“India’s Booming Cloud Market is set to Be Worth $4.1 Billion By 2020,” Forbes’ validation has strengthened the morale of the Enterprise India. It is no longer just about the potential benefits of Cloud that is the driving force behind the conversion. Rather it is the testimonials of the CIOs who have been navigating the Cloud Market to enhance their business functionality, cost-effectiveness and overall management.
Cloud is the new standard across the industries, with CIOs trying to partake in the revolution as it happens. We spoke to the local market players to get their insights about the factors that have contributed to the growth of the Cloud Business in India.
FACTORS THAT LEAD TO THE GROWTH OF CLOUD IN INDIA
The Indian market landscape has changed tremendously over the last couple of years. With the increasing accessibility of the internet and the services that come with it, businesses are benefitting from an open economy that allows them to navigate the market more freely than ever before. Just as the Internet can be accredited to have broken the barriers that were previously limiting the economy and businesses, so has the Cloud taken on the mantle now.
Talking about the effect of Cloud in the corporate world, Rakesh Soni, Cofounder and CEO of LoginRadius, said, “A corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy is soon to be a thing of the past. Soon a no cloud policy will be as rare as a no internet policy is today in organizations. A few years ago, companies were hesitant towards moving to the cloud, experimenting with smaller applications at first. But in the last few years, it has witnessed a dramatic change. Today, as part of digital transformation, companies are moving most of their IT workload to the cloud.” As Cloud becomes the norm in the Indian Enterprises, it becomes important to understand the value, efficiency and effectiveness that using the Cloud bring to the business. This decon-struction will allow the businesses to identify the opportunities that Cloud delivers on. And so going back to the initial realization of this immense potential, Rajeev Papneja, Chief Tech-nology Evangelist, ESDS observes, “The initial factors that drove the growth of cloud computing in India were cost savings on purchases combined with the freedom from management & mainte-nance of Datacenter, the hardware & software to a large extent.”
This highlights an acknowledgement of the Cloud as a better alternative to the traditional Data Centers. Not just in terms of cost-effectiveness, but also as an arrangement that allows remote accessibility and is conducive to innovation in the business operations. Cloud Computing, then becomes a solution for busi-nesses aiming at a more streamlined management of data. “Businesses demand more agility to make sure that they can launch new services to give them an edge in a competitive market. In the process they are making an effort to get the data & applications and delivered services closer to the customer. And those data centres tend to be cloud oriented infrastructure. Companies are on a lookout for better ways of doing things, cloud being a solution to get things done more rapidly,” said Riyaz Tambe, Head of Systems Engineering, India and SAARC Palo Alto Networks. Cloud offers the businesses a competitive edge in the industry that stems from an enhanced deliverability when it comes to dealing with customers. This movement of the Indian Enterprises towards the adoption of Cloud, is multi-faceted, the government playing as important a role as the technology itself. “Although the country is still overcoming inconsistencies in high-speed internet connectivity, power supply, bandwidth, and optical fiber connections, interest in the cloud is being driven by the increasing need for business innovation and agility, the ability to scale fast in a competitive market, and the government’s thrust towards Digital India,” comments Forbes.
With the proposed Indian data protection bill, all enterprises and businesses using cloud with resources deployed outside the country will have to move it back to India. Hence, it will lead to higher deployment and consumption of cloud within the country.”
B.S RAO VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING, CTRLS DATACENTERS LTD.
Cloud4C capability:
Cloud4C is a ‘Made in India’ Tie-4 Cloud, in fact the World’s 1st Tier-4 Public Cloud which offers a four-copy architecture with built-in high availability, disaster recovery, backup with zero data loss and near zero downtime.
Cloud4C offers industry best uptime SLA of 99.995% and highest levels of security with 40+ controls supported by twenty five security tools and is PCI DSS, SOC1, SOC2 compliant and continuous monitoring through our security operations centre. This guarantees peace of mind for our cloud users. Our 4C architecture offers Continuity (built-in high availability, disaster recovery and backup through 4copies), Compliance (SOC1, SOC2, GDPR, RBI etc), Customization (dynamic provisioning) and Control (Dashboard, self-service portal, billing etc). Cloud4C platform offers the ability to host mission critical applications which require zero downtime.
Cloud4C offerings:
- Cloud4C Public, Private/Hybrid Cloud
- Community Cloud (Banking, ERP, Insurance)
- Cloud Managed Services (AWS, Azure. GCP, Cloud4C)
- Disaster Recovery as a Service
Cloud4C Differentiation:
- We are a Tier-4 Cloud services provider
- Providing ‘Near Zero Downtime’ with industry best SLA of 99.995%.
- Zero Data Loss’ powered by our 4Copy architecture with built-in high availability, disaster recovery and backup
- Single SLA at Login
- 40+ Security Controls (Military Grade Cloud Security)
- Cloud Managed Services across major cloud platforms
- Local in-country hosting across 25 countries and 40 locations in line with respective country data protection policies
- GDPR Compliant Community Cloud
- 24X7 Support (Email, Telephone, Chat)
Customer Portfolio:
- 60 of the Fortune 500 Global Multinationals
- 16+ Leading Indian Banks on Banking Community Cloud
- Over 500 Business powered by ERP Community Cloud
- 1000 Large & Medium enterprise using DR as a Service
- 250 Large Enterprise using Managed Security Services
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY ABOUT THE INDIAN DATA PROTECTION BILL?
The Indian Data Protection Bill, still in its early stages, pushes for data localisation. The Bill to be introduced in the Indian Parliament in June suggests that the personal data of Indian citizens be held and processed within the geographical boundaries of the country. According to Sify, “The Indian Personal Data Protection Bill introduces and mandates the concept of ‘privacy by design’ (PbD). Organiza-tions will have to embed this concept in the entire data life cycle of collection, processing and use, storage, transmission, archival and disposal. An organization will need to store at least one serving copy of the personal data on a server or data center located in India. Also, the bill requires organizations not to transfer or store overseas sensitive personal data or certain categories of personal data identified by the Central Govern-ment as critical personal data.”
Commenting on the likely effect of the said Bill on the Cloud adoption in India, Rajeev Papneja, Chief Technology Evangelist, ESDS, said, “I feel it will definitely slow down the pace at which cloud was getting embraced by Enterprises. More than anything else, understanding the clauses of the bill, its legalities and determining the applicable law would be among the initial challenges faced by Enterprises. If we talk about data retention policies, each industry has its own standards and now there will be an additional standard applicable. In many cases it would become neces-sary for the Enterprises to now understand theunderlying architecture deployed at the CSP end to ensure that it meets the required compliances mentioned in Data Protection Bill.” Though how far these apprehensions hold true, can only be answered in due course of time. Expressing a contrary view, B.S Rao, Vice President, Marketing, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, said, “With the proposed Indian data protection bill, all enterprises and businesses using cloud with resources deployed outside the country will have to move it back to India. Hence, it will lead to higher deployment and consumption of cloud within the country. Secondly, since every business requires to address business continuity and disaster recovery, additional resources will be managed through a secondary location. Hence, we will witness rapid growth of cloud resource consumption within the country to ensure compliance with the proposed bill.” Keeping aside the possibilities that might or might not be realized with the Bill, the industrial revolution that the Cloud is bringing about, has indeed resolved a number of challenges faced by the industry.
I feel it will definitely slow down the pace at which cloud was getting embraced by Enterprises. More than anything else, understanding the clauses of the bill, its legalities and determining the applicable law would be among the initial challenges faced by Enterprises. ”
RAJEEV PAPNEJA CHIEF TECHNOLOGY EVANGELIST, ESDS
CIOS INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGES RESOLVED BY THE CLOUD
The pace of Technology is much faster than what industries can possibly keep up with. While a business tries to wrap its head around a new technology and training its workforce in employ-ing it to the benefit of the business, there is always already new technology in the market demanding to be explored. In such a landscape it becomes dif-ficult for businesses to keep themselves and their resources updated. This is where Cloud offers an easy solution.
Rajeev Papaneja, Chief Technology Evangelist, ESDS, identifies with Cloud, a possibility to stay updated at the front of technology. “A major challenge faced by the CIO’s was to keep the infrastructure relevant in fast paced changing technology era. With a huge amount of CAPEX investment done in purchasing different IT and Non IT components, upgrading it every 6 months, 1 year or even in couple of years was not feasible. They were forced to live with the obsolete infrastructure components in many cases. For a commercial DC, cost of many such components are amortized amongst many customers, thereby allowing them to always keep the infrastructure upgraded.”
Apart from financial resources, the other end of the spectrum is a trained workforce. Empowering the employees in making use of the Cloud to the best of the company’s benefit, is a struggle in itself. The emergence of the Cloud and its assimilation in the business operations has transformed
the workplace into a place of learning for the employees. “The primary skill which successful organisations who have moved to the cloud have invested heavily in is the roadmap to the cloud, in the shape of enterprise architect skills. In this process they invested in skills to evaluate the offering as well as trained and reskilled many of their staff or hired to make the organisation cloud-ready.” Rohan Vaidya, Regional Director of Sales – India at CyberArk. Addressing the materiality of the matter, Rakesh Soni, Cofounder and CEO of Login-Radius, said,” Hosting systems and storing data on the cloud also provides safeguard in case of emergencies. CIOs realize that man-made and natural disasters can damage equipment, shut off power and incapacitate critical IT functions in a company. Saving data on the cloud therefore brings with it an important advantage for companies.” Approaching the matter from the other end, where he compares the pre-Cloud era to a Cloud era market, B.S Rao, Vice President, Marketing, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, said, “In the conventional, pre-cloud era a CIO had a challenge of match IT resource supply to real-time need of business as hardware suffered from scalability limitation, secondly, hardware would have a life span, besides the cost of annual maintenance. Secondly, the hardware required to be deployed on-premise with round the clock power, cooling, security etc with manpower to manage the resources. With Cloud computing a CIO is able to eliminate the cost of annual maintenance, hardware refresh cost, scalability/elasticity, excess costs, excess resources, availability challenges, security and compliance challenges.” Apart from these solutions for CIOs that the Cloud provides, there are also a number of other advantages that pertain to the everyday management and the culture of the organization. These have been enumerated by Ravindra Kelkar, Area Vice President, Sales & Services, India Sub-continent, Citrix, “With cloud, employees can carry their data and access it wherever they go. Cloud adoption not only makes businesses more flexible, but it allows them to use their personal devices to access this information if need be. Business can use file-sharing applications to collaborate effectively, despite geographic limitations. Therefore, one of the major advantages of cloud computing for businesses is the increased mobility. This is particularly valuable in an age when employees desire flexibility in their schedules and work environment. Busi-nesses that operate on the cloud can provide employees with options to work on the go, from home, across all devices.” Therefore, Cloud as a solution for CIOs, not just contributes to the business efficiency in terms of delivering to the customers, or cutting down the costs for the management, but it also goes a long way in revolutionizing the workplace for the employees by redefining the workplace dynamics.
In India, we see tremendous growth opportunities in the SMB and enterprise sector across key industries such as manufacturing, retail, F&B, and construction. This is largely due to the country’s macro-level investment in initiatives such as ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’.”
JONATHAN WOOD, GENERAL MANAGER, INDIA, MIDDLE EAST, AND AFRICA (IMEA), INFOR.
Sify’s cloud Capabilities
- Migration from legacy DC infrastructure to Cloud platforms.
- Computer, Storage and Security layers as managed services.
- Grounds up build of cloud infrastructure.
- Turnkey management of Public and Hybrid cloud services.
- CloudInfinit CMP to provide multi cloud operational best practices.
- AWS/Azure/Oracle/Google cloud implementation.
- Delivering SaaS – for logistics – ForumNXT, for scalable pan-country testing model -iTest, Digital certifications – Safescrypt and E-learning pla
Sify’s cloud offerings:
Sify’s cloud offerings are aligned to their customers cloud transformation pursuit with a unified vision of ‘Cloud@Core’ which is also being followed by Gartner. The entire spectrum is across 4 shifts, defined below:Cloud enabling – Technologies that are not themselves cloud services, but form essential building blocks for building cloud services Cloud inspired – Services that have some cloud attributes, but do not meet all the cloud criteriaCloud Pure – Services that meet all the definitions of cloud and deliver the full cloud value propositionCloud enhanced – Higher-level services that would not be practically possible without being enabled by pure cloud services.
The various services offered under these buckets are:
| CLOUD ENABLING | CLOUD INSPIRED | CLOUD PURE | CLOUD ENHANCED |
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Sify’s Cloud Differentiation:
Sify has a unique set of ICT services; a one stop shop offering Enterprise Cloud + Hyper Connect Service + Cloud Security Practice + Certified Enterprise Applications in one bundle.
These are just one part of a comprehensive ICT ecosystem that is supplemented by a full service Network, a string of top tier DCs and an industry grade applications availability.
There are multiple service providers in the market offerings Cloud services. The handicap with most of them is that their services stop at being only Cloud services. So, from a client standpoint, integrations across and with other layers of the IT architecture typically calls into play other service providers. We eliminate that.
Digital transformation of businesses across sectors in India has led to sprawl in data, which can no longer be restricted to the four walls of a data center. In the digital world, there is an increased emphasis on delivering the best customer experience, placing Availability of data at the heart of an IT strategy. Additionally, as business outcomes increasingly depend on the ability to manage data intelligently, CXOs require cloud data management solutions with a new state of intelligence that anticipates the real-time business requirements across multi-cloud environments. ”
SANDEEP BHAMBURE VICE PRESIDENT AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, INDIA AND SAARC, VEEAM SOFTWARE
ESDS’s Cloud Capabilities:
ESDS is one of the top hybrid cloud providing companies in the nation who has its own R&D department. The doubly patented vertical autoscaling “eNlight” Cloud is indigenously designed and developed by ESDS R&D team in India. ESDS provides fully managed cloud services. R&D team at ESDS has built a set of products/tools that help monitor and secure the cloud applications and infrastructure. Cloud experts at ESDS assist the organizations to develop their strategy for embracing cloud as there is no one-size-fits-all cloud.ESDS has built capabilities of all the complementing technologies so as to act as a one stop solution provider for organizations, be it in relation to different storage offerings, security offerings, network management, Cloud Migrations, Databases or even applications.
ESDS’s cloud offerings?
We pioneered the concept of community clouds in India. We provide Private Cloud, Enterprise Community Clouds and Hybrid Cloud solutions to our customers. We also offer quite a few PaaS and SaaS offerings. Our community clouds are bifurcated into
- Enterprise community cloud
- SAP community cloud
- Government/Smart City community cloud and
- BFSI community cloud
All the community clouds are designed and certified to meet the compliance and performance requirements of respective industries/technologies. Besides community cloud offerings, ESDS has developed its own hybrid orchestration layer “eNlight 360” that helps customers cloudify their in-house Datacenter. As far as applications & services are concerned, ESDS provides
- Security Insight services
- Vulnerability scanning as a service
- Network/Database/Infrastructure/Log/Service monitoring as a service
- WAF as a service
- APM as a service
- Core Banking Platforms as a service
- DR as a service
- IoT as a service
- Object Storage
- gDNS as a service
and more are in pipeline.
ESDS’s cloud differentiation:
Our main differentiator is our vertical autoscaling technology that scales
the VM’s vertically by increasing CPU and RAM in real-time based on the intelligent load sensing algorithm. This technology has assisted all the legacy applications to directly move to cloud and reap the benefits provided by cloud technology. There is no need for any kind of modifications at the code level when migrating legacy applications to eNlight cloud. Secondly, we take end to end responsibility and act as a single point of contact for our customers to whom we have provided PaaS. For our banking customers, we are responsible for making sure that the Infrastructure functions as desired, the Platform meets performance, the network connectivity management and database management are all taken care of. Basic managed support is included in our costing and for specialized manages services or SLA’s, the prices are competitive. We allow customization of SLA for every individual customer rather than asking them to sign a generic one.
oday, there is tremendous opportunity for partners who can identify the hybrid cloud opportunity and build service delivery capability. With the right service capabilities partners can generate higher profits as well as retain and grow their customer base. Partners skilled in the concepts of kubernetes, containerization, automation and mobility would be able to implement their expertise and foresight in making more informed transitions and fulfil the role of system integrators while providing services to their consumers. ”
NEERAJ BHATIA DIRECTOR – CHANNEL AND PARTNER ALLIANCES, RED HAT INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA
Finally…
B.S. Rao of CtrlS Datacenters Ltd concludes “Overall cloud adoption among Indian busi-ness including the micro, small and medium enterprises is just about 10%, while the enter-prise penetration appears to be in the zone of 30 to 45%. Having said that, software as a service (SaaS) penetration is the highest with over 50% of all large, micro, small and medium using it. However, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) adoption in enterprise is estimated to be about 30% to 40%, while it could be anywhere between 5 to 8% across MSME’s in India. Therefore India offers enormous potential for all cloud players be it SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS.”
he added, “Industry cloud players should make efforts to help MSME’s overcome their inhibi-tions and concerns of cloud security, availabil-ity, and business continuity etc. This will help them embrace cloud technology especially Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and reap the benefits such as resource optimization, higher productivity, elimination of capital expenditure, cost savings and speed to market.”
As the industry cloud players continue to enhance the deployment of cloud computing the Indian market the market size could well surge past US $10 billion in next 5 years.
