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Articles, Compliance

IT Security Compliance – HIPAA

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)

DEFINITION: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) allows persons to qualify immediately for comparable health insurance coverage when they change their employment or relationships. It also creates the authority to mandate the use of standards for the electronic exchange of health care data; to specify what medical and administrative code sets should be used within those standards; to require the use of national identification systems for health care patients, providers, payers (or plans), and employers (or sponsors); and to specify the types of measures required to protect the security and privacy of personally identifiable health care.

HIPAA Compliance

Title I of HIPAA regulates the availability and breadth of group health plans and certain individual health insurance policies. It amended the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the Public Health Service Act, and the Internal Revenue Code.

Title II of HIPAA defines policies, procedures and guidelines for maintaining the privacy and security of individually identifiable health information as well as outlining numerous offenses relating to health care and sets civil and criminal penalties for violations. It also creates several programs to control fraud and abuse within the health care system. However, the most significant provisions of Title II are its Administrative Simplification rules.

HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.  HIPAA does the following:

  • Provides the ability to transfer and continue health insurance coverage for millions of American workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs;
  • Reduces health care fraud and abuse;
  • Mandates industry-wide standards for health care information on electronic billing and other processes; and
  • Requires the protection and confidential handling of protected health information

The HIPAA language uses the terms ‘required’ and ‘addressable’. Required (R) means that the given standard is mandatory and, therefore, must be complied with. Addressable (A) means that the given standards must be implemented by the organization unless assessments and in depth risk analysis conclude that implementation is not reasonable and appropriate specific to a given business setting. Important Note: Addressable does not mean optional.

HIPAA applies to “PHI” (Protected Health Information).  This is information that identifies who the health-related information belongs to  i.e. names, email addresses, phone numbers, medical record numbers, photos, drivers license numbers, etc.

There are 4 rules that you will need to dissect.

  • HIPAA Privacy Rule
  • HIPAA Security Rule
  • HIPAA Enforcement Rule
  • HIPAA Breach Notification Rule

The Privacy Rule requires Business Associates to do the following:

  • Do not allow any impermissible uses or disclosures of PHI.
  • Provide breach notification to the Covered Entity.
  • Provide either the individual or the Covered Entity access to PHI.
  • Disclose PHI to the Secretary of HHS, if compelled to do so.
    Provide an accounting of disclosures.
  • Comply with the requirements of the HIPAA Security Rule.

The Security Rule is made up of 3 parts.

  • Technical Safeguards
  • Physical Safeguards
  • Administrative Safeguards

There are 5 standards listed under the Technical Safeguards section.

  1. Access Control
  2. Audit Controls
  3. Integrity
  4. Authentication
  5. Transmission Security

There are 4 standards in the Physical Safeguards section.

  1. Facility Access Controls
  2. Workstation Use
  3. Workstation Security
  4. Device and Media Controls

There are 9 standards under the Administrative Safeguards section.

  1. Security Management Process
  2. Assigned Security Responsibility
  3. Workforce Security
  4. Information Access Management
  5. Security Awareness and Training
  6. Security Incident Procedures
  7. Contingency Plan
  8. Evaluation
  9. Business Associate Contracts and Other Arrangements

The Enforcement Rule sets civil money penalties for violating HIPAA rules and establishes procedures for investigations and hearings for HIPAA violations

According to the HHS website (www.hhs.gov), the following lists the issues that have been reported according to frequency:

  • Misuse and disclosures of PHI
  • No protection in place of health information
  • Patient unable to access their health information
  • Using or disclosing more than the minimum necessary protected health information
  • No safeguards of electronic protected health information. (www.hhs.gov/enforcement, 2013)

The most common entities found to be required to take corrective action in order to be in voluntary compliance according to HHS are listed by frequency:

  • Private Practices
  • Hospitals
  • Outpatient Facilities
  • Group plans such as insurance groups
  • Pharmacies (hhs.gov/enforcement, 2013)

 Breach Notification Rule

The HIPAA Breach Notification Rule, 45 CFR §§ 164.400-414, requires HIPAA covered entities and their business associates to provide notification following a breach of unsecured protected health information. Similar breach notification provisions implemented and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), apply to vendors of personal health records and their third party service providers, pursuant to section 13407 of the HITECH Act.

As a part of breach notification requirements business associates must notify covered entities if a breach occurs at or by the business associate

  • Individual Notice
  • Media Notice
  • Notice to Secretary

 References – Sources 

 

Articles, Cloud

IAAS PUBLIC Cloud Price comparison

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Recently I was suggested to provide information on the comparative cloud pricing mainly for the cloud as virtual host.  Its a tedious effort to obtain the similar cloud configuration as almost all cloud provider have different cloud configuration techniques for defining cloud resources in terms of CPU, Memory and Storage.  So I chose to go with the most common and bare minimum cloud configuration available across most of the cloud providers. ( excluded other factors as Load Balancer, Network Rate, Security, I/O Rate, VPN etc)

The below comparison is classified as cloud providers in US,  and Cloud Providers in India. For some of the known cloud providers it was not possible to obtain the cloud pricing for the common cloud configuration so have been excluded from the comparison. Also in some cases, some approximated pricing calculated ( like for IBM cloud, there is no SSD storage as a configuration available).

Public Cloud Comparison
Public Cloud Comparison

The source of calculation is obtained from the below cloud provider price calculator links.

Cloud Price Calculation Resources
Cloud Price Calculation Resources

 

Articles, Datacenter

IT Infrastructure Challenges and way forward

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IT Infrastructure ChallengesTypical IT Infrastructure challenges maintaining existing or building new IT Infrastructure setup are

Budgetary constraint

Reduced cost of owning IT Infrastructure is the primary goal of any business. IT cost control is further analyzed in the areas of

  • Skillful assessment of existing state of IT Infrastructure 
  • Analyzing  utilization of existing IT resources vs requirement and consolidating or reducing IT footprints.
  • Analyzing man power resource vs requirements
  • Cost control over fixed and recurring expenses.  
  • Analyzing the areas of automation
  • Dedicated capacity vs shared or cloud based managed virtual infrastructure
  • Analyzing the areas of IT energy waste.      

Availability/Uptime

Next on the business priority is to ensure the availability of IT Infrastructure components. Ensuring the availability and continuity of the business is a challenge due to below areas of concerns

    Hardware availability

  •                  Network – Ensuring each and every component of network have redundancy set and the network backbone support any failover with the least or zero impact to the Infrastructure services. 
  •                  Storage – Ensuring local or SAN or NAS based storage have raid, mirroring, replication, cloning, snapshot components are configured to ensure the data integrity and availability.
  •                  Server – Ensure all the components of the server are at least dual redundant, be it I/O controllers, power, Redundant ports, redundant local storage or redundant CPU to support the server availability.

Above three components ( Server, network and storage) become more challenging with Disaster Recovery solution in place due to the business uptime requirements. Datacenters are therefore certified with

  • Tier I – Single non redundant distribution paths, 99.671% availability allows 28.817 hours of downtime
  • Tier II – Redundant site capacity, with 99.741% availability and allows 22.688 hours of downtime.
  • Tier III – Multiple distribution availability paths ( dual powered ), with 99.982% availability and allows 1.5768 hours of downtime
  • Tier IV – Alongwith T3, HVAC systems are multi powered, with 99.995% availability and 26.28 min or .438 hours of unavailability.

    Software availability

OS Clustering: Operating system based cluster solutions ensure that in the event of unavailability or failure of any active node, the running services are failed over to the other good node. All host based/OS based clustering solutions are active/active. Cross site ( Geo ), clustering is setup for the Disaster recovery configuration.

Application clustering: Using application servers, web servers for active/active availability is achieved by using software based clustering solutions.

Monitoring: – All kinds of monitoring solution support the assurance of IT Infrastructure. Both software and hardware monitoring ensures required hardware and software components are monitored for faults or crossing the set threshold values.  Subsequently alerts are generated and sent to the concerned team ( Helpdesk/L2 or L3) support for further action.

Storage and network multipath: This ensures that at the OS level, both network and storage components are configured have redundancy . For network its called IP Multipathing or IP Bonding and for Storage its named as I/O Multipathing ( MPXIO ).

Backup:  As a part of data availability, routine backup should be in place to ensure the recovery of business data in case disasters. 

Consolidation 

Consolidation is already mentioned as a components drive to help reducing existing hardware footprint. Consolidation exercise should be performed with after detailed risk analysis. This also requires to ensure all business stakeholders are taken into confidence before performing any consolidation exercise. Consolidation of IT assets are classified further below

  • DC site consolidation – By reducing the number of datacenters, spanned through multiple geographies, wherever possible.
  • Hardware consolidation – Consolidation of hardware assets such as racks, cables, servers, storage, network components either by shutting down unused capacity or using virtualization/cloud to optimize the usage. Using pool offering than dedicated procurement allows consolidation and optimum use of IT resources.
  • Software consolidation – Analyze and consolidate unused or not required software services. Using virtualization software capability to minimize the software licencing costs.

Security:

It Infrastructure security is becoming more and more crucial requirement for the business, especially in the verticals of defense, finance or healthcare. To support data security, the IT security policies should be in place. Some of the aspects of IT security are

  • Unauthorized hardware and software ports accesses
  • Hardware and/or software based encryption to ensure the secured data transfer.
  • Regular Hardware, OS and software based patching processes
  • Regular scanning for vulnerabilities and viruses
  • Regular risk analysis, and security holes be patched immediately.
  • Security policies adhere to ISMS based information security standards
  • Adhering to required security compliance ( PCI, HIPPA, ISO27001 etc).
  • Physical security policies ( like CCTV, Entry Gate passes, visitors sign, assets in and out records, different levels of security checks at Datacenter, security practices cascaded to every employee, vendors are bound to security guidelines etc ). 

Outdated /Legacy Technologies

There are two aspects to outdated or legacy technologies. First they produce risks to the existing IT and  to the business and second legacy hardware or software increase the overall cost of support, consume more power and require expert skilled resources. So both hardware and software components should be renewed to ensure the business availability and reduced cost.

Provisioning Time

This is also addressed as a part of challenge for both hardware and software builds in terms of TCO. IT Infrastructure provisioning process should be automated to ensure the quicker availability and reduced cost of man hour efforts. Cloud based infrastructure makes is more optimum to utilize the capacity of existing hardware and software components. 

Scalability

IT Infrastructure scalability been challenges till the standalone hardware was the only choice of setting up IT Infrastructure. Since the concept of shared services, first virtualization and now cloud based infrastructure services ensure the up or down scaling of infrastructure needs.

IT Energy waste:

Green IT is the need or hour and a definitely challenge for all organizations to implement, due to the cost required to support this. Although modern data centers have adopted new technologies to reduce energy footprints and using alternate sources of energy. 

Dedicated vs Shared Infrastructure 

Most of the organization still hold a good amount of standalone infrastructure resources due to multiple factor. Be it due to the business application needs, or compliance related concerns or just a typical inter business clashes to not share the infrastructure.  Although due to the business need to reduce the hardware footprint, infrastructure should be on a shared platform, unless and until there are some serious compliance concerns. 

Automaton

Automation helps reducing the man hour efforts and overall cost of supporting IT Infrastructure. Implementation of Cloud based technologies are known for automation starting from procurement to the end of life of cloud. Other areas of automation for development and operational support of the organization also helps in ensuring the availability of the business.

 

Articles, Cloud

Operating Model: IAAS Cloud Computing

Cloud model of Infrastructure services is targeted to ensure reduced CapEx, lower OpEx through automation, higher up time and flexibility. Transition to the cloud model often requires an evolution in plan, build and operating model based on roles, skills, processes, and organizational structure. Operating model for the cloud based infrastructure require a middle layer of cloud experts ( SMEs, Leads, Architects) .  At a very high level, private cloud operating model can be layered in areas

  • Cloud Business Analytic and Planning – Formed by CIO, CTO, Enterprise Architects, Business Analysts, and Cloud SMEs. The goal of this team is to do a detailed assessment of cloud requirements.  A typical vision phase of TOGAF, that defines the business goals from existing to future model and prepare GAP analysis.
  • Cloud Architecture – Formed by having a team of Enterprise Architects, Capacity Analysts, Cloud SMEs, Cloud Leads etc. Team at this level will be engaged with the technology architecture by studying business goals( in terms of TCO and RIOs). Cloud Architecture team will prepare the Cloud Design based on the business goals as set at previous level.
  • Cloud Build – A team who is responsible to the design the implementation of the cloud infrastructure. This will include Cloud SME, Cloud Architect, System Administrators, Network Administrator, Storage Administrator, Vendor Manager, Client Engagement Manager – to estimate existing and growth of Infrastructure needs.
  • Cloud Run  – Cloud Operation Team, who will look into the day to day operation of clouds, reclaim and modification requirements. This will be a a team of combination of Cloud Admin, System Admin, Network and Storage Admin for day to day operation activities. Additionally looking into the capacity usage versus future growth using monitoring capabilities.
  • Cloud Governance services –  ITSM based service model for cloud such as Cloud Service Catalog , Change Mgmt, Incident Mgmt, Configuration Mgmt, Problem Mgmt Service Level Mgmt ensuring right level of SLAs are defined. Governance model also ensures Data Security through compliance, info security, availability ( through HA and DR) and business continuity analysis.
Articles, Cloud

Cloud Computing – FAQs

Q. What is cloud computing? I am a Non-IT person and have no clues about cloud computing.

Ans:  As per the wikipedia definition, “Cloud computing is the delivery of services of the computing a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computersand other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet). Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid“.

Sounds too long definition to understand? Lets start with the understanding the source of IT resources like computer, storage and network. Its called Datacenter which is a dedicated secured and highly available IT Site/Sites/Rooms/Rooms with temperature control and required heat flow, having bunch of running computers/servers stacked together in racks, connected using networking and storage components and to achieve specific business needs using business driven applications installed on these servers.

Traditionally, when a requirement for compute resource would arise,  end user had no or very minimal control over procuring required resources. The requirement had to go via approval process to the systems administrators and followed through procurement and build process and once built with required storage, network and security requirements hand over to the end user for application deployment. This had challenge due to lead time of procurement and build process ( sometimes 1-2 months ).

Lets understand other challenges in building new or manage existing Datacenter with no cloud model in place.

  • Need  floor space for setting up small/mid or large scale datacenter
  • Manage cost of all Datacenter requirements ( like power, cooling, racks, cabling, servers, storage, networking devices etc )
  • Manage and day to day operational support expenses for datacenter operation
  • Manage vendor support and license costs
  • Manage cost of provisioning, decommissioning, monitoring and backup solutions.
  • Manage security, vulnerability scan, antivirus products and support cost
  • Manage the cost of PCs/Computers/Storage/Servers and Networking based software products and licensing.
  • Manage expenses on Operating System, Database and Application development or proprietary software
  • Manage infrastructure tiers as a part of product development cycle ( Dev, Test, UAT, Pre Prod, Prod )
  • Buy additional capacity for setting up Disaster Recovery solutions.
  • For redundant and scalable infrastructure, will need purchase additional hardware ( like CPU, Memory, HDD, I/O PCI cards etc), allow downtime of your running system (server, computer) and then fix it ( only if you know how to add otherwise pay to the respective vendor to get this done).
  • Time consuming server provisioning processes ( Plan, Order, Approval, Availability Lead time and then delivery ).
  • Unable to seamless scale up or scale down as per the requirements
  • Once hardware is bought will be up and running till the end of life whether not or partially used. That mean wastage of floor space, power, cooling and rack space size.
  • Another big challenge comes from old legacy hardware, which are not under support. It costs much more to support EOL hardware than buying new one.
  • Availability comes as biggest challenge in maintaining datacenter with no cloud functionality

Now on top of above challenges, think of a business case where client is a startup business or small ISV, is setting up a new business and not sure about the long term impact on such investments, above expenses may turn to be a complete disaster.

Instead what if all Infrastructure components like Servers, Storage, Network, Application offered to the clients as hosted services? Like you provide a web/app based portal to end user to define their requirements, and once they submit the requirement form, the required host/storage/application/database or network bundled services setup and started as expected. Also, as per their needs end user would like to see further flexibility on

  1. Easy scaling of computing resource needs ( scale up or down )
  2. Elastic in nature
  3. Should be charged as per the services bought
  4. Should be highly available
  5. Should be monitored
  6. Should be automated as  a part of managed services
  7. Should be able to decommission anytime with no extra hassle.

To address above solution is a cloud model. So basically you think of Cloud as a

  • Managed virtual computer (instances), which is served as “on-demand” and easy and quick provisioning
  • Offered as “Pay as you use” model ( Public ) or Charge back model ( Private cloud )
  • Automation for provisioning, modifying, decommissioning, backup, high availability, monitoring
  • Independently priced computing resources ( like CPU, Memory, Storage, Networking, Software,Application etc )
  • Can be easily expanded or reduced ( elasticity)
  • No infrastructure management and operations support cost ( In case of Public Cloud)
  • Provides disaster recovery and backup offerings these virtual hosts ( with minimum downtime )
  • Accessible to from anywhere. ( Public Cloud )
  • Third party managed infrastructure services ( Public Cloud )

Q. What are different types of cloud computing solutions

Ans: Cloud computing are commonly defined as below types

  • Infrastructure as a service (IAAS)
  • Platform as a service (PAAS) and
  • Software as a service (SAAS)

Although some new definitions on the cloud computing models are also coming up as Storage as a service, Network as a service, Database as a service, Desktop as a service etc.

Q. What are different models of cloud computing ?

Ans: Cloud computing can be adopted for Private, Public or Hybrid model.

Private cloud computing is mostly adopted by organization restricted by compliance and regulatory governance. In private cloud, company still owns and manages  the back-end infrastructure but utilize them optimally by adopting cloud methodology and reducing time to provision a cloud service and other cloud offerings.

For Public Cloud Computing, the infrastructure services are accessed via internet based cloud hosting providers and charged on “Pay as you” model with different resource models. Public cloud computing is commonly used by  non business critical or small and medium size business.

Hybrid Cloud Computing is something which is hybrid model of Public and Private cloud solutions. Mostly adopted Cloud model is used by Enterprises to bring IT Infrastructure under cloud control, mixed with critical and non critical business requirements..

Q. Can I fulfill all IT requirements public cloud based solutions rather than setting up local IT Infrastructure?

Ans. This is something, that requires further consulting to understand what your business priorities are. If your priorities are to reduce the TCO of your company IT spend, reduce of pain of company managed Infrastructure operation and support and compliance and governance ( specially adhering to shared platform model) are not in priority list then Public Cloud Computing can certainly help you define a model which allows you to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your IT Infrastructure. For example you are a Start Up , and need computing resources as playground areas to try and test the product you plan to launch. So instead of buying servers/desktops and setting up your own IT Infrastructure/Datacenter, you rather go for cloud based infrastructure and other software services, use them, if it all goes well, carry on further with services otherwise you can stop services. For more detailed consulting for specific requirements send your request for consultation by clicking on Contact  .

Q. What are the benefits of using cloud computing in my IT Infrastructure?

Depending upon the type of cloud computing solution ( Public, Private or Hybrid ), cloud computing comes as larger plus as against having own Datacenter or Managed services. Below are the list of Cloud Computing based solutions.

  1. First and foremost reduced cost is one of the most important benefit. Cloud model allow customer to buy or stop infrastructure services as and when needed as “Pay per use”.
  2. Cloud solution provides scalability of computing resources. They are elastic in nature, which means, as and when needed resources can be added or reduced.
  3. Multi-tenancy , in terms of capability of having multiple operating system based Infrastructure is another advantage.
  4. Reduced time to provision an Infrastructure. Where provisioning of a server may take 3-4 weeks of time starting from procurement of hardware to racking, patching, networking, storage allocation to host build process, cloud instance can be provisioned in minutes with the click of few buttons.
  5. No Infrastructure operational and support costs
  6. And accessible from anywhere as this is completely internet based service.

Q. Are there challenges using cloud computing?

Ans: Yes there are, but not for every situation. Some common challenges are

  • Due to shared services, or multi tenancy nature of cloud, if your data need to adhere to certain compliance or local governing standards, then cloud solution could be challenging
  • The other challenge is Data security. Although now a days most of the cloud provider are providing additional level of security with add on Firewall and VPN based services, still there are challenges to Data Encryption or Data communication from Client to the cloud providers.
  • Another challenge is the complete control of Datacenter Infrastructure lying with vendor. First is you are locked to the Infrastructure services and offerings provided by the vendor.
  • SLA and KPA should be carefully and clearly stated and defined for cloud services, like in case of unavailability of services or data breach as a part of contract of agreements.
  • For some customer data location matters ( although this is against cloud computing principles ). Local governance is one of such example, which restrict data residing on other geographical location than permitted.
  • Although cloud computing is meant to reduce the cost of ownership of IT Infrastructure, this cloud be challenging and need due diligence to analyze the effective cost benefits by cloud  or migrating existing Infrastructure to cloud model. Remember cloud model is “Pay as you” for every infrastructure and software services, so you spend hourly, daily, monthly or yearly basis ( based on the contract with cloud provider) for every bit of service ( CPU, Memory, Storage, Network, Disk,  OS, VPN, Firewalls, DR, Monitoring, Backup).
  • Other aspects of cost of ownership of cloud model is like to increase due to charge back model. If this model is not carefully implemented, there are likely chances of overhead of cost.
  • Some compliance demand Datacenter audit reports and as the entire control of Datacenter lies with the service provider, this could a big challenge if there is a breach of compliance.
  • In a cloud model for IAAS based cloud computing, unit of CPU is measured as vCPU, which is a fraction of core or a full core.  So the challenging part is none of the public cloud provider provide CPU speed . This is mainly due to the nature of cloud computing infrastructure, as back-end hardware could be a mix of different CPU blades/servers.  Having said that it cloud produce challenges where workload analysis is done based on CPU speed being one of the core factor. Also initial budgeting of Infrastructure compute resource does require matching CPU speed with vendor defined or previously available bench-marking reports. So by not mentioning CPU speed, it will be difficult to understand how many cloud instances or what power should be bought.
  • Cloud is not a right choice for high computing based workloads or in other words, vertically scaling up requirements. Cloud solutions are best suited for horizontally scale compute resources.

Q. What is the current state of Cloud Computing in India?

Ans. India is definitely a growing business and there are plenty of opportunities in India. As per the report published by Gartner estimates that in India alone the market for cloud-based services will rise by a third to $557 million this year, and more than triple by 2018.  Having said that so far only 2-5% of total IT Infrastructure is under cloud infrastructure.

Q.  Which is the right kind cloud computing model out of Public, Private or Hybrid for our organization?

Ans: There is no straight answer to this.  This will need a detailed consulting engagement to understand different business needs and accordingly align them to different models of cloud computing. Non business critical environments are the first and easy target to move to Public cloud. Although Production/Live environment can also move to cloud model, as far as they are not breaching agreed compliances. If there is a restrictions due to geographical based data compliance, then Private cloud will be a better choice. Most of the organization though choose to have Hybrid cloud model, which allows them to avail balanced use of both cloud computing solutions.

 Q. Any information of cloud providers in India?

Ans. There are plenty of cloud provider in India.

Below is the list of some well known India hosted cloud solutions providers

              CtrlS, BSNL, Tata Telecommunications, IBM India, Net4, Reliance, Salesforce India, Netmagic, Go4Hosting, Mictonova, Rioch, WebWerks.

Additionally, other internationally known cloud solutions provider

             Amazone (AWS), Dimension Data, Salesforce, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Apple Cloud Storage etc.

For further comparative study based consulting on these cloud providers, connect via clicking Contact .

 

Cloud, Datacenter

Data Center and Cloud Computing in India

Data Center and Cloud Computing in India

Opportunities & Challenges

The rapid growth in the Datacenter and cloud solutions and services in India there is an expected high demand for the cloud based solutions. “A report published by IT research and advisory firm Gartner estimates that in India alone the market for cloud-based services will rise by a third to $557 million this year, and more than triple by 2018. “

Gartner Says India IT Infrastructure Spending to Reach $2 Billion in 2015 and India Will Be The Second Largest Market For Data Center Infrastructure In Asia/Pacific

Focusing growing IT Infrastructure requirements in India, it makes sense to provide solutions and consultancy on the challenges coming through. This spans through

  • Data Center Services
  • Introducing Cloud Computing Solutions to small, mid and enterprise scale IT Infrastructure requirements.

It is not very encouraging though that India stands 29th, as per 2013 Datacenter Risk Index used for Global Investment Decisions created by Cushman & Wakefield LLP, Hurleypalmerflatt and Source8 based research study. This index was created against multiple factors attributing to Datacenter Uptime. Some of these areas are Energy Costs, Internet Bandwidth, Water Supply, Natural Disasters, Education ( specific to IT Education), Energy Security, GDP PER CAPITA and Inflation. “The retail data centre market has continued to grow with operators beginning to build out larger Tier-III facilities. The opportunities for growth are substantial but the ease of doing business is still a barrier. Power security still remains a significant risk stemming from the lack of diversity of energy imports and increasing reliance on imported oil making it still the highest risk country in the APAC region. However despite these challenges, the perspective remains that long-term India will be an attractive investment opportunity.” Says the research. When it comes to Cloud Adoptions, like any country Cloud Computing, the terminology is becoming popular in India as well, although in the real life, this has not yet been well adopted in India. As per the study, even with the growing demands, so far only 2-5% of IT requirements in India have been fulfilled through cloud computing solutions. Since the inception of Cloud Computing, specially for Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), IT requirements have taken a completely different shape of looking at IT Infrastructure as a service.  SAAS form of cloud has been there since the birth of email services over the public network. As a last note in this Blog is to know the beneficiaries of the public based Cloud Infrastructure offerings. A mid or small scale startup, vendors or ISVs who

  • Are not sure about the scale of their business growth and would like to use the cloud capabilities.
  • Are not sure about the life of a particular product and unable to define infrastructure reusable capabilities, so use cloud.
  • Need elasticity of the Infrastructure resources as and when needed, which allows them to take a call on infrastructure design
  • Need cheaper and “Pay as you go” model allowing customers to only pay for required operational IT infrastructure resources for a given capacity and time.
  • Need to reduce the time to procure Infrastructure resources from days to hours.
  • Need to reclaim the unused capacity or due to the end of product lifecycle

Till date not many Data-centers based in India, are providing services for public hosting and cloud solutions. Some of the Data-center Hosting and Co-Location Services providers listed below.

Company

Website

Offerings 

CtrlS

 http://www.ctrls.in Datacenter Hosting and Public Cloud Offerings. All datacenters are Tier IV certified

BSNL

 http://www.bsnlcloud.com/pages/index.asp Datacenter Hosting and Public Cloud Offerings

Netmagic Solutions

 http://www.netmagicsolutions.com Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Private Cloud, Pre-Provisioned Servers, Colocation and Hosting solutions. SAP Certified

Reliance

 http://www.relianceidc.com/HTML/index.html Colocation, Hosting and Cloud Computing.

Go4hosting

 http://www.go4hosting.in/ Dedicated Hosting, Cloud Computing, VPS Hosting, Colocation, Disaster Recovery Services,

Net4

 http://www.net4.in/aspx/general/company-info.aspx Data Centre & Cloud Hosting Solutions, Enterprise Internet Services, VoIP Solutions, Enterprise Messaging & Hosting Solutions and Domain name registration

Airtel

 http://www.airtel.in/aes/home/Data+Center+Services Managed Hosting, Storage  and Colocation

Tata Telecommunications

 http://microsites.tatacommunications.com/providers/datacenter/ Colocation, Managed Hosting and Storage

Micronova

 http://micronova.in/ Colocation, Cloud VPS, Dedicated Servers and Hosting Solutions. ISO 27001 Certified

Ricoh

 https://www.ricohidc.com/about-ricoh.html Dedicate Server, Virtual Private Server, Cloud Server, Managed Service, Co-Location Service, Email Hosting And Disaster Recovery. ISO 27001

WebWerks

 http://www.web-werks.com/ Dedicated Servers, Cloud Hosting, VPS and Co-location Services.

Sify

 http://datacentre.sify.com/datacentre-home.html Hosting and Colocation, Tier III Datacenter Certified by “Uptime Institute”

Strad Solutions

 http://www.stradsolutions.com/ Dedicated, VPS and CO-LOCATION Web Hosting Solutions