Definitions of what constitutes a private Cloud are suspect; meanwhile public Cloud adoption though slow is picking up pace
When is a Cloud not a Cloud? Well, when you are talking about private Clouds, many experts feel that the deployment of private Clouds in India isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Basically, server virtualization has picked up in many pockets but a virtualized setup isn’t a private Cloud unless and until you add orchestration and self-provisioning. Then there’s the question of exactly how much control Indian CIOs and IT managers are willing to relinquish and the bigger question of if the business users really want that control.
Self-provisioning, from the vendor side, is being sold as the answer all of a business’ woes. If the business unit heads are IT-savvy, then yes, it could be a powerful enabler but if they aren’t, then it could be disastrous. Moreover, who will ensure that self-provisioned resources aren’t wasted. The more I think about this, the more I feel that a strictly defined private Cloud makes sense mostly in a test & dev environment where developers need to provision and release resources rapidly. In a conventional business unit, IT provisioning probably doesn’t need to be quite as rapid.
IT/ITES companies have been the biggest adopters of virtualization for the simple reason that they need to support all the popular environments while developing solutions for their customers. Companies in other verticals, unless they have a particularly heterogeneous environment, may not even need to virtualize since there is always a performance penalty to be paid while doing so. A bank or a manufacturer would probably not even need virtualization except for the aforementioned test & dev.
The public Cloud on the other hand does make a lot of sense, particularly for smaller companies that can’t afford the IT staff or equipment to run stuff in-house. In the Indian context, small manufacturers and other SMBs have gone in for Cloud-based email, SFA and the like.
Then there’s the option of doing your backup & recovery in the Cloud. Call it Cloud DR or whatever, it’s an intriguing option with the only problem being bandwidth or the lack thereof. Despite that, for smaller companies that don’t have the wherewithal to set up a DR center, Cloud-based backup could be an interesting option particularly if backed by a well known name. Most of these companies, if they have a formal IT setup, would be hosting with a IDC provider or telco providing these services. For them, backing up to another location owned by the same or another provider or telco makes a lot of sense. For the bigger fish, they can always build a second data center and use that for DR.
Cloud has become a term that has been used and abused to death. Everybody’s scared of not calling their product ‘Cloud-ready’ or ‘Cloud-enabled’. Let’s take a step back and see what really qualifies as a Cloud since, for a corporate data center, it’s debatable if even virtualization is always necessary, let alone a Cloud.
– Prashant L Rao
Editor, Express Computer
prashant.rao@expressindia.com