India: Cloud Computing an Important Government Agenda, Says Kapil Sibal

Appropriate Framework and Mechanism Needed for Cloud Services

The Union Minister for Human Resource Development and

Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal delivering

the inaugural address at the Cloud Summit 2012 – Enabling the Indian Cloud Revolution,

 in New Delhi on July 04, 2012.  Photo © PIB

NEW DELHI (PIB) --- The government is willing to collaborate with the industry and academia to develop a secure and progressive ecosystem for cloud services in India. This was stated by Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology while inaugurating the Cloud Summit 2012 here today. The theme of the Summit is “Enabling the Indian Cloud Revolution”. Highlighting the need for outlining technical and other parameters for cloud providers, standardization of contracts, privacy and security conditions, the Minister urged the industry to work out details for setting up cloud services. Describing cloud computing as a fine economic solution in a complex knowledge economy, the Minister suggested that the focus could be on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and the starting point could be clusters, which have commonality of purpose and vision.  Sibal also released the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) White Paper on 'The Indian Cloud Revolution', on the occasion, saying that India was still in the process of evolving appropriate architecture to take advantage of the possible revolution." Later CERT Director-General Dr Gulshan Rai pointed out that concerns of privacy, security, compliance and vigilance with regard to cloud arose because of the absence of physical infrastructure at the user-end. He suggested that an alliance on the lines of the US-based Cloud Security Alliance be set up in India to answer all issues and concerns. He stressed on the need for setting up a framework for data sharing.

Cloud computing is a model for on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Cloud computing is an online service model by which hardware and software services are delivered to customers depending upon their requirements and pay as an operating expense without incurring high capital cost. Cloud computing is a set of services that provide Infrastructure resources using Internet media & applications and data storage on a third party server.