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Delivering services to large and small enterprises in India, Akamai Technologies sees the Cloud market reaching over $3 billion by next year, an almost five-fold increase from 2012. Sidharth Malik, Vice President & Managing Director, India, Akamai Technologies, in an interview with Bhawna Satsangi of Elets News Network (ENN), speaks of the grey areas that the government should focus on

How can Cloud technology be put to use to improve citizen-centric services?

In a country as big and diverse as India, which is still in the early stages of adopting computing technologies, Cloud Computing provides an excellent platform to foster greater collaboration and innovation for delivery of a wide array of citizen services. Using Cloud-based approaches, the government can aim to improve efficiency while delivering citizen services at the national, state and local municipal government levels which will help make a vast difference in the quality of lives of its citizens.

What are the Cloud-related services that you offer?

The successful delivery of citizen services via the cloud requires a focus on both the underlying computing infrastructure (i.e., data centers) and the quality of delivering those services over the public Internet. Given the challenges in the public Internet, the right delivery platform is important to address the high user and citizen expectations. Akamai powers the hyper-connected world with a complete Cloud solution portfolio, designed to accelerate the delivery of services over the public Internet by making it fast, reliable and secure. Akamai reduces the complexity and chaos of the connected world, keeps up the agility, and engages and delights the citizen with the most secure, high-performing user experiences anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Can you tell us about some of your Cloud technology-based deployments in India?

In India, we are working with both large and small enterprises who have adopted Cloud technology. Most recently, we partnered with Pepperfry, a leading online furniture and home marketplace with over 2 million customers. Being an online retailer, they faced challenges in maintaining a consistent performance of their website at all time. Pepperfry approached us and we were able to deliver their web content 2X faster approximately 70 percent of the time. Around 85 percent of Pepperfry content was offloaded to Akamai’s servers which helped Pepperfry substantially save on infrastructure costs as well.

Compared to the global standards, where does India stand in terms of Cloud technology adoption?

According to a recent report by Gartner, Cloud Computing will constitute the bulk of IT spending by 2016. In India alone, it is predicted that the Cloud market will reach over $3 billion by next year—an almost five- fold increase from 2012. However, there are some barriers that are restricting the adoption:

Internet connectivity in India: The connectivity in India varies across the nation and improving the connectivity would be one of the influencing factors.

Security and performance concerns: Increasingly connected nations have presented new technology challenges for the government as they strive to deliver secure and fast content and applications to the citizen.

What are the grey areas, according to you, which you would like the government to focus on?

There are three key areas government could look upon:

Delivering services that build a greater citizen–government connect, through a citizen centric approach rather than duplicating services available from private party players.

Taking the lead on, and deploying a national cyber security platform that will allow both governments and private parties to provide everyone with the required cyber security.

Identifying the key partners who have the experience and expertise to help in Cloud adoption. They will help governments deliver on the promise of a secure and fast digital future for the citizens of the country.

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