CIOs at India Inc not rushing investments in cloud computing

Concerns over data security and privacy and an immature ecosystem are likely to stunt the growth of cloud computing in India.

Despite the obvious benefits of lower capital expenditure and quicker rollout of new products and services, chief information officers (CIOs) are hesitant to make full-scale investments in the new technology. For now, they are rolling out pilot projects or waiting for the technology to stabilise, before making this radical shift.

Unlike traditional information technology, cloud computing relies on storing, managing and retrieving data hosted on the internet, rather than on a local server.

Cloud computing is a marketing term for technologies that provide computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. A parallel to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid, wherein end-users consume power without needing to understand the component devices or infrastructure required to provide the service.


Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on Internet protocols, and it typically involves provisioning of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet. This may take the form of web-based tools or applications that users can access and use through a web browser as if the programs were installed locally on their own computers.
Cloud computing providers deliver applications via the internet, which are accessed from web browsers and desktop and mobile apps, while the business software and data are stored on servers at a remote location. In some cases, legacy applications (line of business applications that until now have been prevalent in thin client Windows computing) are delivered via a screen-sharing technology, while the computing resources are consolidated at a remote data center location; in other cases, entire business applications have been coded using web-based technologies such as AJAX.