A Private Affair

Last year, Jammu &
Kashmir became the first Indian state to roll out cloud based ration
card, birth/death certificate and recruitment services for its
citizens. It used the spare infrastructure from the data centers of
Madhya
Pradesh. The use of the cloud computing model enabled the J&K
government to roll out these services within 60 days at zero initial
cost. What helped J&K was the transformation of the data centers
at Madhya Pradesh into a private cloud- allowing the latter to
offer IT-as-a-service to any other state government, through what
will eventually become a pay-per-use model. Clearly cloud computing
has become a priority for the governments with the ministry of IT &
Communications encouraging states to share applications and data
centers. Government estimates say that if 2 or more states consume
IT-as-a-service using the private cloud model, it could save the
exchequer almost 50% of the `1,378 crore allocated for state data
center projects. The state data center (SDC) project is part of the
`27,000 crore National e-Governance Plan rolled out in 2005.
Following the successful roll out of citizen services in Jammu &
Kashmir, Microsoft pitched its cloud services to the governments of
Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal to help them start their
e-governance projects.

For cloud vendors like
Microsoft, the private cloud model is turning out to be the next big
opportunity. Not just governments but many large enterprises also
want the benefits of cloud computing-fast deployment, increased
agility, lower costs-but with tight control over things like
physical infrastructure and security policies. While government
departments with their massive data centers and stringent
data privacy and security guidelines make a natural contender for
private cloud rollouts, large enterprises which have already invested
in their own data centers too are expressing interest and evaluating
the proposition. Obscured by Clouds Many enterprise CIOs are in the
process of completing the cost-benefit analysis in their readiness
evaluation for a journey to the private cloud. A simultaneous step is
identifying the right approach to implementing a private cloud-one
that suits their needs and priorities best. A common roadblock here
is in understanding the mechanics of implementing a private cloud; as
CIOs must ensure a successful cloud implementation that provides
benefits that far outweigh the cost and efforts involved. On the
other hand, some organizations have started their journey. As Prateek
Chatterjee, head of corporate communications at NIIT says, “We have
seen clear cost savings by implementing virtualization on our global
IT infrastructure and the results have encouraged us to work with
Microsoft and put in place a definitive roadmap to transform our
infrastructure into a private cloud. NIIT stands to gain
significantly in the medium to long term with savings in hardware and
management costs through the private cloud model.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia,
associate research manager at Springboard Research notes that IT
consultants and partners remain critical to help majority of
organizations in implementing a private cloud. Only a handful of
organizations would be able to successfully carry out the private
cloud rollout without hand-holding from external service providers at
least at some stage- either in planning, architecture design,
implementation or maintenance. Cloud adoption trends available thus
far suggest that it is the SaaS model which is seeing the fastest
level of adoption; and that SMBs are leading the pack in cloud
adoption ahead of enterprises. However, there are many large-scale
organizations in both government and private sector that have keen
interest in taking advantage of the cloud computing model and will
find a compelling proposition in transforming their data centers into
a private cloud.

By-Karan Bajwa

The author is general
manager, Public Sector, Microsoft Corporation (India)

(maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in)