Private clouds, where companies create a pool of resources using their own infrastructure and provision virtualized services to end users via automated tools, are gaining traction within large enterprise IT environments in the country.

One of the primary reasons that industry experts believe has been a driver for private cloud adoption is the exposure to lesser risk being associated with the private cloud.

“Private cloud model will deliver benefits without much exposure to the downsides. It is a low hanging fruit and has a low risk option as all the applications will be within a company’s firewall and generate cost savings,” says Vishnu Bhatt, VP and Global Head, Cloud, Infosys Technologies.

He adds that a sizeable number of companies in the BFSI, telecom and government space have shown adoption of private clouds over the last year. For Infosys, the cloud model is one of the new verticals of growth and the company has set up a dedicated unit for cloud about a year ago.

According to a study on private cloud landscape in India, released last week by Zinnov Management Consulting for EMC, estimated that private cloud deployments could result in potential savings of up to 50 percent on the IT investments on average, when compared with a legacy IT model, with cost optimization in segments like telecom and networking, hardware, software, internal labour and external IT services.

The report added that the total cloud market in India is currently worth US$ 400 million and will grow ten fold, to reach a market value of US$ 4.5 billion by 2015. Private cloud adoption will dominate and account for US$ 3.5 billion in revenues, growing at over 60 percent. The findings were based on a comprehensive survey of over 100 CIOs and IT decision makers in India across industry verticals conducted during January 2011 to May 2011.

Some enterprises who have already embraced private cloud within their environment include Wipro, iGATE Patni and Fortis Healthcare.

Patni has put nearly 80 percent of its infrastructure needs on a private cloud that helped it reduce its capital expenditure by nearly 30 percent, and saving another 30 percent on lower power consumption.

“The adoption of private cloud will increase as most of the enterprises have already virtualized their infrastructure. The only barrier that we see is the acceptance by various business functions as it may cause some business processes to change,” says Satish Joshi, Executive Vice-President and Head of Product Engineering Services, iGATE Patni. The company is extending its cloud services to its clients, since it also is a Systems Integrator.

According to Sid Deshpande, Senior Research Analyst at Gartner, the government’s initiative to deploy a private cloud model for the Unique Identification (UID) project will be an effort to convince enterprises who continue to be skeptical of the private cloud model.

“UID will emerge as one of the largest private cloud deployments in India. This year we will see an expansion in the extent and scope of usage of private cloud in India, with early adopter best practices and case studies being used to validate the value proposition to more verticals and segments within Indian enterprises,” he says.