New-age firms accelerating cloud adoption

Manish Israni, Head of IT Operations & CIO at Yotta, feels that with increased awareness, growing market, availability of skilled talent, government initiatives, increasing start-ups and emerging tech, India is poised to grow aggressively in the future.

Public, private or hybrid: What are the kinds of cloud that are becoming popular in India, also among both the large enterprises and SMBs?

India stands for expansion in the cloud services sector with increasing Internet penetration in the country. Shifting to the cloud is not an option for companies anymore, it’s crucial. Cloud adoption in India is moving in depths of the country through increasing colocation services driven by sectors like BFSI and healthcare. Cloud usage of an enterprise purely depends on the business needs of the company, in my opinion; it could vary based on the requirements for each application and workload.

The use of hybrid cloud solutions by enterprises has picked up pace in the past few years. SMBs are increasingly deploying cloud services due to reduced infrastructure cost, flexibility, better workforce collaboration and more. Hybrid cloud allows businesses to scale, be it large or small enterprises. As security is one of the key areas of concern for companies along with costs, hybrid cloud solutions allow them to reap the benefits of an affordable public cloud and ensure the safety of their critical data by hosting it on a private cloud.

What are the implications on India's Personal Data Protection Bill in the market and how does it fare when compared to GDPR?

The new norms with a restriction on the transfer of personal data is good news for the Indian data center and cloud operators as companies will now need a robust IT infrastructure to store and access data. The definition of critical personal data remains unsettled and will be categorised by the central government. Lack of clarity has affected the decision making of investors in the industry. Also, every sector is governed by a regulatory body, companies are in a midst of uncertainty of which regulations will be applicable to them like financial data also falls under RBI’s mandate and critical data can only be transferred in case of health emergencies after the approval of DPA.

Person Data Protection Bill is majorly inspired by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While there are similarities in the clarity of consent, compliance with law, individual rights, exemptions, etc; there are a few differences too. PDPB has shed more clarity on personal data categories - personal data, sensitive personal data, and critical data. The central government has the authority to categorise certain data as ‘critical personal data’ that must be processed in the country. GDPR has a list of ‘special categories’ to classify data but does not provide any guidelines to process. While GDPR aims not only to safeguard the data but also allow for a smooth cross border transfer of all types of data given the other country has an adequate data protection framework in place, PDPB focuses only on protecting sensitive personal data and regulating this data.

How are technologies like AI-ML changing the cloud environment?

Organisations are increasingly using cloud-based services and leveraging Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to execute and install AI-infused cloud results. Global technology players are taking lead in cloud-AI technology by initiating PaaS solutions integrated with AI abilities. The fusion of these technologies brings multi-fold benefits to an enterprise by changing the way data is stored and processed to deliver informed results. The scalability and low cost of computing allow for seamless running of an AI-ML solution. In a public cloud environment, the benefits of an intelligent solution can be further extended to the users. With the adoption of AI-based solutions for the cloud, multi-cloud environments can optimise their security architecture by identifying a possible threat or outage and take preventive measures. The demand for intelligent cloud solutions will increase in the areas of banking, education and smart devices among others and large enterprises must leverage this amalgamation to stay competitive in the world.

What are the major cyber threats of putting data on the cloud and what are the common safeguards used to avoid that?

There are a record number of cybersecurity attacks happening around the world. The threat that looms on the traditional storage is also true for data stored on the cloud. As cloud allows sharing of files via links, leaks or loss of data through data breaches, a Denial of Service (DoS) attack by flooding system with huge quantities of data and jamming the servers, insider threats and hijacking accounts are some of the major cyber threats that companies need to beware of while using cloud services.

Companies can prevent from falling prey to data threats by taking preventive measures like putting in place an immediate response plan, having two-factor authentication access, monitor cloud services that are in use and assess their risk. Besides these, encrypting data and limiting the number of authorised users with access to encryption keys also helps. In terms of technology, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) now use advanced of firewall technology like Web Access Firewalls, application services, layering and micro-segmentation. Businesses should also ask CSP’s for complete visibility and control of their cloud operations via multi-cloud management tools. Most importantly, always keep backup copies of your data offline, which sounds pretty simple but many businesses fail to do.

Is India able to keep pace with the demand for growing IT/cloud infrastructure, with concepts like Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things coming up?

According to a study by NASSCOM, the Indian cloud market is estimated to reach US$ 7.1 billion by 2022 with 30% CAGR which was at US$ 2.5 billion in 2018, dominated by SaaS and IaaS. India’s cloud spending is only second to China at 40.2% CAGR. New-age companies are accelerating cloud adoption by implementing Cloud-first strategy along with emerging technology trends like IoT, AI-ML, edge computing, on-demand models, XaaS and so on. IT-related companies, communication, and Media sector have shown a higher rate of adoption as compared to sectors like Banking, Retail and Healthcare. With increased awareness, growing market, availability of skilled talent, government initiatives, a proliferation of start-up ecosystem and emerging technologies, India is showing high adoption levels and is poised to grow aggressively in the future. Global players like AWS and Google Cloud are also operating their IaaS facilities out of India owing to these factors. In the coming years, we’ll see India become the global hub for cloud computing.