Opportunities and Challenges for Cloud Adoption in India

Cloud computing in simple terms is a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered through the Internet in a pay-per-use, self-service way.

In India all the sectors including Education, Healthcare, SME’s & Government will greatly benefit from Cloud adoption. At present there are roughly 300 million literate adults in India and the government’s goal is to increase literacy to more than 75% by the end of year 2020.

• Education vertical cloud based services can be utilized for offering education through remote & virtual classrooms.
• Health industry can utilize cloud to create national citizen health database. The cloud can also help to enable services like telemedicine so that healthcare services can be provided in remote areas of country where there are few resources.
• Cloud can be used for collaborative working across geographically distributed offices.

Cloud infrastructure can be leveraged by Government agencies to quickly & effectively roll-out new services & schemes

Typical Characteristics of e-governance Applications make them suitable for Cloud are:

• Large Distributed User Base
• Well defined way of working across offices & locations
• Software Deployment, Implementation & rollout to multiple offices are still massively time consuming and can be speeded up by Cloud based solutions
• Opportunity for consolidating Best Practices
• Sizing and Scaling can be done more cost-effectively and just-in-time
• Provides a better way of managing security, infrastructure and resources

For making a comprehensive policy and strategy for “Indian Cloud”, ubiquitous approach should be adopted by building a composite platform with core components such as base infrastructure. The key software components can be ERP, ECM & BPM Platforms. The key non software components for setting up a cloud infrastructure are following:

• Connectivity & Bandwidth- This involves connectivity between the application hosted on cloud infrastructure as well as the connectivity between the end customer and hosted applications. The connectivity is poor at remote location as well as the penetration of Internet is low.
• Land & Real Estate- To set-up a large data centre you need multiple acres of land which is also a challenge as prices of properties in India is going up very fast.
• Security – The security is also a concern area for cloud infrastructure.

So in order to reap the full benefits from Cloud adoption the Government needs to provide right infrastructure & policies in place so that challenges can be overcome.