The debate and discussions on cloud have become more frequent now that more and more organisations are showing their eagerness to move to it. With the announcement of the government cloud service ‘Meghraj’, cloud services have become more accessible than they ever were.

According to Surendra Nath Tripathi, joint secretary, ministry of small and medium scale enterprises (MSME), the government and various stakeholders should now move from a discussion on cloud to a discussion on ease of its use. “We have to look at ease of use of technology which will allow people to adopt it,” he said at the Cloud and Data Centre conclave organised by Governance Now in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Tripathi said that he wanted small and medium industries to also benefit from technology such as the cloud but for that several factors have to come together. “Small industries work with small capitals, which is everything they have. Data hosted on an insecure cloud may lead them to lose their entire business. So it is necessary to look at the customer perspective when designing these services,” he said.

To facilitate maximum ease of use, Tripathi said the ministry of MSME is developing its own cloud service called ‘Badal’ to provide cloud to MSMEs spread all over India. “There are 36 million MSMEs in India which need to adopt cloud services and Badal will spread to them,” he said.

Tripathi said Badal would go the app-store way. “It would be like I-tunes where one can listen to a song and download it. No one is concerned about malwares there. This is how easy to use cloud services should be,” he said.

Dr Nirmaljeel Kalsi, joint secretary, ministry of home affairs, said with the coming of the cloud, implementation of projects have become efficient. “Apps can be hosted on cloud easily and it is great that national informatics centre (NIC) is hosting a number of applications on cloud,” he said.

Bernie Trudle, Cloud chief technology officer (CTO), CISCO, said traffic of data centres which offer cloud services is already greater in 2014 than traffic of traditional data centres. “The traffic they generate is higher in comparative terms even though data centre with cloud services are only two percent of traditional data centres,” he said.