Silver lining in the cloud but challenges remain for IT cos

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Bangalore: As cloud computing gains popularity, analysts predict it may soon render the IT industry redundant as applications are purchased, licensed and run over the network instead of a user’s desktop. According to Gartner, the worldwide cloud services revenue is all set to cross $56.3 billion in 2009, a 21.3% increase from its 2008 revenue. The cloud market is expected to reach $150.1 billion in 2013.

Despite the bright silver lining in the ‘cloud’, Indian IT companies face many challenges when it comes to adopting cloud computing. According to Diptarup Chakraborty, principal research analyst, Gartner, “The adoption of cloud computing in India will depend on the rate of adoption of IT infrastructure within small enterprises and rate of improvement in internet infrastructure.” Ease of adoption is key to the success of this model. “Vendors have to come up with easy-to-adopt applications that can run cloud computing,” he said.

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. This network of servers and connections is collectively known as “the cloud.” Computing at the scale of the cloud allows users to access supercomputer-level power. Users can access resources as they need them.

“Indian companies are widely using traditional web-based services for their businesses today. So, many are comfortable with the basic productivity apps being offered as a service. At the IT-as-a-service end, this is still in its earliest stages. Many companies are using hosted facilities for their data centers and IT-as-a-service will be the next step,” said Souma Das, India vice-president of cloud provider, Citrix.

Sridhar Sarathy, vice-president India operations, Juniper Networks, highlighted some basic challenges a company would face in adopting cloud computing. “Arriving at the necessary services and applications to be delivered over the cloud, understanding the requirements of each application, the compatibility between the user network and that of the cloud provider, understanding the software licensing aspects of using services delivered by an external cloud provider and having the financial justification for migrating to the cloud are some of them,” he said.

Globally, security is a big threat surrounding IT in the cloud. “Access and authentication, infrastructure security management, and network security are some of the key security issues associated with cloud computing,” cloud provider Altair’s business manager (South Asia), Satish R said.