Cloud Computing – 'Voice of the Service Provider'

P Sridhar Reddy CMD, CtrlS in conversation with Enterprise Channels

What kind of uptake are you seeing for cloud computing in India?

As more companies migrate toward the cloud and data becomes readily accessible, ensuring the protection of enterprise data will remain a top priority in 2013.Our experience with the CIOs of all the organizations is really overwhelming when it comes to discussing and adopting private clouds. Enterprises that have a large infrastructure within their internal data centers are looking to host their UAT / Test platforms on Private clouds. The enterprises are initially moving their UAT platforms, new projects, non-core projects onto the hosted private cloud models. Organizations strongly feel that the private cloud is intermediate step before adopting the public cloud. When these non-core move to public cloud, we will see the core move to the private cloud.

What are the benefits of moving to the cloud vis-a-vis using in-house servers?

With characteristic features of scalability, greater resilience without redundancy, zero CAPEX and reduced costs and disaster recovery, it is the harbinger of good tidings to its subscribers, such as the minimization of in-house IT infrastructures, substantial cost savings, and diminished administrative hurdles, thereby appearing as an appealing outsourcing proposition for Enterprises. Moving to cloud bridges the ever growing gap between demand and supply of IT requirements.

In the enterprise market, what are the key expectations from the customers for cloud computing? How prominent is the growth for public, private and hybrid clouds?

Enterprises look for scalability and security while considering vendors for Cloud. CtrlS cloud provides cloud computing infrastructure and services so you can move quickly from an idea to production – without the pain of large capital outlays and long-term vendor contracts. This flexibility also comes with all the security, cost stability, and enterprise-grade performance of a dedicated world-class private data center.

What applications are most suited for the cloud? Are you seeing mission-critical applications moving to private/public clouds?

Almost all kind of applications except those working on mainframes, Unix hardware are suitable for public cloud. At CtrlS we have implemented DR for the Unix based hardware like Pseries, Sun which run mission critical apps as well. Surprisingly some of the customers who need 100% uptime and scalability are aggressively pursuing private/public clouds. These customers are usually tech savvy companies like ecommerce, payment gateway companies etc.

What are the challenges that you face in finding the skilled people to work on such projects? Do you see a skill gap in the market? What are you doing to bridge that gap?

There is a serious skill gap as most of these are new concepts and demand skills in not just applications but also in networking, internet, storage and security areas. At CtrlS, we started a training academy which has various courses ranging from 100 hours to 6 months full time.

What are you doing in order to enable partners in the cloud computing space?

We offer white labelled public cloud platform and offer consulting help to our partners to win large deals.

Source :issuu.com/smechannels.com/docs/enterprisechannesls_march_2013

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