Cloud market shaping up in India, grows above 30 percent

Bangalore: Having become an integral part of several Indian organizations, cloud computing is growing by more than 30 percent in the Indian market. Nick Sharma, the CEO of Cybernet-SlashSupport (CSS) says that it is the small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the country that are mostly adopting cloud computing technology.

There are about eight million SMBs in India, which contribute to around 50 percent of the country's GDP. According to Sharma, Cloud computing is significantly changing the way business is conducted across sectors today. "Besides the operational efficiency, elasticity and scalability of cloud computing technology, the low-cost systems integration factor has appealed companies to move to the cloud during the economic downturn," says Sharma.

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The algorithm of 'cloud' technology offers easy access to applications from any computer. It also enables flawless upgrades, where the provider manages all the updates for multi-tenant cloud applications, allowing companies to run with a high operational efficiency.

Today, CIOs of several Indian IT companies are showing interest in cloud computing and most of them are exploring how cloud can impact their IT infrastructure. But regardless of its benefits Sharma adds that the major hurdle for a full-fledged adoption of cloud-based technology in India is the low bandwidth speed. "Presently, several companies in India are at the first or the second level of the adoption of the cloud computing technology, where a part of their infrastructure suit is on cloud. And, catering to the security issues, many big enterprises will never put their 'mission critical applications' on the cloud. They will only use the utility application like email archiving and storage management on cloud."

According to a recent IDC study, spending on IT cloud-computing services is expected to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will account for 25 percent of IT spending growth in 2012.