Tata Communications high on cloud

MUMBAI, INDIA: Tata Communications, the global communications provider, is all set to tap the growing cloud services market in India. Along with large enterprises, it sees small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) as potential users of cloud services.

Recently, Tata Communications partnered NetApps to strengthen its presence as cloud services provider in Indian market.

“Our business strategy is to leverage both our global IP network and data centers across the world to deliver a fully integrated end-to-end solution to our customers. This opex model based with lower total cost of ownership solution allows us to meet specific customer needs,” said Alok Bardiya, Tata Communications' vice president – Managed Services and Marketing.

“We are offering cloud services on the server side, wherein virtual machines are being offered to customers on a “pay-as-you-use” model. We believe both managed hosting and virtualization (which allows servers and storage to be configured on an on-demand basis) have high growth potential and are already seeing high growth potential in the market as we get customers on board,” added Bardiya.

Tata Communications' data centers are spread in 22 cities globally and multiple of them are based in seven Indian cities. Overall, these data centers offer about 10,00,000 square feet space and further the company plans to add another 500,000 square feet space.

Though cloud computing offers great flexibility to businesses and cost-effective means to meet the downturn, security remains a major concern for most enterprises before using cloud services.

To address such security concerns, Tata Communications offer multilayer security cover. Right from its networks to access cloud services or data center infrastructure, it has installed multi protocol label switching (MPLS) for virtual private networks (VPN), which offers strong security level.

“Within the data center, we have several processes that provide physical as well as data security. We provide shared firewalls, UTM (unified threat management) devices and also provide India’s only DDOS (denial of service) protection services. Our position as a tier-I Internet service provider (ISP) globally allows us to monitor global Internet protocol (IP) traffic and provide protection against malicious attacks on IT infrastructure,” explained Bardiya.

So you can work all the way from an employee desktop that traverses the network and accesses our infrastructure in data centers – all is secured, he added. The company claims to have India's only tier-III data center with globally certified processes for data center governance.

“Large enterprises with its existing legacy infrastructure and in-house skills would go for virtualization for consolidation purposes, while SMBs may look for a full outsourcing model. Our view is that the growth in these services will come from all verticals. BFSI, IT/ITeS, Manufacturing, Pharma and Services are some verticals that are more aggressively adopting this model,” commented Bardiya.

Tata Communications is highly confident to establish itself as cloud computing service provider in India. But, Gartner's principal research analyst, Diptarup Chakraborti pointed to cloud computing's low awareness in the country. Only about 22 per cent large enterprises are aware about cloud computing, according to Gartner 2009 report.

“There prevails a lot of confusion between software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing. Still the definition is unclear both for users and vendors. With the state of infrastructure, bandwidth and connectivity issues, cloud services' penetration in market will remain low,” commented Chakraborti.

Moreover, it's hard to predict the cloud services market in India or worldwide, Chakraborti said. “There hasn't been any study done so far that suggest the estimated market worth of cloud services,” he added.

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