Symantec upbeat on Indian cloud computing market

Symantec upbeat on Indian cloud computing market

MUMBAI: IT security firm Symantec Software Solutions said the country's nascent cloud computing market, a platform where software applications and related resources can be shared online, is likely to bloom within a year.

"A cloud is a big wave in the global market, and India certainly is following the trends," Symantec Vice-President Information Management Group, Vijay Mhaskar, told reporters here.

The revenue from Indian cloud market is likely to grow over $3-billion by 2015, from the current $534-million, he said, quoting the IDC report.

"Besides the actual numbers, there is a significant growth in cloud computing. It is certainly adopted globally, and India is following the same trend for adoption," Mhaskar said.

Cloud computing, which is Internet-based, facilitates sharing of technological resources, software and digital information. The emerging field would function on a pay-per-use model, helping technology companies to bring down cost.

The cloud computing platform is expected to mainly benefit enterprise SMB (small and medium business), SOHO (small office, home office) and consumer segments.

"Indian enterprises are discussing virtualisation and private/hybrid clouds. While agility and affordability are the main drivers, having fewer legacy systems is helping this transition," Mhaskar said, adding that the the transition brings in a new set of challenges related to security, scalability, and disaster preparedness.

Symantec, which conducted a survey, found out that out of the 3,700 companies which participated in the research globally, 73 per cent wanted to virtualise their database applications within a year.

Symantec said 57 per cent of the 200 Indian firms, which participated in the survey, were implementing server virtualisation compared to 45 per cent globally.

The research said one-third of the companies surveyed were planning for private and hybrid cloud deployments.

Server and storage virtualisation are the most mature with 31 and 26 per cent of enterprises implementing, while the private Storage-as-a-Service is the least mature with 21 per cent adopting, the survey said.

With Sony playstation, Sega, IMF, CitiBank, Gmail being hacked, it is not a surprise that 76 per cent of the companies were concerned about the security reasons.

"Security is the number one concern after having implemented server virtualisation and 76 per cent cited it," Mhaskar said.

Digital information in India will grow from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3-million petabytes (one petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes) over the next decade (2010 to 2020), twice as fast as the worldwide rate, Symantec Director-Technology India and SAARC, Anand Naik, said, adding that it was important to develop security to protect privacy of the corporates who wanted to store their data using cloud.

"Awareness around these emerging technologies is prevalent, but the Indian enterprise is yet to move completely. There is a wait and watch approach to the level of maturity in the market before implementation," he said.

Symantec recommended that enterprises could leverage and modernise their existing infrastructure prior to the implementation of hybrid/private cloud.