IIITM-K has been entrusted with the responsibility to establish a Cloud computing testbed by Information Technology Department, Government of Kerala. Realising the benefits of cloud computing for the e-Governance projects and State Data Centre, Kerala State Information Technology Mission (KSITM) has taken the initiative to set up a Cloud Computing Test-bed at IIITM-K to study the feasibility of setting up a cloud environment for the State Data Centre. Cloud computing infrastructure allows enterprises to achieve more efficient use of their IT hardware and software investments. CDAC Chennai is providing technical consultancy to the project.

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Cloud computing services usually provide common business applications on-line that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers. It is expected that Cloud Computing will help in pooling of computing resources of Government Departments into large clouds thereby increasing utilisation of computing resources effectively. Besides, the self-service nature of cloud computing allows organizations to create elastic environments that expand and contract; based on the workload and target performance parameters.

The Kerala government started a number of e-governance projects to address the services of 39 Government departments, over 122 field Departments and over 30,000 offices spread across the nook and corner of the state. Projects like Personnel and Payroll Management System using SPARK (Service and Payroll Administrative Repository for Kerala) requires huge amount of resources during the peak period of computation at the end of every month and may face problems with poor response time owing to want of resources. Also, applications which require high traffic at certain period and other time kept idle(Examination result announcement) are more suited for a cloud environment. The cloud is futuristic, and a reality now and has become the most exciting development and delivery alternative to arise in the new millennium. Presently, cloud computing is still in the early adopter phase, but will continue to move into mainstream adoption. Today’s unprecedented business and organizational challenges re-thinking decision makers to adopt more flexible and cost-effective mechanisms to achieve their IT and business objectives to achieve in a easy and comfortable way. Cloud, with its economic, green and scalable development and delivery mechanism, will be a gift to organizations and the business benefits are undeniable. Though it may be seen as a threat to hardware manufacturers, nevertheless cloud offers tremendous opportunity in terms of software, services, networking, platforms, infrastructure sharing “on-demand”.

The development of the project will be carried out using open source software toolkit like Eucalyptus, Hadoop, with CDAC open source OS BOSS. BOSS is an operating system developed by C-DAC. Once the testbed is successful, the testing would be done with one of the e-Governance projects.