Cloud computing

Indian Economy glossary

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Also called: Cloud services · Topic: Infrastructure: Transport, Communications and Energy · NCERT: Beyond NCERT

Meaning

Cloud computing means renting computing resources over the internet when you need them, instead of buying and running your own servers. These resources include storage, servers, software and processing power. A user pays only for what they use. So a big upfront cost on machines becomes a regular running cost, and capacity can grow or shrink quickly (this is called scalability). The cloud also offers faster set-up, backup and recovery, and keeps services running if one machine fails. Clouds are grouped in two ways:

  • By who shares them (deployment models): public, private or hybrid.
  • By what is rented (service models): IaaS (rented servers and storage), PaaS (tools to build apps) and SaaS (ready-to-use software).

Example

In 2014, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) launched MeghRaj, the National Cloud Computing Initiative, also called GI Cloud. It lets government departments use shared cloud capacity instead of each department buying its own servers. By September 2026, 2,330 departments were on MeghRaj 2.0, and 30 cloud service providers were empanelled, meaning approved to serve them.

Don't confuse with

  • Data localisation: a rule about where data must be physically stored, for example inside India. Cloud computing is about how computing power is accessed. A cloud can be located in India or abroad.
  • Serverless computing: a type of cloud service where the provider runs the servers for you. The servers still exist; the user just does not manage them.

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