The initial hype surrounding cloud computing raised a lot of unrealistic expectations. With the dust settling CIOs are able to see better and find out whether the subscription model delivers what it promises. The results, perceived or otherwise, are not all favourable: SaaS providers still fall short of providing adequate information security assurances in comparison to licensed software vendors. Subscription-based software also fails in terms of reliability.

Security and reliability are big concerns for Makemytrip. com, a Gurgaon-based online travel agent (OTA). If any customer-facing application goes down, the OTA is badly impacted. “If our application stops servicing, our customers would move to other sites, something we just can't afford,” said Mukesh Singh, Senior Vice President of Technology Development, Makemytrip.com.

Singh is already contemplating a move to SaaS, though in a limited way, mostly involving non-core business applications. “I would like to try it with any service which is not a customer-facing one, such as storage of data for data mining,” Singh says.

How much time would a CIO give to find out if the model is measuring up to her expectations? Singh says that he would give two-three months for the ROI to be realised and that the period is essential to properly test the solution. “What vendors say is one thing, but when you get down to implementation there are always some surprises, which take some time to get used to,” he says.

In reality things are progressing well. The evolution of the cloud computing ecosystem to address these issues is well underway. “With time, issues such as lack of reliability and inadequate security will be ironed out,” says Singh. Singh should know, having served as General Manager with Amazon India, the Indian arm of the company that is one of the biggest cloud providers in the world.

The challenges for CIOs then are to know the right time to move to the cloud and which applications to move first.

KNOWING THE RIGHT TIME
It's now well established that more and more companies are moving many of their applications onto the cloud. Springboard Research, in its recently released bulletin has said that India is the fastest growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market in Asia Pacific with an estimated CAGR of 60 percent from 2008 to 2012. According to the research organization, the Indian SaaS market which was worth $105 million in 2009, is estimated to be worth $352 million by 2012.

Notwithstanding SaaS's increasing popularity, individual companies must determine for themselves whether the shift from on-premise software to the cloud model will prove beneficial to them. Tom Bittman, a senior Gartner analyst, notes that the cloud computing services needed to deliver the majority of IT services do not yet exist.

“There are limited SaaS offerings today; service-level requirements can’t always be met; glaring security holes exist; compliance requirements haven’t caught up with technological capability, cloud providers tend to be proprietary and monolithic,” he said in a recent blog.

Shashank Sathe, CTO and VP of Mumbai-based Rajshri Media, agrees with the premise that security is a big issue, but he also notes that cloud computing model is simply not cut to serve all applications, at least not currently. The company deals in online delivery of professionally shot content streamed on Internet. It has to contend with guidelines from various types of companies with whom it partners.

Sathe says that it's a highly complex task to manage these various deliveries via an unmanned system which has to not only function as the company's digital asset management but also serve as an in-house cataloguing, archiving, email tracking and order supply-chain management system. “A SaaS model simply doesn't fit in this kind of a dynamically changing scenario since there is way too much at stake and too little time to deliver the final product to the clients,” he says.

To build custom applications and have them operating out of the cloud may be challenging, but it's not impossible. Rajesh Uppal, CGM – IT, Maruti- Suzuki India is trying to do just that. He wants to build an application which would enable suppliers to check the company’s requirements and carry out commercial transactions using a SaaS application. He's already used the model when the company developed dealer automation software. Designed by a service provider (Wipro) and hosted from a third- party centre (Reliance IDC), the dealer automation application is being used for many functions such as enquiry tracking and customer servicing.

Uppal notes that the cost would have been prohibitively high to the dealers if they had to develop the application themselves. In the current scenario, where they use it as a service, they are able to pay for it on a monthly basis. The back-end of the application is integrated with Maruti-Suzuki's database, helping the company to have access to the data.

However, Uppal still needs to think out-of-the-box while designing the application, as the cost of application development again poses a challenge. He is trying to work with other automobile companies such as Hero Honda to look at the possibility of joint development of the application.

aditya.kelekar@9dot9.in