Organisations are increasingly leveraging the agility factor of the hybrid cloud to gain competitive advantage, according to Rahul S Kurkure, Founder and Director of Cloud.in, who in an interview with CIO AXIS says hybrid cloud is also being extended to the edge.
CIO AXIS: Share a brief about your organisation and what are your service offerings?
Rahul S Kurkure: Cloud.in, a born-in-the-cloud platform, is the flagship brand of Hostin Services Pvt Ltd., which started its operations in 1999 in Pune amidst the first dotcom boom.
Cloud.in, as a brand, was launched in 2016 and is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Solution Provider and Public Sector Partner, today. We serve large enterprises, digital native businesses and startups across all sectors.
Cloud.in empowers organisations with its wide range of Cloud Solutions, such as, Cloud Consulting, Planning and Implementation, Migration and Modernization, Managed Cloud Services, FinOps, SecOps, Automation & DevOps, Cost Optimisation and Resource Augmentation, Content Delivery & Edge Security Solutions, besides Media Solutions. Our Intellectual Platforms include, Freedom (Multi-Cloud Billing and Management Platform), Cloud Advisor (Multi-Cloud Security Advisory Tool), Edge Insights (Edge Analytics and Intelligence) and VFORT (Secure Edge Delivering Platform).
CIO AXIS: What is your USP that provides an edge over your competitors?
Rahul S Kurkure: We at Cloud.in, strongly believe in personalized service to all customers whether enterprises, SMEs, digital native businesses or startups. With over two decades of experience in deploying and managing Mission Critical workloads across different sectors, we have a good understanding of the customer pain-points. We work at configuring tailor-made solutions as per their requirements and suitable to their budgets. We are working with customers from the e-commerce, financial services and media sectors among others, on AWS. Being a game-changer in Cloud offerings, Cloud.in has numerous endorsements from its customers and the industry in general.
CIO AXIS: Which cloud model – public, private or hybrid – is in demand across enterprises, today?
Rahul S Kurkure: Many organisations that are taking the first step to move away from legacy systems, are depending on private cloud due to the high stability, security and control offered. However, the higher costs, lesser flexibility and ongoing responsibility of maintaining the private cloud infrastructure, could become a challenge in the long run.
Public Cloud Service Providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, deliver Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for organisations to rent a part of their infrastructure. It comes with advantages of scalability, lesser capex and reliability, but organisations have lesser control over the infrastructure.
So, many futuristic organisations are beginning to opt for the hybrid cloud model, which offers the benefits of both public and private clouds. The on-premise datacentre, private and public cloud resources are connected, yet remain distinct. More business-critical applications and sensitive data can be run on the private cloud with others on the public cloud. Hence, the agility factor of the hybrid cloud is increasingly leveraged by organisations to gain a competitive advantage.
Furthermore, today, the hybrid cloud is extending to the edge too.
CIO AXIS: What are the current trends in cloud computing across industries?
Rahul S Kurkure: In 2022 also, like the last couple of years, we are witnessing rapid adoption of cloud services and this trend is here to stay. According to Markets and Markets Research, the global cloud computing market size is estimated to reach US$947.3 billion by 2026 from US$445.3 billion in 2021 at a CAGR of 16.3% during the forecast period. The growth of emerging technologies such as big data, AI, ML and others, are driving the growth of the cloud computing market.
The market size of hybrid and multi-cloud solutions is increasing and serverless architecture is also gaining more traction. Cloud Security is becoming more critical today. Service mesh is being adopted for communication between services, while ensuring the cloud platform is dynamic as well as secure.
Open-source Cloud platform is being leveraged to customise the infrastructure, based on the requirements, to facilitate innovation as well as for delivering a collaborative work environment.
CIO AXIS: Cybersecurity today is among the key business priorities in an organisation. How can cloud computing enhance cybersecurity?
Rahul S Kurkure: Cloud computing security solutions support in addressing data breaches and safeguard critical business and personal data. DDoS attacks are kept in check, which otherwise would have become a challenge to business continuity.
The Cloud infrastructures support in meeting regulatory compliance. Servers can be protected during periods of high traffic by scaling up the cloud solutions.
However, despite these advantages, there are cases of cloud computing attacks due to compromised user accounts, malicious insider activity and misconfiguration, among other reasons.
Organisations are implementing more powerful cloud security measures to prevent cyberattacks and safeguard assets, application and data. High visibility across the complex asset landscape for monitoring and addressing targeted threats is sought after. Security in Cloud is working on a shared responsibility model, where public cloud providers protect the infrastructure, host operating system and the virtualization layer. User organisations manage the security of business applications, business and customer data and the guest operating system.
CIO AXIS: What are your organisation’s growth plans over the next three years?
Rahul S Kurkure: Cloud.in looks towards a 100%+ Y-o-Y growth by 2025. We are transitioning from a traditional service provider to a next-gen solution provider. Going forward, we plan to extend as a Multi-Cloud Services provider and SaaS Solution Provider. We are aggressively hiring a relevant talent pool and expanding our product offerings too. We have plans to expand our presence to international markets as well in the next few years.
CIO AXIS: What benefits does it bring to you for being an AWS advanced consulting partner?
Rahul S Kurkure:As an AWS advanced consulting partner, we have gained further credibility as a cloudtech company and are able to leverage AWS’s constantly evolving portfolio of new technologies and services. This status has enabled us to serve our customers even better.
As an AWS Partner, we have uniquely positioned to help customers take full advantage of all that AWS has to offer and accelerate their journey to the cloud. We have got the benefit of expanding our customer reach, and growing our business with technical, marketing, and funding resources from AWS. We have got the opportunity to engage with AWS to enhance the value of our unique offerings with resources, programs, and benefits that is driving greater profitability.
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