The haziness that surrounds cloud computing adoption appears to be clearing up, as India Inc finally seems to be accepting the idea, according to a Springboard Research survey
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unveiled at Cloud 2010. The report suggests that
around 42% of Indian organizations use or plan to adopt cloud computing at the moment.
Interestingly, as recently as 12 months ago, only 18% of Indian organizations were interested in cloud
computing adoption as per the report.The main reasons cited for the increased cloud computing adoption are:
1. Efficient allocation of resources by specialists.
2. Resource pooling and distribution increasing accessibility.
3. Empowerment to focus on core competencies.
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In India, increase in IT budgets (despite the recession)
and government stimulus has given significant traction to the adoption of cloud
computing services. Under-utilization of IT resources is another reason for the rise in cloud
computing adoption. According to the survey which was conducted in May, awareness about cloud
computing is in the range of 85% among Indian businesses. The report suggests that this could be
because of the different cloud computing vendors who recently ventured into India.
The top cloud computing adoption drivers that came out of the survey were scalability on demand to
meet business needs, reduced hardware infrastructure, and the ability to pay per use. Public cloud
is currently the preferred choice, with 21% of organizations opting to go for it or are already
using it. 59% of the respondents said they are not aware of what cloud model to go for. Though
there is a higher level of comfort in a private cloud, moving forward the hybrid model is seen as
the better way for cloud computing
adoption.
The areas in which cloud
computing adoption is currently leveraged among Indian organizations are 36% for
enterprise-class applications, 31% for storage, 24% for servers, 13% for DR, 15% for security and
13% for excess CPUs. Organizations somehow seem to separate cloud
computing adoption from the usual technology buying trend, and are considering it more
strategic in nature. CIOs and CEOs—and not IT managers—top the list of the most eligible decision
makers.
An interesting part of the survey is about the perceived cloud computing leaders in India. Of the
respondents, 33% perceived IBM to be the leader, followed by Google (20%), Salesforce (9%), Oracle
(4%), Microsoft (3%), HP (3%), and Amazon (3%). Google's leadership perception could be because of
the size of the enterprise application.
Despite being aware of the benefits of cloud
computing adoption, challenges also loom large as per the report—with security as the greatest
concern. Security concerns largely seem to focus on regulatory compliance and unauthorized access.
Another challenge for cloud computing adoption is that of integration, including local or remote
integration scenarios. The trust factor plays an important role when it comes to performance
management and monitoring to ensure compliance with SLAs. It clearly came out that cloud computing
will not replace on-premise deployments due to the above concerns, and that there are only certain
scenarios wherein its adoption makes sense.