New Cloud Computing - Tripartite Agreement Signed

Cloud Computing Test Bed to be set up at IIITM-K

The Government of Kerala has launched several e-Governance projects and services to address various sections of the population. One project that addresses the employees is SPARK, which reaches out to nearly 5.25 lakh employees across the Kerala. Owing to its wide reach, a huge amount of resources are required during the peak period of computation; the last week of the month. SPARK and similar applications witnesses heavy traffic during a certain period of time but are scantily used during the remaining time. There are a few Departments that have huge resources but do not need such huge amounts for their applications. To overcome this, pooling of resources into large clouds  or cloud computing has been recommended as an efficient way to achieve resource optimisation. Aggregated IT infrastructures of cloud can also make it a lot simpler for Government to maintain and support their IT.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Cloud computing services usually provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers. Cloud computing increases profitability by improving resource utilization. Pooling resources into large clouds drives down costs and increases utilization by delivering resources only for as long as those resources are needed. Cloud computing allows individuals, teams, and organizations to streamline procurement processes and eliminate the need to duplicate certain computer administrative skills related to setup, configuration, and support.Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. The concept incorporates infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) as well as other recent technology trends that have the common theme of reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. Besides the self-service nature of cloud computing allows organizations to create elastic environments that expand and contract based on the workload and target performance parameters.

Test Bed

On the basis of the recommendations made the Technical Committee, headed by the Director KSITM, constituted for the purpose, it was decided that a Cloud Computing Test Bed be set up at IIITM-K campus. The implementation of the Test Bed would be carried out jointly by IIITM-K and C-DAC. IIITM-K would provide the resources and technical consultancy would be provided by C-DAC Chennai. The implementation will be carried out in two phases during a span of six months.

Future

Cloud computing is a reality now and has become the most exciting development and delivery alternative to arise in the new millennium. Presently, cloud computing is still in the early adopter phase, but will continue to move into mainstream adoption.

Today’s unprecedented business and organizational challenges re-thinking decision makers to adopt more flexible and cost-effective mechanisms to achieve their IT and business objectives to achieve in  a easy and comfortable way.  Cloud, with its economic, green and scalable development and delivery mechanism, will be a gift to organizations and the business benefits are undeniable. Though it may be seen as a threat to hardware manufacturers, nevertheless cloud  offers  tremendous opportunity in terms of  software, services, networking, platforms, infrastructure sharing  “on-demand”.