We have come to the conclusion that the positives of cloud far outweigh negatives. The question is not whether we should adapt cloud or not, the discussion today is what kind of cloud we should adapt: government cloud or public cloud or private cloud. There are no straight answers. This decision will largely rest on application and service. And parameters like how critical is the application and how sensitive is the data this application is handling.
There are various open issues of privacy, security and jurisdiction which need to be addressed before using public cloud.
Another issue is the IT procurement, which needs to be aligned to the cloud setup. Today for each project, we are buying different hardware. There has to be a structure which oversees all kinds of IT procurement in the country. Another issue is that various applications which can be replicated in different states/departments should be based on cloud architecture.