RIDING THE CLOUD COMPUTING WAVE

•  Communications Today

The advent of cloud computing and the move toward a digitally connected world is leading toward massive growth in the way data is generated, stored, managed, and consumed, whilst being disseminated to users ubiquitously through public and private clouds. A big part of an enterprises' IT strategy is to focus on providing consistent and superior digital experience and reduce the need for large-scale, traditional IT infrastructure investments in captive data centres that are aging, unable to handle demands of modern high-density computing platforms, and are not cost efficient to operate and manage.

For enterprise computing that is still hosted in captive data centres, the move to hosting providers is accelerating globally. It is estimated that by next year, 65 percent of all IT infrastructure will be in cloud or third-party data centres. In the initial phases, many enterprises used a third-party data centre as backup or disaster recovery facility, but as part of their next-generation IT strategy, a considerable number of them are turning to it for primary computing and critical infrastructure needs. They are looking at IT application deployments in third-party data centres that are more diverse, complex, and business-critical. Capacity is being redistributed as applications are going from captive to both the cloud and third-party data centres.

With reducing IT budgets, increasing accountability toward enabling the business and the digitization wave, more IT leaders are looking to manage their critical IT infrastructure more efficiently. Moving these workloads to a reliable purpose built third-party platforms such as cloud, managed hosting, and colocation are the choices available to them. However, the decision to do so is not binary. It hinges on the IT leaders' perceptions around security, control, scale, costs, and on the types of applications and their interdependencies. Most modern deployments are typically hybrid wherein, the enterprises will have applications hosted in public cloud and managed hosted environments, while others which are data-heavy with lots of inter-dependencies will be in captive infrastructure managed by a service provider or managed by customer themselves in colocation environments.

Increasing adoption of cloud is creating a win-win scenario for the entire ecosystem including cloud providers, customers, and data centre services providers alike. Rapidly growing cloud service providers are working closely with their trusted carrier-neutral data centre service provider partners for their core as well as edge capacity requirements. A growing number of customers moving some of their applications to the cloud are taking colocation and managed hosting services from data centre services providers for rest of the applications, and in doing so, they ensure these applications are nearer to the cloud. Concurrently, data centre operators are getting their fair share of growth from both cloud providers and customers.

In India, historically the data centres have predominately been captive. However as Indian enterprises adopt cloud for more and more applications, the need for third-party data centres are rising due to the compatibility of that option with the hybrid deployment scenario mentioned earlier.

The Indian data centre market is currently underserved, and there is an ever-increasing requirement for energy efficient facilities which also meets global build and quality standards. With the evolution of cloud computing, many captive data centres in India are unable to handle the demands of modern high-density computing platforms, thus motivating many organisations to look for reliable third-party data services providers with modern facilities.

As one of the fastest-growing infrastructure market that is poised to also be one of the largest globally within the next few years, we anticipate strong demand for data centres across India.