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TECHNOLOGY
Cloud With A Lining
ICICI Bank, Yes Bank among the firsts to adopt cloud computing
SREEVALSAN MENON
22 May 2009
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Cloud computing allows businesses and
consumers to remotely access a vast
computing resource that can be tapped
on demand to deliver the next-generation
services that consumers demand.
It improves energy efficiency as it is a
shared infrastructure, and allows organisations
to track information better, pay for what they use,
and access more computing, storage, services
or applications on demand. |
The short message that flashes on your mobile after using a credit or debit card seems routine if you get it, but worrisome if you don’t. Vikram Raichura, proprietor of Via Infomedia in Mumbai, which provides this peripheral yet essential promotion and notification service for many banks and retailers, knows the ‘mission critical’ nature of this operation.
Six months ago, Raichura relied heavily on a telecom operator’s infrastructure as his capital expenditure (capex) resources were not sufficient enough to set up an IT infrastructure.
But the back-end connectivity that linked the banking platform to a telecom link on a real-time basis could neither handle the growing demand for space nor efficiently manage the dense networks. That’s when he switched to cloud computing.
Today, his company sends out 200,000 messages a day and 4 million on average each month — nearly 25 per cent more, and without any additional capex. “My operations are on basic cloud services, which are at least 30 per cent cheaper than a dedicated infrastructure, and I can scale up as per requirement,” says Raichura.
In a downturn, start-ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India, key to the economic revival, are embracing cloud computing — a virtual computing environment that uses the Web to work on a variety of operating systems, loading custom applications, and running them with as many systems.
Amazon pioneered this process, with its Elastic Compute Cloud. IBM, which invested $100 million in its 13 global centres, Rackspace, Sun Microsystems and Google (gmail is the biggest example of cloud) are key players in this $14-billion market, which could grow to $42 billion or 25 per cent of global IT spending by 2012. In India, the market potential is just over $1 billion.
TCS, Infosys and Wipro are investing in creating special teams to explore opportunities for creating private clouds for big companies. Utilities such as Reliance Energy, and large business groups such as Aditya Birla Nuvo are also said to be considering private clouds.
Others are tapping cloud computing for specific projects: a leading automaker runs a customer reward programme; a few broking firms are testing mobile stock portfolio management; hospitals trying it for online medical records; news channels using it for interactive programmes or snap polls; and banks (Yes Bank and ICICI Bank) testing customer applications.
Netmagic Solutions, which began with 1,000 servers a month ago, has signed up 10 customers and expects a 30 per cent growth in demand for cloud space. A basic cloud service operation costs a paltry Rs 7,000 a month (maintaining this through a dedicated server and staff would cost Rs 20,000) against an investment of Rs 3-5 lakh for a similar owned infrastructure, complete with servers, firewalls, load balancers and switches. For around Rs 10,000, one can get disposable server resources, and for Rs 20,000, a dedicated hosted ‘cloud’ infrastructure is yours to meet large enterprise requirements.
Experts say India, which jumped the IT infrastructure curve earlier, can benefit from cloud computing if it solves fundamental disadvantages. Apart from safety of the data if hosted on a third party infrastructure, the potential loss of control on one’s key properties is a major hindrance to cloud’s growth. No bank, for example, could risk a payment gateway on the cloud.
In India, high-speed internet connectivity will remain an issue. Private experts argue that at some stage the costs can surpass the traditional hosting in case of very high usage.
s dot menon at abp dot in
(Businessworld Issue Dated 26 May-01 June 2009) |
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