By Anzy Mohammed S
Over the past year, the cloud has become a pivotal asset for global economies and businesses to tackle the disruptions caused by the pandemic. The Covid-19 era not only accelerated cloud adoption across industries, but also drove home the message: ‘do it now or get left behind’. Today, more and more organisations are charting the digital journey in order to fool-proof their businesses from the vulnerabilities of the evolving business landscape.
As businesses shift their focus towards expanding capacity, and increasing flexibility and cost efficiency, the cloud is acting as the backbone for the adoption of all new technologies. Most firms navigate through seven stages before they finally become a cloud-first organisation and leverage cloud for more rapid innovation. Now, in order to realise the full potential of cloud, it is imperative that enterprises first recognise how fundamentally different a true cloud-first approach is and embark on this transformation from an application down perspective while also integrating extensive automation into the enterprise environment.
According to Nasscom, the demand for cloud in India is increasing as companies of all sizes digitalise and opportunities improve for small and medium enterprises. As firms adopt new technologies to address their needs, multi-cloud adoption has emerged as a valuable strategy, enabling businesses to become more agile. In fact, it is estimated that by EOY2022, 30% of Indian enterprises will deploy various tools and solutions to manage their multi-cloud use.
As enterprises explore new cloud-powered opportunities, it is important to focus on three areas: On-demand access to data anytime, anywhere and without interruption; managing cloud costs while driving operational efficiencies across the IT infrastructure; extracting more value out of data. Succeeding with these priorities will require changes in technology and company culture. Another important aspect of cloud platforms is they are changing the way companies build software, and therefore demand constant reskilling and new skilling of the workforce. Going forward, development teams will integrate resources who understand both psychology and technology – with an enhanced focus on user experience.
Yet, the challenges associated with cloud adoption remain a reality. Organisations of all maturity levels cite security as one of the top challenges. Those at the beginner and intermediate levels are burdened also by a lack of resources and expertise. For entities at the level of advanced cloud maturity, managing cloud spend becomes increasingly difficult. As cloud usage continues to grow, cost optimisation will continue to remain an important step for harnessing investments and focusing on innovation and resilience.
With the pandemic being a ‘world-wide wakeup call’, organisations everywhere have had a very powerful and direct reminder of the importance of systems resilience, agility, adaptability and scalability. In this innovative cloud future, organisations can try new products, new processes, and new ways of working – sometimes all at once. Be it new ways to collaborate, the ability to enable low-cost experimentation, or the opportunity of rapid global scaling of solutions, the adoption of cloud-first strategy is empowering organisations to drive faster innovation and realise faster time to value.
The writer is COO, SAP Labs India