Monthly Archives: February 2014

Making a Dent in India’s IT Universe

Mr. Sridhar Reddy, our CMD, presented at a recent event – Convergence India 2014 held at Delhi. He was moderator for the session “Cloud Solutions for Business- Building a successful and secure business on cloud”. The event was covered by many media partners. Communications today was one of them and published excerpts of his presentation as guest column in its February edition.

IT Infrastructure

Brief on CtrlS by Gartner in MQ for Cloud Enabled Managed Hosting

CtrlS Datacenters Ltd.

 

CtrlS Datacenters is a managed hosting provider in India, as well as an early public cloud provider in India. It targets enterprises and the banking and financial services sector. It offers cloud-enabled hosting, with multitenant, single-tenant and customer premises options, as well as related managed services. It also provides colocation services. Its cloud data centers are located in Hyderabad and Mumbai.

Strengths
■ CtrlS has good data center infrastructure. It invests in high-grade data centers, an important requirement in India due to the country’s generally poor infrastructure. It is also expanding its data center coverage outside India to support foreign and local MNCs with inbound and outbound hosting requirements. It has data centers in the U.S. and United Arab Emirates, and it plans to extend its coverage to Singapore and Australia.
■ CtrlS provides high-availability services through its high-grade data centers, multi-availability zones and three-way disaster recovery architecture, with a zero-data-loss guarantee. It also has strong security implementations, with good certifications. It is strong in the banking and financial services sector.
■ CtrlS has strong IT services skills, with experience of supporting secure payments and financial transactions for banking and financial services organizations. It tends to take a solution-led approach, which differentiates it from infrastructure-based players.
■ CtrlS is a good choice for Web business hosting in India, as its cloud platform is built for a public cloud service. It has implemented an automated system for monitoring Internet performance in real time that can automatically divert Web traffic to alternative Internet links in cases of degradation.
■ CtrlS is price-competitive, with a choice of hourly and monthly plans. Pricing is also transparent, as in a typical public cloud service. CtrlS also provides volume discounts for enterprise deals.
■ CtrlS has a well-designed cloud management portal, which is easy to use and offers a good choice of features. Customers also say that CtrlS provides good service quality and is very responsive to their requirements.

Cautions
■ CtrlS is still largely a player in India. It is beginning to expand its presence outside its home country, but most of its staff and skills are still concentrated there.
■ CtrlS is relatively young compared with the large and established players in the Asia/Pacific market. The company is funded by private investors and has been investing heavily to support its growth strategy. It has completed its investments in data centers. Over the next three years, it plans to continue to invest aggressively in IT infrastructure, product development and managed services capabilities. It has secured funding for this investment, supported by its strong revenue growth in the past few years. The outlook for CtrlS is positive, although it needs to mature further to compete in a market dominated by large players.