How right cloud technology mix is key for Indian enterprises

The journey of Indian enterprises to Cloud, especially towards Hybrid and Public platforms, is gradually gaining momentum, but finding the right mix is what holds the key for them and Cloud players are now offering customised services to clients.

The Indian Cloud market is growing exponentially. According to the apex industry body Nasscom, the domestic cloud market is projected to reach $16 billion by 2020.

The Public Cloud services market in India is projected to hit $1.9 billion by the end of this year — an increase of 42 percent from 2016 — predicts market research firm Gartner.

Business leaders across industries are increasingly adopting Cloud technology, says Mohit Pande, Country Manager-India, Google Cloud, because they understand it helps solve real challenges like teams working better together, data becoming useful to make smart decisions and companies creating new values to stay competitive.

"We are committed to offering and investing in technology that leaves the choice to customers. Customers don't want to be locked in. They are making sure that their workloads can be managed by containers that run on any platform," Pande told IANS.

A container is a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it — code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings, etc.

Google has been running its services in the Cloud for over 14 years. The company hosts seven Google applications, each with more than one billion users.

"Over the last few years, a large number of Indian enterprises have chosen Google Cloud to grow their businesses. We are excited by the growth of paid Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers in India, many of whom are leveraging our Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities," Pande added.

Google offers solutions like "Kubernetes", an open source technology for managing containers which allows customers to run across multiple Clouds. Google "Stackdriver" provides power monitoring, logging and diagnostics across Clouds.

According to Gartner, the highest growth in India will continue to be driven by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services, projected to grow 42 percent, followed by 33.5 percent in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and 33.3 percent in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

"In 2017, enterprises who looked at creating new value with Cloud evaluated three major steps while building their strategy: decide which IT and business functions to deliver through Cloud, identify and address challenges in adopting Cloud and realise operational, financial and innovation benefits," Vikas Arora, Country Manager, IBM Cloud, India/South Asia, told IANS.

For Prasad Rai, Vice President, Cloud Applications, Oracle India, the new model of business applications delivery, which is SaaS, will actually meet the customers' objectives much more appropriately in the country.

"Over the last two-three years, we have seen a significant shift in the customers' mindset towards the SaaS-based solutions on Cloud. Everyone is today looking at embracing SaaS and this is something that we've seen across industries in India," Rai told IANS.

The Indian enterprises today want more than just productivity and cost-saving perks.

"For them, Cloud as a technology is an enabler to turn increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data into easily accessible insights and help them continually improve customer experiences and applications by infusing cognitive and AI," Arora explained.

With over 50 million SMBs, India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

"India's workforce is already ahead of the curve from being mobile-first to largely avoiding the costly hurdle of transitioning legacy systems. Google has a local team of seasoned enterprise and developer experts connecting with start-ups, SMBs and large corporations to understand their needs and offer solutions accordingly," Pande added.

Google recently launched its own Cloud Platform region in Mumbai which offers several services, including Compute, Big Data, Storage and Networking.

"With the India region, enterprises will be able to take advantage of the high speeds, low latency and performance benefits uniquely offered by GCP (Google Cloud Platform) services. Further, Indian customers will now be able to buy these services directly in the local currency," Pande emphasised.

Hosting applications in the new region, Pande added, can improve latency from 20-90 percent for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and, of course, Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the other closest region which is Singapore.

According to Arora, IBM has announced multiple new innovations on IBM Cloud that will help enterprises further derive value from their Cloud.

This has opened more options for the organisations that are not only relying on Cloud to enhance internal efficiencies but also target more strategic business capabilities.

"The customers are looking at Cloud to provide them access to new-age technologies like IoT, Blockchain and Mobility services, coupled with strong security, compliance and regulatory features. Besides large-sized enterprises, we have started to see a huge demand coming from SMEs and start-ups," Arora added.