India’s telecoms watchdog has proposed regulating the cloud computing segment due to the increasing uptake of cloud services among businesses.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has invited comments from stakeholders over the proposal to regulate the cloud sector.
In a consultation paper released last week, Trai posed questions including ”what regulatory provisions may be mandated so that a customer is able to have control over his data while moving it in and out of the cloud.”
The other areas in which Trai has sought comments include provisions for billing and metering re-verification of cloud services, how disputes are to be addressed, mechanisms for customer complaints and the security aspects of such services.
The paper comes after Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’s account was hacked and another report said that hackers might have used malware to collect more than 32 million Twitter login credentials.
It sought opinions about the quality of services parameters based on which the performance of different cloud service providers could be measured for different service models. The paper also sought comments on the steps government should adopt to promote cloud computing in e-governance projects, establishment of data centres in India, encourage business and private organisations to utilise cloud services and to boost Digital India and Smart Cities incentive using cloud.
Cloud Computing has four attributes — data intensive, resource pooling, scalability and rapid elasticity and On demand access. It can be operated in one of the four deployment models — public cloud, private cloud, community cloud and hybrid cloud. Cloud computing accounted for about 33% of the total IT expenditure in 2015 across the world. Analysts project that from 2013 to 2018, the cloud computing market will grow at a 9.7% annual rate. Also, by 2019, cloud IT infrastructure spending is expected to be $52 billion, or 45% of total IT infrastructure spending.
In India, cloud computing has huge potential for industries. Verticals such as retail, railways, manufacturing, banking, education and healthcare have started switching their on premise applications to cloud services for optimized reach and performance as well as elasticity and scalability.
The sector regulator has asked stakeholders to send their written comments by July 8 and counter-comments by July 22.