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Businesses today need to be more agile than ever, not only in bringing their products to market, but also in their ability to adapt their sales, pricing, supply chain, and marketing strategy – all in real-time. This cover story gives you an in-depth sense of how to capture the real value of the cloud in order to embrace change and serve evolving enterprise needs through optimizing workloads, maximizing efficiency, and building resilient systems and teams
Whether it is to continue business operations or maintain access to essential needs, the digital economy has played a crucial role in all aspects of our lives. In fact, the last two years of the pandemic gave an opportunity to every industry and sector to re-evaluate their digital transformation journey and take necessary steps and investments to accelerate the pace of adopting digital technologies. Indeed, cloud computing is being seen by many as the next wave of digital technology for individuals, companies, and governments. Due to the WFH and hybrid models, we have seen a domino effect on companies accelerating their cloud initiatives.
Cloud of optimism
As the experts put it, Indian enterprises of all sizes fast-tracked their decisions to shun the legacy infrastructure and move their operations – piecemeal or in full – to the cloud. According to market estimates, nearly 60 percent of the Indian CEOs expect cloud computing to deliver results in the next two years. Further, more than 60 percent of the Indian organizations plan to leverage cloud platforms for digital innovation, as the firms re-strategize their IT spending plans, according to IDC. Organizations continue to rapidly migrate workloads from data centers to the cloud, and the trend has been accelerating during the ongoing Covid pandemic. Studies indicate that 33 percent of organizations are running more than half of their workloads in the cloud today, and that number is set to rise to 56 percent in the next 12–18 months.
The growing traction on the cloud is likely to push public cloud services in India to a market size of $7.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 29.6 percent from 2021. This trend is likely to persist, as virtual work underscores the urgency for scalable, secure, reliable, cost-effective off-premises technology services.
In addition, India’s SMB organizations present a huge untapped opportunity. A recent NASSCOM study indicates that while over 60 percent of the respondents have adopted cloud, nearly 50 percent are still at a nascent stage and only about 15 percent are advanced users. Given the pandemic, SMBs are likely to fast-track cloud adoption, with many skipping the proof-of-concept stage.
Multi-cloud rush
Although most organizations in India have adopted cloud at some stage, the current pandemic forced them to spend more on SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS solutions. In addition, as the pandemic made business agility and flexibility the leading necessities in an organization’s digital transformation process, we have seen accelerated enterprise interest and adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud.
In fact, multi-cloud adoption has emerged as a valuable cloud strategy that is enabling enterprises to become more agile so that they can scale up and down as needed and avoid vendor lock-in. IT managers are distributing workloads across two or more clouds in order to maximize resilience, meet regulatory and compliance requirements, and leverage best-of-breed services from different providers.
Multi-cloud adoption is very much the norm as organizations were found to be operating in an expanded and diverse digital landscape. Almost 71 percent of organizations are pursuing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy as the cloud is the preferred choice for integration of multiple services, scalability, or business continuity reasons. Further, 76 percent of organizations are using two or more cloud providers and hybrid still accounts for more than one-third of the deployments.
While most organizations do not make the jump from on-premises to multi or hybrid-cloud deployments in one go, 63 percent of India’s enterprises ramped up investments in the hybrid cloud compared to just 46 percent globally, according to a recent Nutanix report. As more workloads are migrated to the cloud, the industry is becoming more sensitive to the unique requirements of different processes.
Further, according to IDC’s recent cloud survey, 78 percent of enterprises will have a multi-cloud environment in the next two years, with the use of different on-prem and off-prem cloud environments.
However, while the uptake of multi-cloud architecture has started to gain momentum, not all businesses are sufficiently prepared to implement cloud roadmaps due to data management, migration, and skills-related challenges. In addition, while hybrid and multi-cloud strategies bring flexibility to the organization’s data management strategies, they also introduce new challenges and can create inefficiencies as different cloud environments have different data structures and cloud management consoles, which don’t speak to each other.
Public cloud providers including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and so on take a walled garden approach to the services they provide. Their business model has involved promoting their platforms as one-stop-shops, covering all of an organization’s cloud, data, and compute requirements. In practice, however, the industry is increasingly turning to hybrid or multi-cloud environments, with requirements for infrastructure to be deployed across multiple models.
What this means is that there are growing calls for the big providers to create bridges between their platforms. It will benefit organizations needing to share data and access with partners in their supply chain, which may all be working across diverse applications and data standards. This is also a space where we are likely to see growing levels of innovation from startups, creating services that simplify the process of operating between different public cloud platforms.
Unlocking value from the cloud
Cloud technologies are central to digital acceleration. And the cloud is a fundamental enabler of successful transformation. But cloud adoption alone is insufficient to motivate significant gains in revenue and profitability. The ability to integrate functions and processes, and to enable intelligence and interoperability, is a key determinant in fully exploiting the potential value of the cloud. With the right approach, migration to the cloud can be measured and manageable, while involving minimal transformation work. A cloud solution enables organizations to use an existing data system and to migrate on-premise applications and virtual systems one at a time when you are ready.
Enterprises are witnessing three major changes in their technology outlook over the last two years of the pandemic. The cloud went from good-to-have to an absolute mandate for enterprises. In addition, the cloud is not just restricted to scalable, reliant, and secure infrastructure, it has dramatically transformed the discipline of software engineering, data, and artificial intelligence allowing enterprises to completely reimagine their business processes, supply chain, and customer experience. Further, new technologies like blockchain and Metaverse are going to have a massive impact on enterprises.
“With these three trends, we are seeing a never-before opportunity for enterprises to reinvent their businesses and transform the digital core. Over the last 18 months, there has been a massive transition underway. As per our Cloud Continuum research published recently, about 13-14 percent of enterprises use the cloud not as a cost and efficiency play but as a platform for innovation. These organizations use the cloud infrastructure layer for reliability, scalability, and security. They reimagine data and AI to ask the relevant questions of consumers, they write enterprise applications in a cloud-native manner, and have completely reimagined their customer experiences. The research also showcased that they outperform their peers by about 4-times to 14-times,” details Ajoy Menon, Senior Managing Director & Cloud First Lead, Advanced Technology Centers in India, Accenture.
Highlighting the key steps to ensure success in digital initiatives, four things are really relevant: a big commitment from a cultural standpoint to making the cloud a bedrock of reinvention and having to start from the top; the ability to break the silos and embrace the culture of learning. In addition, it is crucial to understand the customer journey or business processes that we want to change or reinvent. Further, the organization must have the ability to find the right talent to realize its vision and strategy. Moreover, organizations must have to compress their transformation journey; they must stop thinking in terms of months but in days; the pace of change to have a competitive advantage has dramatically shifted to deliver projects really quickly, shares Menon.
Cloud journey towards a truly digital ecosystem
Businesses need to act to improve revenues and profitability, enhance customer experience and secure a bold strategic positioning in the market. In fact, organizations are facing compelling arguments for transforming their businesses, founded on market pressures and digital opportunities.
Kersi Tavadia, CIO, Bombay Stock Exchange, mentions that changing market conditions and customer expectations are forcing organizations to drive digital transformation. “Besides adopting a cloud-first approach, businesses are incorporating AI/ML solutions to deliver customer delight. For organizations like BSE, surveillance on rumors and transactions are extremely crucial where AI/ML algorithms help us monitor and examine social media feeds, news, and audio/video files as well as exchange transactions to check any manipulations in real-time.”
He adds that BSE is the only exchange in the world with a last-mile real-time surveillance system. Kersi further shares that technology is most easy to implement; the toughest part is to change the perception, the people, the culture, and the processes. “More than the technology, it’s about your attitude and aptitude to face the challenge. It’s more crucial to get everyone to move together and accept the change. While change is only constant, it is the most difficult to change.”
Sandeep Bhambure, Managing Director, Veeam Software India & Saarc highlights that while organizations are driving strategies towards a cloud-first approach, there is a sluggishness in the pace of cloud adoption due to a lack of confidence in recovery in case of a disaster. “Many of the customers are worried due to challenges in the availability of data, RPO, and RPO. Organizations are building competencies on how soon they can recover from any mishap. For this, they are looking at transforming data protection.”
However, the pace of data protection has not been able to match the pace of transformation of products and services. “As per our latest research with over 3000 IT leaders worldwide, they are looking at spending 7 percent more on data protection in 2022 as compared to the last fiscal,” adds Bhambure.
Cloud convergence with AI for data-driven innovation
Most enterprises believe that the converged platform of cloud, data, and AI will drive important transformations in the technology industry landscape. Even though this convergence is still in its infant phase, incredible advancements are imminent during evolutions that cloud, data, and AI together would bring.
“When implemented in concert and supported by a strong data-driven strategy, cloud and AI provide great value. While cloud computing offers agility, flexibility, and cost savings, AI has also started dominating the technology world and is impacting each and every function, process and industry. In fact, the convergence of both technologies is touching everyone’s life as we interact with technology while making purchases and interacting with voice assistants,” shares Dhruv Rastogi, VP & Head of Data Science, IKS Health.
“People are leveraging cloud services to build AI capabilities on their solutions. There is an entire ecosystem shaping up on the cloud for AI, which is quite vibrant and mature now with out-of-the-box solutions and possibilities of a lot of experimentation and pilots. This is further helping AI become a more mature technology globally,” adds Shashank Saxena, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Architecture – Retail Banking Assets, IDFC First Bank.
The convergence of cloud and AI is the seed of innovation. The power of cloud AI comes from its ability to sift through a large amount of data and offer distinct insights. Moreover, it’s not an option now but a mandatory requirement for organizations. “Data strategy will be quite crucial in the convergence of cloud and AI. In fact, organizations need to come up with an umbrella data strategy for the entire enterprise including all the departments and functions. This will enable businesses to derive intelligence and decision-making,” tells Meheriar Patel, Group CIO, Jeena & Company.
Vidhya Veeraraghavan, Artificial Intelligence Lead, Standard Chartered Bank, shares that when it comes to execution, businesses need to ensure their progress on three foundations: cloud foundation, data foundation, and AI foundation. “We need to ask if we have moved our core applications/ infrastructure to the cloud, have we optimized our data management infrastructure for a single source of data, and have we started exploring and experimenting with AI solutions. As we get through these questions, then only can we decide on the steps to integrate AI into business processes.”
Further, Sharad Kumar Agarwal, CDIO, JK Tyres highlighted that technology providers must democratize the converged AI and data solutions on the cloud by optimally pricing them so that organizations can test the waters or run their pilots. “The price points must be such that the realistic benefits of the solution can be established. On the other hand, the AI literacy quotient needs to be improved for enterprise users. This education will entail and set the right expectations on the benefits and deliverables. Hence, upskilling the employees will help,” he states.
Dynamic control with ZTNA for cloud success
Zero trust is a terrific security standard; if implemented completely, it dramatically decreases the cyber security risk. “Zero-trust is actually not zero trust; it’s trust coupled with verification. Making the context right is the key to success in zero trust architecture. What it enforces is granular, adaptive, and contextualized policies for providing secure and seamless access to applications,” states Manoj Sarangi, Senior Vice President, National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL).
Here the context is critical. Context can be about user identity, user service location, device location, time of the day, type of services, and security posture of the device. You do not trust a channel or an individual based on one-time credentials that are being provided; you validate each transaction based on its merit and context.
“The zero-trust approach allows the organization to create a software-defined pyramid and divide the corporate network into micro-segments. So that prevents lateral movement across different segments. In addition, it makes a virtual dark net and prevents application discovery and the public internet, so data exposure and malware can be minimized,” explains Sarangi.
He further adds that zero-trust is not about technology. “You should have a strategy, then technology can support it; not the reverse. Zero-trust is something that you cannot get overnight. It is a journey that has to happen gradually and you have to pace it.”
While CXOs try to put their money on the right approach, there is no one answer of what is the right cloud strategy for an organization. The timing, and existing landscape, coupled with the business priorities and existing technical debts shape up the right cloud story. From an uncomplicated technology perspective, Shaibal Ghosh, CEO, CEO-APAC, Tesla Power USA, states, “We are living in a world where simplicity is missing as we as humans complicate most of our lives. However, technology is something that is driving simple and minimalistic solutions; in the backend, it may be extremely complicated and diverse. In fact, the ease of use and intuitiveness to drive the customer experience, it’s good to be technologically progressive but there is a limit to everything. We should not stop being human. We have to ensure that we know where we stand, what the future is, and try to contribute to the planet.”
