BSNL today formally landed into the domain of Cloud Computing. It has  internet data centres (IDCs) in six Indian cities to offer managed hosting and cloud services in collaboration with IT services provider Dimension Data.
The centres are located in Mumbai, Faridabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Ghaziabad.
“BSNL will offer managed co-location, managed hosting and cloud services through these IDCs built, operated and managed by Dimension Data for BSNL,” the firm said in a statement.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).
“The IDCs will enhance BSNL’s comprehensive service portfolio to meet the communications and IT needs of large medium as well as small business enterprises in India,” Communications Minister Kapil Sibal said, inaugurating the IDC services.
This type of data centre environment allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with easier manageability and less maintenance, and enables IT to more rapidly adjust IT resources (such as servers, storage, and networking) to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand
“It will facilitate various organizations to quickly induct IT enabled services within their organizations without the hassles of setting up and maintaining their own data centres,” he added.
Cloud computing is expected to be the future of information technology and its adoption will be driven by the increasing commitment of the government towards healthcare, education, rural development and other e-governance initiatives.