event
Cloud Computing
It’s not a thumbs-up, yet With low utilisations of existing data centres, full-blown clouds won’t be a govt priority now, but SaaS is ok
(L - R) Sumeet Bhatt, Director, NexTenders; CSR Prabhu, DDG, NIC, Hyderabad; Sanjiv Mital, CEO, NISG; Dr Ajay Kumar, Principal Secretary–IT, Kerala (Chair); Ashok Kr Meena Commissioner-cum-Secretary, Food, Civil Supplies & Consumer Welfare, Orissa; Sethumadhavan Srinivasan, Dy Director-Network Strategy, Huawei; Prashant Chaudhary, Consulting Manager (Govt), CA; Ravi Joseph Pinto, Principal Architect, Oracle
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jay Kumar, Principal Secretary, Government of Kerala, chaired the session on ‘Cloud Computing & RoI for the Government Sector.’ He set the premise that RoI on cloud computing was a challenging task and there was an important need to discuss the indicators of a positive RoI and the various benefits of using cloud by the government. He said it was important to create cloud infrastructure and cloud middleware. Both tangible and intangible savings, better infrastructure, less use of too many separate data centres, provisioning of on-demand resources were some important advantages of the cloud technology, he said. The biggest concern highlighted was that of security. Also, performance of the cloud depended on the availability of the resources. He put forth the concern that the current usage of data centres
else’s responsibility to keep adding the hardware. CSR Prabhu, Deputy Director General, National Informatics Centre, Hyderabad highlighted that all models were developed independently by different agencies and that there was no interoperability. He emphasised upon the need to develop the technology locally and make things integrated, and opined that data centres can be made available in the state and servers can be made available locally in remote areas. Prashant Chaudhary, Consulting Manager— Government, CA, informed that cloud services should be leveraged on demand and be used when needed through cloud, depending upon the need at a particular stage. He advocated that at the moment it was too early to talk of RoI in the Indian context as there was not much usage of the data centres and servers. Ravi Joseph Pinto, Principal Architect, Strategic Architecture and Programs, Oracle, focused on IaaS and PaaS as the cloud models. The focus is also on the private and the public cloud and on the emergence of the hybrid cloud going forward, he noted. He pointed out that it was important to have the consolidation of data centres.
Security concerns deter cloud-thinking as much as the view that availability of resources can be a question mark was only 15 percent and hence it was difficult to discuss the RoI on cloud computing. Ashok Kumar Meena, Commissioner and Secretary, Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department, Government of Orissa, emphasised that for the RoI on cloud computing it was important to have a dedicated IT setup. Sanjiv Mittal, CEO, National Institute for Smart Government, pointed that lot of government departments were in the stages of their automation processes. He emphasised on Software as a Service (SaaS) as a model, as for transactions to keep going, it’s then someone
Sethumadhavan Srinivasan, Deputy Director—Network Strategy, Huawei, said that cloud computing was all about security and offering reliable services around private, public and hybrid clouds. He pointed out that for better utilisation of services the security aspect had to be addressed properly. Sumeet Bhatt, Director, Nextenders was of the view that cloud computing and e-Governance could be a revolutionary idea for India. The main challenge was security and the possible tampering of data. He advocated security measures to be independent of any human involvement. September 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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