A new study conducted by Accenture and WSP Environment & Energy has found that organizations that opt for running business applications on the cloud can help reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by a net 30% or even more compared to running those same applications on their own infrastructure. And in case of a small firm opting for cloud computing, the benefits are even more: the net energy and carbon savings can be more than 90%, says the study.

That should make a lot of small companies in India sit up and take note of the benefits of switching to cloud computing. Already, more than 50 cloud computing service providers are working in the Indian market. Indian internet services providers (ISPs) and data centre service providers such as Bharti Airtel, Sify, Trimax and NetMagic are investing in bandwidth and facilities to support new cloud service offerings.

Again, the biggies of Indian IT like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, HCL, Mahindra Satyam and others are developing cloud computing applications and solutions for verticals ranging from financial services and banking to manufacturing. “Cloud computing has opened new avenues for the industry to evolve and experiment. Being a low cost, highly efficient and extremely flexible application, it has provided the relatively smaller companies to move to the scale and robustness of larger companies. As the industry is dealing with supply constraints, the shift towards the paradigm of ‘Cloud’ is apparent and vital,” Infosys Technologies CEO and managing director K Gopalakrishnan commented recently at the All India Management Association conference.

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