Shift From Private to Public Cloud For Companies is Imminent By 2020, the growth of public cloud infrastructure and the resulting costs of the infrastructure, and security solutions for it are likely to increase by 2.5 to 3 times

The future and scope of cloud computing in India seem to be encouraged further due to the Digital India Initiative which would be a push enough to the small and medium businesses (SMBs) to switch to cloud computing.

LEVERAGING PUBLIC CLOUD

An emerging trend that will definitely gain momentum in the next five years is the transition from private to hybrid clouds. Corporate environments will be composed of private IT infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure. Both parts will be connected through protected communication channels - with the use of encryption among other tools - and managed from a unified console (or the control center). In 2018, corporations will have more systems that can and should be taken outside the corporate perimeter and placed closer to the customer. Public cloud environments make it easy to do this. By 2020, the growth of public cloud infrastructure and the resulting costs of the infrastructure, and security solutions for it are likely to increase by 2.5 to 3 times, compared to what the industry analysts demonstrated this year. Public cloud services will lead growth in the identity and access management cloud security market through 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 28.9 per cent. However, private cloud services remain the largest sector. Major cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google continue to lead strengthening their positions and stretching out far ahead of competitors. They are doing this not only because of better reliability, availability or coverage area but because it provides a more sophisticated end-user experience and delivers a comprehensive set of automation and integration capabilities for workloads located in cloud. Bringing a combination of onpremise and off-premise environments under a unified management results in specific security requirements where traditional security solutions are a 'no go'. This is because they don't offer full security capabilities for elastic corporate hybrid clouds, nor can they quickly and effectively follow infrastructure changes and support business growth.

SECURITY VERSUS PERFORMANCE

Using the cloud helps to quickly and more accurately analyze new types of malicious programs or websites detected on client devices. When security applications encounter an unknown threat, they contact remote servers for a resolution and receive an immediate answer, which typically takes a few hours to update databases. Companies have to find a right balance between security and performance. In a virtual environment, a 'traditional' antimalware will decrease its performance. But putting in a 'lightweight' security to focus on performance will risk being exposed to vulnerabilities. Hence, companies must use a solution that does not compromise on performance but at the same time have seamless management that allows you to see, detect and protect. SMBs can be more cost effective by using cloud computing to access information anywhere with any compatible device. Key industries driving growth of cloud security include banking and financial services, IT and telecom, intelligence, retail, healthcare and government agencies.

(This article was first published in the December issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here)