In an interview with TimesTech, Hemant Agrawal, CTO of Netweb Technologies, shares insights into the booming private cloud market. He discusses how Netweb’s Skylus platform empowers enterprises with scalable, secure, and AI-ready cloud infrastructure, tailored for India’s evolving digital ecosystem.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: The private cloud market is projected to reach USD 35.2 billion by 2030. What are the key factors driving this surge, and how is Netweb positioning itself to capitalize on this growth?
Hemant: The key factors driving the growth of the private cloud market are increasing desire for Control and Customization of the exiting IT infrastructure, Enhanced Security and Data Protection, Scalability and Flexibility, Digital Transformation Initiatives, Integration with Legacy Systems and Regulatory Compliance. The rapid adoption of private cloud has helped to address the above concerns of businesses.
Netweb is well-positioned to capitalize on this growth through its Skylus private cloud platform with HCI capabilities. Skylus combines compute, network and storage in a single software-defined platform, simplifying deployment and management. One of its compelling aspects is support for containerized, VM-based, and bare-metal workloads – making it a natural choice for use cases such as Business-critical Applications, Data Center Consolidation, Edge Computing, Containers and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). So, with in-built orchestration, high availability and data protection, Skylus empowers enterprises to run critical workloads securely within their own data centers or edge environments – bridging the gap between agility and control. Furthermore, Skylus private cloud usage spans many industries such as Healthcare, Manufacturing, BFSI, IT & Telecommunications, Government, Retail, Media & Entertainment, etc.
To cap it all, Skylus cloud instances can be created and managed by users and organizations leveraging and taking advantage of the broad software stack, which includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Omniverse, Skylus.ai, KubytsHub and KubytsFlow. This stack introduces cloud instance autonomy leveraging hundreds of pre-compiled/trained frameworks – models, and development tools to structure the development, training and deployment process over AI cloud. This will play a substantial and essential role in Generative AI, large-scale agentic AI and physical AI workloads, helping users to scale across hundreds and thousands of nodes in an AI cloud.
TimesTech: Data security and compliance are top concerns for organizations today. How do Netweb’s private cloud solutions address evolving regulations like GDPR and HIPAA while ensuring enterprise-grade security?
Hemant: Considering there is no officially recognized HIPAA compliance certification for software, as any certification only confirms a software solution has incorporated all of the required safeguards to meet the requirements of HIPAA Rules.
Key requirements include secure user authentication, access controls, data encryption, audit logging, and data integrity controls. Additionally, robust security measures for transmission and storage, including encryption and secure protocols like SSL/TLS, are essential.
Netweb’s private cloud – Skylus adopts a holistic, layered security model that not only addresses the technical safeguards (encryption, access control) but also the procedural and governance frameworks. The combination of secure architecture, policy enforcement, and continuous monitoring helps organizations mitigate risk and remain compliant required to meet regulatory obligations such as GDPR and HIPAA.
TimesTech: Hybrid cloud adoption is on the rise. How does Netweb’s Skylus platform enable seamless integration between private and public cloud environments, and what advantages does this bring to businesses?
Hemant: Hybrid cloud enterprises have been on the rise for enterprises seeking agility without trade-off on the control. Netweb’s Skylus platform is flexible enough to accommodate seamless integration between private and public cloud environments for HPC, AI and other workloads, leveraging capabilities such as cloud bursting, policy-based orchestration and dynamic resource scaling. Private clouds such as Skylus allow organizations to run workloads primarily on their private cloud and automatically burst into public clouds such as Azure or AWS during peak demands.
This hybrid model empowers businesses with elastic scaling, cost optimization, business continuity, agility, reduced infrastructure complexity and disaster recovery without a massive investment in on-premises infrastructure. By blending the reliability of private infrastructure with the flexibility of public cloud, Skylus positions businesses to support modern HPC, AI, and enterprise workloads while optimizing total cost of ownership and accelerating innovation.
TimesTech: Many SMEs hesitate to adopt private cloud solutions due to high initial costs and infrastructure complexity. How is Netweb overcoming these barriers and making private cloud more accessible to them?
Hemant: Many SMEs are reluctant about adopting private cloud solutions due to perceived high upfront costs and complexity in set up and management. However, this is not entirely true. Even the adoption of public cloud can be a costly affair.
Nevertheless, Netweb addresses the challenges of high initial costs through its Skylus Edge Cloud offering – a compact, cost-effective private cloud appliance tailored for SMEs. Designed with simplicity, scalability and affordability in mind, the Skylus Edge Cloud Package encompasses the core building blocks required to launch a private cloud environment without the need for a large-scale data center. The customer can start small from a few nodes and then scale further to the Skylus Enterprise Cloud Package as the business grows.
The Edge Cloud package includes integrated compute, storage, and networking, in-built virtualization and container orchestration, centralized management dashboard, pre-installed cloud operating system, and support for VM, Kubernetes workloads.
Netweb plug & play appliance eliminates the need for complex infrastructure planning and enables quick deployment, helping SMEs transition to a modern IT environment with minimal investment. With flexible scalability, high availability, and automated updates, Skylus Edge Cloud makes private cloud adoption not just feasible, but practical for small and growing businesses.
TimesTech: What are the biggest challenges you see in the current server market when it comes to delivering scalable and secure private cloud infrastructure, and how is Netweb addressing them?
Hemant: Delivering scalable and secure private cloud infrastructure is a critical challenge in today’s server market – especially as AI/ML workloads, regulatory scrutiny, and data security demands increase. Organizations need infrastructures that are not only elastic and performant but also hardened against evolving threats.
As customers deploy more AI models, risks are involved for insecure AI deployment. AI models can be reverse engineered or exfiltrated in poorly secured environments. Inference on unprotected data may lead to data leaks or IP loss.
Netweb addresses the server market’s dual mandate – scale and security – by combining AI-optimized infrastructure with enterprise-class private cloud architectures that embrace confidential computing. Confidential computing ensures that data is always encrypted, even during processing, workloads are isolated in secure enclaves, creating a trusted execution environment as well as enterprises can prove compliance and build trust with stakeholders.
As organizations deploy sensitive AI models, the need for secure, controllable environments becomes mission critical. Netweb’s solutions empower enterprises to meet that need without compromising on performance, flexibility, or compliance.
TimesTech: With over two decades at Netweb, how have you seen the company evolve in terms of cloud innovation, and what’s next for the Skylus platform in India’s rapidly transforming digital landscape?
Hemant: Over the past two decades, Netweb has successfully transformed from a hardware-driven enterprise to a leading name in the domain of high-end computing innovation, with a capability to deliver integrated stack solutions empowering businesses across sectors with services such as Cloud Migration, Managed Cloud Services, OpenStack Cloud, HPC on Cloud, Managed Kubernetes and other services. The launch of Skylus, our private cloud platform, marked a pivotal shift – offering enterprises a scalable, secure, and sovereign alternative to public cloud solutions. Built with hyper-converged infrastructure and in-built orchestration, Skylus has enabled organizations to run mission-critical workloads with unmatched control and flexibility.
Looking ahead, Skylus.ai represents the next leap forward. It is a groundbreaking composable GPU aggregation-disaggregation appliance designed to optimize GPU resource management for AI including GenAI workloads. It addresses the critical challenges faced by organizations in utilizing multi-vendor GPU and CPU resources, offering a vendor-agnostic solution that drives faster ideation, fosters collaboration, and accelerates experimentation while optimizing resource utilization and total cost of ownership.
With power packed features that include Automated Workspace Creation, Flexible Scaling (up to 16 nodes), Multiple Storage Protocols (iSCCI, NFS and S3), Integrated and Intuitive Dashboard, RBAC User Management and Direct Access to In-built VM and Container Marketplace, it is ideal to be used for Research & AI labs, Educational Institutions, Healthcare & Genomics, Manufacturing & Industry 4.0, BFSI, Automotive Sector, Aerospace & Defense, Retail & E-commerce, Startups and SMEs.
