Cloud computing technology, which involves virtual servers and a virtual IT infrastructure, will see increasing adoption by e-commerce and startup companies in India in the near future.
E-commerce companies, for instance, that do not want to invest in an IT infrastructure, will adopt cloud computing and will outsource their cloud computing requirements to third party cloud computing service providers. Once their infrastructure is on cloud computing, they will be successful in providing faster and efficient services to their customers especially when they have a flash sale for instance when lakhs of users log in to their systems at the same time.
“Any website can be hosted on the cloud. In the US, most of the e-commerce players are porting their IT infrastructure on a cloud infrastructure,” Sonal Puri, the CEO of the US-based company, Webscale Networks told THE WEEK. “We have a cloud service which can cater to different requirements of an e-commerce player. In case of heavy traffic on an e-commerce website, our cloud system automatically senses the increase in traffic and then allocates more servers to the system so that there is minimum downtime and the site is up and running continuously. On the other hand, when the traffic is less, it automatically reduces the number of servers required to run the site. Nowadays, cloud computing not only covers servers, but also very well provides security and networking as well.”
Puri also feels that cloud computing facilitates agile functioning of different e-commerce websites. “There are cloud infrastructure like ours which can transfer or switch over the entire cloud infrastructure on to another cloud system in case of a disaster in about 15 minutes time frame. This can avoid downtime and keep the system up and running even if a disaster strikes,” she added.
As per Gartner Inc. public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 38 per cent in 2017 to total $1.81 billion. Gartner says that the highest growth will continue to be driven by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which is projected to grow at 49.2 per cent in 2017, followed by 33 per cent in software as a service (SaaS) and 32.1 per cent in platform as a service (PaaS).
The research report says that additional demand from the migration of infrastructure to the cloud, as well as increased demand from compute intensive workloads, both in enterprise and startup space, will drive this growth in India.
