By Srinath Srinivasan
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation for numerous organisations. At the core of the transformation is moving applications to cloud. It assists enterprises to adopt exponential technologies. Bengaluru-based Infosys, by way of cloud apps, assists enterprises to streamline their operations and rein in expenses by shifting IT expenses from capex to opex models. Scalable cloud systems with enhanced information analytics can give enterprises the capacity to forecast and make insight driven choices on capital investments as properly.
“Covid-19 did not bring in any new trend, it only accelerated the earlier trends,” says Dinesh Rao, executive vice-president and international head, Enterprise Application Services, Infosys. “Consumerisation of the user experience, adoption of open-source technology, massive rise in cloud adoption including multicloud and hybrid cloud and modernisation of legacy systems are some significant trends in the context of the pandemic,” he adds.
According to Rao, cloud apps have been created to meet the demands of the trends above even just before they got accelerated due to the pandemic. “As per our research, 54% of enterprises are building cloud apps as a foundation on which organisation’s digital transformation can be enabled,” he says. With cloud apps, it becomes vital to handle them effectively in order to attain enterprise objectives. “The key to success is to define the business objectives that drive the move to the cloud and having a well thought-out roadmap for the journey, keeping in mind current issues and opportunities against a future desired state,” he adds.
Rao says there are two approaches to go about this transformation. Enterprises hunting to respond rapidly to industry alterations, or these who want minimal disruption to current systems and processes can adopt the Line of Business (LOB) strategy to rapidly ‘turn on’ a new service. Others hunting for new finish-to-finish consumer journeys or enhanced enterprise outcomes can adopt the Enterprise cloud strategy by utilising cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to make an integrated enterprise-level cloud ecosystem to provide synergies across applications and enterprise-wide efficiencies in the lengthy run.
Organisations can also pick a hybrid mode that include things like each the LoB and the Enterprise Cloud strategy to optimise their cloud investments. This balances flexibility and speed with their want for a more standardised strategy. Following the pandemic, it has come to be vital for organisations to generate operational efficiencies in their provide chains. Rao believes that cloud apps can assist the trigger even though offering expense effectiveness, responsiveness and resilience. “This calls for the use of powerful forecasting models that use AI and machine learning to mitigate risk, disclose actionable insights, and make informed decisions. And all of these are being cloud-enabled,” he states.
The compatibility and interoperability of cloud apps and its capacity to leverage information to help choice-producing assist it address Supply Chain Management (SCM) challenges. “Cloud apps are typically designed in a tiered structure making it easy to integrate with existing systems,” says Rao. The applications also assistance intense automation in factories, warehouses, and logistics. SaaS model additional increases expense effectiveness in SCM.
Powering the cloud applications is Infosys’ proprietary Cobalt neighborhood. It consists of enterprise and technologies innovators, and 14,000 cloud assets. These assets consist of enterprise assets, engineering assets, mastering assets, and understanding assets. Rao says,“Our industry specific business assets help accelerate digital transformation with industry best practice processes, Engineering assets with emerging technology solutions like IoT, Blockchain, AI/ML solve industry specific problems.”
Infosys also runs Cobalt Labs at Infosys international digital centres exactly where firms can co-generate new options and accelerate speed to industry. “Infosys Cobalt Labs works with the Infosys partner ecosystem to pre-configure partnerships to prototype industry solutions as well,” says Rao. With a cloud initially providing like Cobalt, comes the challenge of cyber safety.