TRAI asks Regulations on the Growing Cloud Computing in India
Soon after Twitter’s co-founder Evan William’s account got hacked and reports saying hackers might have used malware to collect more than 32 million Twitter login credentials.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has shown active concerns on the growing adoption of cloud computing. As businesses helming towards big data storage and other third-party software processes, TRAI has proposed regulating this segment of industry inviting comments from stakeholders. The Indian telecom body in its recent consultation paper asked questions on “what regulatory provisions may be mandated so that a customer is able to have control over his data while moving it in and out of the cloud”.
The proposed also puts Security aspects, mechanisms for customer complaints, metering re-verification of cloud services among the vital regulations.
It also sought opinions about the quality of services parameters based on which the performance of different cloud service providers could be measured for different service models.
The paper also asserts on the steps government should take to promote cloud computing in e-governance projects, establishment of data centres in India, encourage business and private organisations to utilise cloud services and to boost Digital India and Smart Cities incentive using cloud.
“Should there be a dedicated cloud for government applications? To what extent should it support a multi-tenant environment and what should be the rules regulating such an environment? It also touched upon the legal aspects relating to cloud computing.
The law of the users’ country may restrict cross-border transfer or disclosure of certain information. “How can the client be protected in case the cloud service provider moves data from one jurisdiction to another and a violation takes place? What disclosure guidelines need to be prescribed to avoid such incidents?”
“What policies, systems and processes are required to be defined for information governance framework in cloud, from lawful interception point of view and particularly if it is hosted in a different country?”
Cloud Computing has four attributes — data intensive, resource pooling, scalability and rapid elasticity and On demand access. It can be operated in one of the four deployment models — public cloud, private cloud, community cloud and hybrid cloud.
Cloud computing accounted for about 33 per cent of the total IT expenditure in 2015 across the world. Analysts project that from 2013 to 2018, the cloud computing market will grow at a 9.7 percent annual rate. Also, by 2019, cloud IT infrastructure spending is expected to be $52 billion, or 45 per cent of total IT infrastructure spending.
The sector regulator has asked stakeholders to send their written comments by July 8 and counter-comments by July 22.
