In the past one and a half months, I personally moderated five CIO discussions on cloud computing in various cities across India. It was surely an overexposure but some very typical myths got broken and mysteries got solved.

Firstly, in India, cloud computing is still a matter of roundtable ‘discussions’. Whatever hype you may assign to cloud, CIOs are still just talking about it – not many hands rose when I asked about the adoption of cloud and I would have easily met 100 CIOs across five cities. This doesn’t mean there is ‘no’ adoption but certainly no one wants to take the plunge, not right now. Many CIOs candidly accepted that they will consider cloud once they see some trusted testimonials.

The second part is even more interesting. This whole campaign about private cloud and how enterprises can benefit from it drew flak. In fact, if I can be more explicit, many CIOs suspected it as a gimmick which will favour large technology infrastructure vendors only. To a large extent this appeared true. What is the significance of cloud if everything still resides in your guarded premises? Some may argue that by deploying private cloud, you can get an environment without sacrificing control over the underlying infrastructure. A few others may argue that private cloud can bring capabilities so that infrastructure can be rapidly and elastically provisioned - in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. “These benefits seem lucrative but what is stopping CIOs from adopting cloud. There seems to be something pulling back,” argued C.N. Ram, Group CIO, Essar in one of the discussions.

Lastly, are the vendors themselves prepared with offerings, is a big debate. Here we have to decouple hype from reality. Ajay Mehar, CIO of Sony Entertainment remarked that he has been trying to find a cloud vendor who can provide him infrastructure but so far none has offered a convincing solution.

Amidst all the skepticism, I still feel merit in the argument that cloud is an inevitable migration from how technology will be consumed in the future. CIOs should think of cloud as a ‘charge-back’ model in which they can pay as they use. The next couple of years could see enterprises realising the compelling benefits from cloud, and   vendors and service providers overcoming the bottlenecks.

As ever, I would like to have your comments.