 "'Internal IT Departments To Play Role Of IT Negotiators'")
Cloud computing has been termed as one of the technologies to be adopted across sectors in a big way in a couple of years. A few examples are already there in front of us. Biztech2.com caught up with Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Analyst, Gartner, to get his views on cloud computing and to know where the technology is headed.
Are companies realising the importance of private cloud infrastructure?
Big companies like Wipro and Infosys have started building private cloud infrastructure because they have large data centres. Now they can give a server on demand for a project, which earlier used to take more than two weeks. Private cloud infrastructure also makes remote management easier. Different types of PC delivery modes like hosted models and all become way easier. Also, it makes more sense to have a private cloud environment in a country like India where broadband is an issue. To have 120 GB streamed on the systems with public cloud, which has a speed of 4-5 mbps is a hassle. In private cloud, one obviously uses their networking lines. So, private cloud is definitely going to be a hit in the country. Especially with companies who have a large employee base.
What according to you are the reasons for growth in the cloud storage market?
Amazon came out with e-compute cloud because they had so many servers for their back-end operations. They realised in due time that they have huge space available on them. They then decided to monetise it, which was a good move. There are service providers today, who go to such data centre holders and tell them, ‘Look you have so much of space available, let me market it for you’. And there are people, who want storage space for their heavy media files and all.
With things like videos, pictures etc, the world is on its way to becoming extremely digital. The media and entertainment industry, for example, needs huge storage space to store heavy files, for which space available on the PC is no longer enough. Pay-per-use model is and will be, thus, extremely popular.
Is security a concern for cloud computing?
No infrastructure in this world is secure. Not our home, not our PC, and not our data centres either. So, why should cloud computing be any different? Give it two or three years, and no one will be concerned about security. The same thing happened with LAN a few years ago. Everyone was concerned about giving access to all through LAN. But now, nobody talks about it. This is a concern that will be for anything that is new and it will get addressed with time.
What according to you is the future of utility computing?
Utility computing will take a few years to take off properly. However, in that much time, we will see that everything that we use today will be available from the cloud. What will perhaps impede this is that the IT department, which is the provider of these services in a company, will soon become an IT negotiator. This change in role will occur because there will be fee-based models coming in and they will negotiate prices with cloud computing vendors rather than merely procuring IT products. In a few years time, there won’t be any need to buy servers, for one can access them from anywhere in the world through cloud computing.
The reason that utility computing hasn’t been taken up well so far is because one people are unaware of its benefits and two, they have still not developed a model, which will help to monetise it properly. Monetisation policies are being developed now and once those are in place, things will start falling in line.