloud-service management. Reports from Gartner and IDC have highlighted how the cloud is really picking up in a big way in the country. Today, when we talk to service providers, one of the key challenges that we see from small and medium enterprises is that about 35 million of them exist in the country. The key benefit that the cloud can really bring to the table is in terms of reducing the infrastructure costs. In terms of service delivery, cloud improves the agility but more in terms of how do I really provision my services for my end customers and get better service-level agreements.

It is built differently because of a dynamic pool of shared resources that are operated differently. “It is a pay as you use kind of a model, and you have charge-back mechanisms,” says Krishnan.

Bellur explains, if a company has 25 servers today, and they are vertically stratified running different applications, can be termed a virtual pool.

“The term is called server consolidation,” says Bellur. By this method an operator can amortise cost as well as save cost. Because an operator can run less servers which leads to lower cooling requirements, resulting in lower power demands. “I can completely eliminate upfront investment,” says Bellur. He explains that small or medium businesses, in such a scenario, need not buy any hardware. They can go to a public cloud, so their capital expenditure becomes zero.

However, there are a few areas of concern: Issues and demands from customers, what really makes a user of cloud service decide, whether the application is suitable for cloud service or not. It is a valid concern not only among the companies but also the government. There are also issues concerning this technology. A lot has been spoken about it whether it is privacy or security; there are issues concerning jurisdiction, administration, legal and policy-related. The US government was trying to use cloud service. But considering the issues related to safety and security, it has set up a committee to examine critical issues on cloud service. Privacy and security are key concerns in the US, and it felt the need to have a policy; there is a need to issue guidelines when, where and how to use cloud service, which applications should go to the private cloud and which applications should go to the public cloud.

In India too, the issue of security and privacy is gaining importance. Recently, the announcement of the release of Aadhar, the unique identification number, received a lot of pessimism.

One of the reasons is that Aadhar numbers will be released digitally, using different servers. These are vulnerable targets for cyber attacks and could cause enormous loss to individuals and the country. Security is very important. In fact, the more the society relies on technology the more vulnerable it becomes in terms of security. Thus, security becomes very important. If there is a way which can help us address accountability speed, archival, retrieval, transparency and security, we need to deliberate now. Many of the technologies we adopt have originated outside India. Applications need to be local. “The way technology has to be used needs to be local. This is the important aspect on which we need to deploy technology for security management,” says Bharadwaj.

“Security, of course, is a question that we are all worried about,” says Neeta Verma, senior technical director, NIC. Her contention was how can cloud service guarantee security. There are some questions that they have to ask themselves definitely in order to make the move towards cloud service. “So, things are not as quite rosy,” she says. However, Venkatesh Iyer, head (India and SAARC), Virtual Computing Environment Initiative, EMC Data Storage Systems, feels that there is no cause for alarm. “Cloud is not a one-step approach, it is a journey. You need to have multiple steps in this journey when you implement the public cloud or the private cloud,” he says.

India is ready for the cloud. “Yes, we definitely are ready as far as the technology is concerned but we need to do a lot in terms of policy and jurisdiction, and we really need to be very cautious when we are applying these technologies,” argues Verma.

No doubt, cloud service in India is a huge opportunity. It is fraught with many concerns in terms of safety, security and management issues. However, the positive outcome of this technology is its ability to allow an individual in a city or a village to access the data that he wants it through a low-cost and easily accessible medium.

That our future data will reside in the cloud is a reality. There would be elements who would seek to steal such information is another reality. It does not matter, if it is a private cloud or a public cloud.

Cloud service has a critical role to play in connecting the unconnected. It has the potential to reach remote parts of the country. This technology is evolving, but the speed and spread that it has makes it more attractive for financial deepening not only in India but in many developing nations, that are looking for such a low-cost technology.

Reprinted with permission from Inclusion (a quarterly publication of Skoch Media). Originally published in Inclusion, April-June 2010. www.inclusion.in