(2 June 2010 9:10 pm)

NEW DELHI: Cloud computing is the best way to beat piracy of computer software which affects 65 per cent of the aggregate software market.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steven A Ballmer said this was because unlike other programmes that required use of DVDsetc., intellectual property was interwoven with the software and therefore could not be copied.

This would also help entertainment devices in protection of intellectual property, he said.

Ballmer was addressing a press meet to underline the importance of India in its overall cloud services strategy and announce the launce of Windows Azure.

Cloud services are estimated to create 300,000 jobs in India. NIIT is launching a training programme and Microsoft has also tied up with Cognizant who have developed solutions to enable implementation, CDC Software who has rolled out the Cloud versiojn of CDC Response, and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore which is launching an application on Azure to study resource allocation constructs.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.

It supports multiple languages and integrates with existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid.

It is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server that preceded it in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.