In a recent report titled the India Cloud Market Overview, the International Data Corporation (IDC)stated that the Indian cloud market has grown by 70 percent last year (2012), and is expected to exhibit a 50 percent growth rate for the next three more years. It is said that the Indian cloud market is rapidly maturing and seeing new entrants and investors, even though public cloud still lags way behind the private cloud due to a number of factors.
Factors Affecting Public Cloud Adoption in India
Like with any emerging market, the biggest challenge for public cloud computing in India is the lack of dependable infrastructure. In some areas of the country, the grid is still subject to intermittent power outages, which means data center operators will have to contend with downtimes and possible loss of service and data, or be forced to rely on diesel fuel to run backup generators, which can be very impractical when it comes to operational costs.
Another challenge that’s slowing down the rate of public cloud adoption in India is disparity between urban and rural residents, between uneducated and educated people, and between people who don’t have access to technology and people who do. It’s true that cloud computing offers advantages or benefits that extend beyond the context of businesses, but until people who don’t really have much to do with technology start to feel its benefits, the adoption of public cloud will remain limited to large businesses who have faith in the technology.
One of the cloud’s key benefits also end up having an unintended side effect in India, as its ability to boost the growth of an organization has helped widen the gap between large businesses and SMEs – with large businesses being more savvy and able to adopt the cloud for their operations, while small enterprises are unable to adopt the cloud and remain stagnant.
The future looks bright, nonetheless, as some of the more progressive companies in the country have used the problems with infrastructure as an encouragement to spur new innovation. For example, IBM’s Bangalore office has solved problems with the inconsistent power grid and the high cost of diesel-based generators by installing rooftop solar panels that provide direct current power to their own data centers. In a lot of established markets, solar installations may not be worth their upkeep costs at such low volumes but in India, where diesel power is on the increase and solar power is subsidized, the solar system ends up paying for itself in as little as four years.
Other companies also become creative in avoiding or solving the increased cost of cloud computing brought forth by a weak infrastructure, such as the IIIT Delhi University, which uses the idle capacity of their school’s computer lab as a private cloud. Source