Cloud Computing:The Changing Paradigm

Cloud has come a long way from the time when it was distrusted and suspected as a gateway for all security threats. Presently, cloud is being hailed as a foundation for innovation and rightly so.

- Jasmine Desai

More than US$ 1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years, according to Gartner. This will make cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.

IT spending is steadily shifting from traditional IT offerings to cloud services. Ed Anderson, Research VP at Gartner, sums up this disruption perfectly when he says, "The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of startups and 'born in the cloud' providers."

This is just the beginning, as various possibilities of cloud computing are still being explored. Saju Sankaran Kutty. Associate Vice President – Cloud Infrastructure and Security at Infosys, states, “Some of our clients have leveraged cloud to modernize their legacy applications, increase capabilities and integrate their entire customer-vendor ecosystem.” He points out that with the ability to scale and operate on the cloud, some clients have provided traditional in house applications to their customers and vendors. “We have also seen clients in the education sector leverage cloud to standardize reporting across schools,” adds Kutty.

Organizations are just limited by their thinking and need to be open to scenarios that cloud enables. Srinivasan CR, Global Head, Data Centre Services and CDN Business, Tata Communications, avers, “Now the cloud has reached a point where due to wide adoption, you can ask for a scenario and 99.9% of the times that scenario maybe possible on cloud.”