Bangalore: With at least 30-40% of enterprises adopting the hybrid cloud, India is emerging as a top hybrid cloud market, according to Anil Valluri, NetApp’s President –India & SAARC.“At least 30-40% of enterprises are getting into the hybrid cloud but it’s not 50% yet in India. Everybody is talking about hybrid cloud and there’s a big push from the top management because it gives the many benefits like pay for what you use, manageability, elasticity and more,” said Valluri.
He believed that India is more on the hybrid cloud than other markets because other markets are doing lots more of on-premise or fully private. The role of cloud providers, in his view has been significant in driving and adoption of hybrid cloud in India.
“Other markets are also doing hybrid, but India is adopting and embracing hybrid cloud lot more to my understanding because of good cloud providers like Sify, Netmagic or others,” he opined.
Indian enterprise customers compared to customers in other markets are different in terms of service expectations and behaviours. “Because we need customise service, we cannot deal with people on the phone. We need face-time and that’s the nature of our behaviour. We still are very face oriented,” he stated.
While the adoption of public cloud like Amazon, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud is more among the startups due to benefits of savings and manageability, it’s the large enterprises and businesses that are investing in the private cloud due to have better data controls and meet security needs.
But private cloud still remains a costly affair that comes with other requirements such as infrastructure investment, managing of infrastructure, skilled and trained staffs and more.
“So there are two extremes –one is best spoke and another is completely commodity, but in between, you need that is the ability to control, defined service levels and locally stored data. But at the same time I need to be billed like as pay as you go on a service provider model or a consumption model than the answer is hybrid cloud,” pointed out Valluri.
“And that’s the very reason why it’s called the hybrid cloud as it gives the best of both worlds (private and public cloud),” he added.
It actually gives the ability to virtually own the infrastructure at the same time gives the ease of pay as you grow like a consumption model, according to Valluri.
And that’s where the cloud providers like Tata Communications, Sify and Netmagic play a bigger role in the Indian market. “They have their own datacentres with fully trained staff and offers same cloud models called as Netmagic Cloud or Sify Cloud. They will talk to customers, provide customised solutions and at the same time they have the fat pipe to Amazon or Azure,” he informed.
“If they need lots of computing they will go seamlessly back to the public cloud. So you get the best of complete elasticity that Amazon gives and the control of a private cloud in a hybrid cloud. That’s the reason why Indian customers are choosing hybrid cloud,” stated Valluri.
This scenario also is bringing cloud service providers closer to technology and cloud infrastructure vendors like NetApp and others. “The reason why Amazon or Azure is partnering with lots of us because Amazon has no ability to give customise services because it doesn’t matter to them at the scale they operate. This is the bridging of the gap between service levels,” explained Valluri.
Although, NetApp is cloud infrastructure technology solutions provider to enterprise customers on one side, it also helps them to set up hybrid cloud by working with cloud providers like Netmagic or Sify. It enables customers with the ability to host data and applications in the cloud.
“If you want to do Amazon we will give you cloud volumes by using NetApp’s infrastructure and if you are using your own infrastructure on Amazon. So NetApp plays role across all the three areas,” concluded Valluri.