With a large start-up ecosystem, India is a big market for cloud services

GS Paper 3

Syllabus: Science and Technology- Developments and their Applications and Effects in Everyday Life

 

Source: TH

 Direction: The article tries to explain cloud computing, its significance for India and the way ahead to promote the cloud computing ecosystem in India.

  

Context: AWS or Amazon Web Services, one of India’s largest providers of cloud-based services, has provided start-up credits that allow aspirant startups to use a suite of services from computing, storage and hosting for free.

  

Background:

• India has the world’s third-largest startup Over the last 5 years, the number of registered startups in India has grown from 452 in 2016 to 84,012.
• While startups in India span a variety of industries from financial tech, gaming and health tech, several are based in the cloud – the servers and data storage accessible via the internet.
• Data-storage companies are offering a slew of incentives to draw and retain these cloud-based start-ups on their platforms.

 

What is cloud computing? It is the on-demand delivery of IT resources (computing power, storage, and databases) over the Internet with pay-as-you-go (pay for a service before you use it) pricing, from a cloud provider like AWS.

 

Who is using cloud computing? Organisations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases. For example, video game makers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.

 

Types of cloud computing: The three main types of cloud computing include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

 

 

Benefits of cloud computing:

• Agility: The cloud gives one easy access to a broad range of technologies so that one can innovate faster and build nearly anything that one can imagine.
• Elasticity: With cloud computing, one doesn’t have to over-provision resources upfront to handle peak levels of business activity in the future.
• Cost savings
• Deploy globally in minutes

 

Cloud services and their importance in India:

Potential: The cloud computing market in India is predicted to develop at a rate of 28.1% between now and 2027.

 

 Promoting e-governance:

• Cloud computing can further the motive of e-governance – service delivery, transparency, citizen awareness and grievance redressal, by providing a faster, easier and cost-effective platform that can be used by multiple government agencies.
• “GI Cloud” – ‘Meghraj’, by the Government of India to harness the benefits of cloud computing.
  • The focus of this initiative is to accelerate the delivery of e-services in the country while optimising ICT spending of the Government.

 

Promoting startup ecosystem:

• An increasing number of small and medium-sized businesses in India are rapidly shifting towards cloud computing which is emerging as the major driving factor for the marke
• As cloud services can simulate experiments on the cloud, run tests, and learn from failed attempts, it has helped “compress” the lifecycle of a startup, allowing them to become more innovative.
  • For example, HealthifyMe, which developed an app called ‘Vaccinate Me,’ allowed feature phones to book close to 50 million vaccination appointments.
• Cloud services are increasingly connecting to start-ups located in tier 2 and 3 cities providing training to even those with minimal education in cloud computing skills.

 

Conclusion: The way ahead lies in taking due care of security, interoperability, licensing, reducing the digital divide, etc, to promote the cloud computing ecosystem in India.

 

Insta Links: Cloud Computing

 

Mains Links:

Q. Discuss the advantage and security implications of cloud hosting of servers vis-a-vis in-house machine-based hosting for government businesses. (UPSC 2015)

 

Prelims Links