Enterprise Cloud: Respect their Privacy

The typical cloud triad- IaaS, PaaS and SaaS can be served in various settings such as public, private, hybrid and community. While creating a database of cloud deployments in the Indian region, one cannot help but notice the preference large companies have towards creating private clouds. Ranging from verticals such as BFSI, IT/ITeS perceived as early adopters of technology, we witness participation coming from Healthcare, Retail, Government, Manufacturing and Education segments as well.

Figure 1: Companies chosen to deploy private clouds in-house

The commonality amongst all the above companies is a cautious CIO wanting to improve utilization and efficiency of current resources and hence transcending legacy data centers to an agile cloud center.

The top three commonly stated reasons to move to a private cloud are as follows:

1. IMPROVE Resource Utilization
2. Introduce IT ACCOUNTABILITY
3. Carry out the above 2 without discarding current investments and jeopradizing company's vital data assets

In the current economic environment, IT investments need to be modest and tend heavily towards supporting new product innovations and research rather than management and maintenance of installed base. Successful companies need to be lean and learn to do more with less. From a large company's point of view, who have already made significant past investments in IT, abandoning and switching to a public cloud shared resource model available via non-secure internet lines might sound sacrilegious! No wonder the list of companies opting for private cloud especially for their core production applications is expanding.

One key observation point here is these companies value data security and control equally as important as costs which is why they choose to adopt a private model which brings down costs by around 25% as against the public cloud model which is significantly much cost effective. Also the market is warming up to hosted private cloud options offered by Third-party providers of the likes of Netmagic Solutions, Reliance Communication, Airtel, CtrlS, ESDS and some more.

IT accountability is a key parameter, which means having a usage report indicating which project is using how many resources, something that only a cloud provisioning can showcase reliably. Infact some companies plan on adopting a utility billing model wherein a usage bill will be presented to internal projects and departments ensuring a level of responsible spending.

While private clouds are here to stay for large companies, that doesn't prevent them from benefiting off public clouds especially SaaS based Email, HR, Collaboration and Business Productivity applications. So while in the long run hybrid cloud is a good possibility, the current scenario is all about private clouds and keeping one's guard up!

Bisakha Praharaj 
Bisakha is a Senior Research Analyst with the Information & Communication Technologies Practice for Frost & Sullivan South Asia & Middle East region.