Cloud Computing has long gone from being just a hype to a reality. Many organizations have progressed beyond the early use cases of collaboration, for eg. dev-test on cloud, utilising the cloud for mission critical workloads. There are also many organisations that are “born in the cloud” and run their business completely in the cloud, Indian organisations being no exception to this global trend.
The adoption of cloud is helping organisations innovate, do things faster, become more agile and enhance their revenue stream. Clearly, the move to Cloud is about business-aligned IT where Cloud drives business innovation and helps meet business goals.
There has been rapid adoption of Cloud in India across various industry segments. However for regulated industries that have to meet compliance requirements and whose data needs to reside within the country, the location of the cloud data centre is an important aspect to be taken into consideration. CIOs of such regulated industries face some data location restrictions and can deploy workloads or applications only on IaaS Cloud within India. It is important for them to decide on a Cloud IaaS provider that has Cloud PoD (Point of Delivery) in India.
It is not only local Cloud Datacenter, which customers are looking for but a cloud service provider which gives them flexibility of leveraging both bare metal(physical servers) as well as virtualized environment from that local datacenter. IBM SoftLayer provides the flexibility to customers to mix and match both environments. IBM scores with a huge multi billion investment to increase its cloud footprint around the world, including India. IBM Softlayer already has presence across the world with 25+ Data Centres for Public Cloud Infrastructure which are all interconnected and it is currently being used by all SMBs and Enterprise customers across the world. By localising data centres in India, there is a hope to further drive the adoption of cloud services in the country.
The question that now arises is whether a local PoD can help Indian customers. Let’s discuss how having local cloud POD can address many business, technology and compliance challenges:
- Having local PoD in India would address the data sovereignty requirements of industries like BFSI, Insurance, telcos etc. who are mandated to keep the data and also deploy some of their critical workloads only in local PoDs. IBM SoftLayer has an edge over other cloud service vendors as organisations of these regulated industries can create dedicated private cloud on SoftLayer to make it more secure. It can also leverage SoftLayer virtualized environment (shared or dedicated) for their non-critical workloads. In either case, usage data is still residing within India and not leaving the borders.
- India, with the third-largest population of internet users in the world, is a key growth market with an increasing appetite for cloud services. However, there are still challenges of not having the proper internet infrastructure in place which results in latency issues when organisations have to use Cloud PoDs outside India over the internet. Having a local PoD in India like IBM SoftLayer would help in getting lower latency to the end users of these organisations.
- The Government of India has launched a lot of initiatives like e-governance, ‘Digital India’ etc. which can be deployed on the Cloud as against creating individual data centres or hosting space. As the Cloud delivery would happen from a PoD in India, it makes it more secure and dedicated for such initiatives. The necessary underlying cloud infra can also scale up or down depending on the needs of such projects. Some of the e-governance software can be hosted from IBM Softlayer PoD in India and can be delivered to various state governments or government organisations that can use the complete package “as a service” on a consumptive model.
- As enterprises in India adopt or plan Hybrid cloud deployment (consuming services from private, public or traditional IT) , they would like to leverage public cloud infra to augment their existing traditional or private infra on need basis, create backup/disaster recovery or to deploy next generation workloads. Next gen workloads, which are typically cloud native, can be deployed on public cloud infra (IBM SoftLayer) and achieve workload portability between their existing private cloud and public cloud. The combination of using existing private cloud along with IBM SoftLayer provides complete visibility, control and security to the organisations. There can be scenarios where enterprises can have “Systems of Record (traditional CRM etc.)” deployed on their on-premises private cloud while leveraging public cloud for their front tier “System of Engagement (social, mobile etc.)” workloads giving organisations application and/or data portability that can move to and from public and private, for improved optimization.
