The Gold Rush for Secure Clouds

Europe has blown the War Bugle, they will build their own EU clouds and secure their data and applications within the boundaries of Europe.
The Rest of the World will also follow suit in building their own Secure clouds for their business, government and anything else that needs cloud computing.
The Gold Rush is on for Secure Clouds built bottom up, it is going to be a bonanza for leaders who offer virtualisation solutions like VMWare and its competition including Microsoft Azure & others, Data Center Equipment hardware providers  IBM, DELL, HP and CISCO and others.
The marketing teams in these companies that provide the building material for cloud computing are going to be busy and laughing all the way to the bank. Their fears of the cheap Public Cloud will be history and no longer a challenge to their growth and revenues.

Secure Clouds in the Horizon will herald the demise of Public Clouds.

The cloud pundits who understand how to put together a cloud computing environment will be in demand, irrespective of their nationality. Cloud Architects who can deliver secure clouds will be  paid in gold for their skills.
China has shown how to build a secure national cloud by buying the Azure platform from Microsoft other countries will follow.
Open Source Computing may be used by countries who have good cloud computing  talent like India, China and Eastern Europe.
Are you ready for the Gold Rush, even if you do not understand the cloud it is a great time to invest in companies which provide the hardware, software and services in building secure clouds.
It is also time for to dis-invest from Public Clouds and SAAS solutions in the Public Clouds, their demise will be swift once these secure clouds are build, the decline could start from  New Year if the requirement for Secure Clouds becomes stronger
Are you ready for the Gold Rush for Secure Clouds, there is gold for everyone.

Why the cloud can come down to earth in India

This is the reproduction of an article published in Information Week today .

http://www.informationweek.in/cloud_computing/13-07-02/why_the_cloud_can_come_down_to_earth_in_india.aspx
The author illustrates how the network and infrastructure can be the differentiator between success and failure in deployment of real time technology solutions like exchanges and cloud computing applications

In 1991, I was a key member of the team to build the first automated stock exchange in India known as the OTC Exchange of India on dial up telephone lines and subsequently an overlay network network on an Government built X.25 backbone with an X.28 dial up connectivity. The internet was unheard of those days, though a few Software Technology Parks (STPI) did have this connectivity and I remember the slow browser which connected me to the Harvard facility from the STPI in Hyderabad.

We had limitations because we could operate only in 26 cities in India with dialup connections, because the rest of the cities were challenged to carry data on a dial up network.

The second exchange set up by the same promoters used VSAT connectivity to connect brokers across India and became a success, this exchange was the National Stock Exchange.
Picture Left to Right : Sudesh Puthran, the author, Late R. Ravimohan, Sandeep Bagalkar & Karthik Shah 

The OTCEI had a VSAT network to deploy the stock prices through the teletext offered by Doordarshan and National Informatics centre. But unfortunately there was  only one government vendor of the teletext boxes could not supply enough decoders to service the 1000 brokers of the exchange. And the teletext died a natural death and it was back to Press Trust of India and Reuters.

This illustration is to show how the network and infrastructure can be the differentiator between success and failure in deployment of real time technology solutions like exchanges and cloud computing applications.

I was recently in Bangalore conducting a course on Cloud Computing Business and I heard the same sentiments echoed after two decades that poor data connectivity thorough the internet beyond 50 miles outside of Bangalore city was pathetic and hampers cloud computing deployment. This was in the IT capital of India, what a shame.

Without assured broadband connectivity which is reliable and effective roll out of cloud computing pan India is doomed. Though DOT may have laid the cables up to every district headquarters in India and will subsequently cover it to the taluk level with an investment of about Rs. 2000 crores, the issue of access to the internet in the last mile continues to be a challenge as it was in 1991.

I remember in 1991 we had 500 dial up lines with MTNL Delhi, and about 250 dial up lines in Chennai, Bangalore , Ahmedabad and other cities just to make sure that our brokers could route through the overlay X.25 network, but the design and execution could not deliver the desired connectivity and the exchange buckled under poor network infrastructure.

I see the same writing on the wall for cloud computing in India, without a robust internet connectivity there cannot be deployment of cloud computing in India. RIP advantage cloud India.

It is time to focus on cloud computing delivery and back end support to countries which have a robust internet backbone connecting most of the population, one of the countries  that meets this criteria is the USA and it is no surprise that cloud adoption and growth is exponential in that country.
LS Subramanian is a cloud evangelist who believes "The Future of Computing is the Cloud", he is the founder president of NISE. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author

Denial of Cloud Computing for Many Countries

As many  countries grapple with cybersecurity laws they are making stringent laws which will prove to be a barrier to cloud computing.
Also the largest provider of cloud services is the USA which plans to make foreign Internet access into that country more stringent given the number of recent cyber attacks. The US government may classify Major cyber attacks as war .see the link below
http://governancenow.com/gov-next/egov/us-may-classify-major-cyber-attacks-acts-war.
These developments do not harbor well for many countries who would benefit from cloud computing.
The cost of monitoring and regulating traffic on the Internet highways will be a challenge in the future given the exponential growth of devices powered by wireless services.
Add to this stringent laws that may be passed by countries which  prevent use of social networking sites like facebook and twitter or for that matter google.

Well there will be country specific and regional clouds which will still be launched, but these will be islands in a setting sun and do not augur well for a global cloud computing framework.

USA will leverage on the cloud, so would Europe which is building its own European Cloud,  Australia and New Zealand and also Japan will be forced to build their clouds or share the cloud infrastructure with USA or Europe. We could even have continent specific clouds based on political alignments like the North American Cloud shared by USA and Canada. The European Cloud is already a reality.
The  developing  countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China may also build their own clouds given their potential for computing driven  economics.
This means the many countries in the Rest of the World who can benefit the most from the cloud computing paradigm  may not be able to derive the benefits of the Cloud for social and economic development.
How this will pan out in the future is difficult to pen now, but one outcome is clear there will be a denial of Cloud Computing for Many Countries" especially those who do not have the skills or money to invest in the required technology for cloud computing.
Stringent patrolling of the Internet may not be the answer, so it is time for us to deliberate how the networks of the world will be shared towards the end of the decade.
Remember the countries which had the best ships still had to control the sea routes for economic dominance less then an 100 years ago. Unfortunately the same may not hold true for the Internet  and cloud computing.