India, yet to make a mark in cloud storage?

BANGALORE, INDIA: India, though has been very quick in adopting virtualization, is falling behind when it comes to cloud. Irrespective of the fact that Indian storage marketplace is also abuzz with cloud, as per reports, India hesitates to mount on the cloud bandwagon.

In Asia Pacific, countries like Japan, Australia, Korea are very matured in terms of cloud computing. However, countries like India and China are slowly treading towards maturity.

Jeremy Cooper, vice president, marketing, APAC, Salesforce.com, says: “The saying that cloud has not been very successful in India is not right. We see a lot of momentum in Indian market and also see a lot of adoption from local companies, including financial companies.”

Cooper further adds that there is no question that India has challenges across the country in terms of infrastructure and bandwidth. However, those challenges are certainly not a barrier for adoption. In the next 18 to 24 months cloud storage will take off in India.

With the kind of growth that Indian enterprises are witnessing, irrespective of slowdown, the enterprise data, especially the unstructured data, is growing like never before. Sooner or later companies will have to look up for an alternative to store all of their data.

Suresh Menon, head, storage and solutions, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India, agrees with this.

“Today customers are looking at ways to maximize storage, back-up data and also how to pull out old data from expensive storage solution. While in the past, bandwidth constraint, network constraint could have been limiting factors, today with archiving, storage virtualization and dedupe, customers are more and more interested in knowing how to handle data optimisely.”

However, mere hosting the data over the cloud is not enough. What if the network, over which a company accesses its data, falls short in terms of quality?

Phil Gann, director, Storage Infrastructure and Business Continuity, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems, says: “Some of the challenges in cloud computing, particularly for India, is that cloud computing relies very heavily on the quality of the network that the user is using to access resource. If you take Australia and Singapore, they have a very reliable fiber network across the country. It is much easier to make a reliable network secure and roll out services.”

In countries like India and Thailand, the infrastructure may not be much mature to support this latest initiatives. So companies will only put their II Tier applications initially, which are the ones who are least impacted once there are problems.

As a cloud user you are relying on the connectivity back to organization and that underlying network connectivity between telecom service providers is the key as to how successful it could be for most of the cloud computing environment.

“The biggest challenge is market awareness. We have been spending a lot of time to educate the market with our partners to bring in this awareness. Second challenge is more of psychological. Indian companies traditionally like to develop their own applications,” adds Cooper.

Though some like to call the security weariness in the market to be a mere mental block, others say that it really exists because one can't compromise a business at the cost of others and it will take some time for the market to really iron out this situation. As Gann notes, “The more that people want something and the demand is there, the faster it will appear.”

“Cloud computing gives companies an opportunity, who traditionally have a budget for resources, software, such that they don't have to buy software anymore,” Cooper opines.

I would like to end this with an interesting piece of blog that I came across when I was browsing the 'Cloud' (Internet, if 'cloud' can be a metaphor for Internet, why not the vice versa).

It goes like this. “It's now feasibly possible to open a business and provision all the IT services you need without having to purchase a single piece of hardware: from your laptop computer you can set up your CRM database, develop and host your website on Salesforce.com, produce all your documentation through Google Apps, create server storage space on Amazon's EC2. If you're concerned about spam and URL filtering, have that managed using something like Webroot's Email and Web SaaS. The possibilities are endless - mobile versions of SFDC enable even more flexibility for the roving sales people.

It further adds, “Are the days of the IT department numbered? You join a company, they mail you your laptop, your security token and authentication credentials - and wham, you're part of the organization. Need to correspond with colleagues: you do it through your organization's private Facebook Group. Meeting time? There's plenty of video conferencing solutions out there: CloudMeeting. Might be worth a try.

There are SaaS payroll services and hosted systems for employees to do their expenses on such as GlobalExpense.”

This explains it all.