tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19649274.post4041980460442169594..comments2024-03-27T17:16:12.789+05:30Comments on The Leap Blog: The economics of cloud computing: an Indian perspectiveAjay Shahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03835842741008200034noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19649274.post-7381910640410729152015-03-16T15:43:59.849+05:302015-03-16T15:43:59.849+05:30There is an important angle to the choice of locat...There is an important angle to the choice of location for cloud hosting which your article may have missed.<br /><br />Cloud hosting services are already reporting that almost each major economy is coming up with local data residency laws. This means that practically every APac country will ask for a local data centre within their jurisdiction. This is already taking away advantages of scale from cloud service operations -- most countries do not have local markets large enough to justify large investments in in-country data centres by these services. And if they do not set up these data centres, they miss out on business from some of the largest users of servers: government, telecom, banking and securities/commodities trading.<br /><br />This is not a case for on-premise hosting of servers. This is a case to set up data centres even where larger macro factors logically indicate that separate data centres should not be set up.shuvamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17715679731307267875noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19649274.post-64852026866230368212015-03-15T15:17:58.322+05:302015-03-15T15:17:58.322+05:30There are two aspects which are not considered in ...There are two aspects which are not considered in the analysis above:<br /><br />1. Geolocation - A lot of services require that the consumer of the service is physically near to the data center because of the limitation of speed of light which creates a perceptible time delay such as voice calling or watching high resolution videos. Also, the international bandwidth can be extremely costly to purchase for some of these heavy workloads. This is a technical and quality of service issue.<br /><br />2. Data governance and security - The government is a large purchaser of IT services and it is unlikely to host it data outside where it can secure the servers/storage or even the communication links. Snowden documents have shown that the spying agencies are tapping even submarine cables.<br /><br />The government would also prefer that the data and communications of citizens and institutions are easily obtained for investigation purposes. I believe (though I need to cross check) that the Companies Act 2013, while allowing only electronic copies of the accounts, requires a copy to be stored within Indian borders. <br /><br />We have already seen the big issue around this with Blackberry messenger services a few years ago. I am surprised that we haven't seen more of this with WhatsApp or Gmail et al. Maybe the current legal mechanism is proving adequate (which I doubt) or our investigative agencies are very adept at tapping (which is also questionable).<br /><br />In either case, I am listing reasons for the datacenter to be physically present in India. It would probably a provider such as Amazon/Microsoft or Google doing the set up given their competitive advantage at winning this market.<br /><br />Abhayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11253524107580302084noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19649274.post-14287171132473609412015-03-15T15:02:11.123+05:302015-03-15T15:02:11.123+05:30Agreed. And yes, the core hardware comes with an i...Agreed. And yes, the core hardware comes with an import duty of around 30% for most of the products against around 4 to 5% in countries like the US. That differential alone is huge barrier to start, given that almost none of these core components are currently made in India. Tirumala Venkatesh Kaggundihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12460774213083580129noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19649274.post-34701438345084773662015-03-15T13:57:21.067+05:302015-03-15T13:57:21.067+05:30I used to work at a company that tried to do this ...I used to work at a company that tried to do this in the high-performance computing space (or at least that's what it evolved into). Disaster doesn't come close to describing the experience, and I'm amazed that the Tata's didn't think things through... Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com