Cloud Computing has been around for almost a decade, but the Indian experience is akin to what Mark Twain said about the weather: Everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it -- till now.
Last week in Delhi at its biggest Indian mela, Rajesh Janey, India head of global Cloud storage leader, EMC shared an interesting learning: Indians have been too savvy to put all their money into either public clouds -- space hired from Net biggies like Amazon -- or private clouds on their own machines in their backyard. Instead they have gone for a masala mix that is best of both cloud worlds: Keep the important stuff on your own hardware; store the less critical data on hired cloud. It's called Hybrid Cloud. And it flows from another Indian perception -- the Customer is King. Chew on this:
Today, you book a taxi using a mobile app, and soon, it comes to your door. Already, savvy taxi operators are providing the GPS co-ordinates of the nearest taxi. At the end of your trip, an email is sent to you with the route map of your travel, the exact time taken for your trip and the corresponding pricing. This is possible because of hybrid cloud technology -- the cab company seamlessly morphs data on its own cloud servers like fleet details, with your own coordinates that are pulled in from a public cloud service like Google Maps.
With or without our knowledge, each one of us is constantly using cloud computing in our daily lives – from mobile banking transactions to pizza deliveries to chat software.
The 'consumer first’ mantra’ of hybrid cloud computing is a stark contrast to old fashioned computing where the process was the priority. Consumers – you and me – today define how we would like our computing experience, and the IT ecosystem is paying close attention to our demands and HAS to respond -- with solutions like hybrid cloud.
EMC has joined other IT entities -- Cisco, Netmagic, VMware -- to jointly deliver this hybrid solution that is said to be worth a billion dollars of business in India alone. But then, we are like that only, and we are calling the shots!
