HDS to shift data to cloud, eyes on India's SMB segment
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 27 July 2010, 21:35 IST
Printer Print Email Email
HDS to shift data to cloud, eyes on India's SMB segment
Bangalore: System integrators in India are busy creating service offerings for the Cloud with a view to tap the Indian market and now Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has unveiled its plans to jump into the race. Following their announcement last year, where the company unveiled its desire to venture into the cloud for all its applications, HDS has come up with an integrated portfolio of cloud technologies, solutions and services, which would enable the adoption of private, hybrid and public cloud environments. Organisations have rapidly adopted virtualization and now look to cloud service delivery models to reduce costs, increase flexibility and improve their time to market. HDS promises to move data from existing environments into the cloud without disrupting applications or users. "Cloud computing is not a product. It's a way to deliver IT services in an on demand, rapid, flexible and scalable fashion and the usage of appropriate delivery method, deployment model and underlying infrastructure can address your particular cloud needs. It is more of a business model," said Sunil Chavan, Director, Software Group & Cloud solutions, Asia Pacific, HDS. HDS has understood the fact that, in India they have to service wide set of customers and the end customer should have different results and they have taken cognizance of the clear demarcation between private, hybrid and public cloud. They would prefer their advent from private to public cloud platform. At present the company is experimenting at the private cloud level and this would be their strategy to move towards storage in the cloud, where the data would not only is assured to be safe but also backed up in their storage devices, ensuring utmost data security. "We have focused on data security, data mobility and reliability. Being from a storage domain, we ensure proper backup of data. We do not follow the strategy of our competitors and our approach in dealing with the cloud is very different from others," added Chavan. Apart from protecting the existing investments while adopting the cloud, it will reduce costs through its multitiered infrastructure, operate efficiently by mitigating risks with a secure, highly available infrastructure and ensure service level agreements (SLAs) with enterprise class hardware and software. "There is one common software for data mobility, comprehension and data storage. This is the building block of our approach to the cloud," said Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Manager, HDS. The biggest challenge which the company might face is customer retention and revenue generation. With Telco as their service provider, the new cloud vendor says that, the customers have the SLAs of Telco to vouch upon and through the SLAs provided by Telco, the customers can fight for the information lost. As of now, most of the Indian companies prefer private clouds and with healthcare and education sector marching at a rapid pace, Cloud would make a lot of sense in India. The transition from private to public cloud would not take much time as the public cloud is aimed at the consumer and small business level. There is no doubt that, the small and medium business (SMB) segment in India is very unique and probably, this is the reason which is luring the cloud vendors to India or pestering the system integrators to try this trend in this market oriented economy.

siliconindia