Turning the Light on in Cloud

As the world battles COVID-19, enterprises globally have embraced the virtual collaboration way of working. As many organizations start the process of getting back to the office globally, millions of professionals have been remotely working, collaborating, and innovating from their homes like never before.

Digital transformation is seeing its much-deserved limelight. A recent analyst report said that 64% of Indian organizations are expected to increase their demand for cloud computing, as a result of COVID-19. Even before the pandemic, it has always been hard to imagine a world without cloud.

Today it has truly become a way of life for people and businesses alike. Right from applications in music streaming, IoT connectivity to business analytics to storage and remote access; cloud computing has contributed to innumerable other advances.

We can safely say that cloud has been around for a while, but businesses are only now realizing its full potential. The top three advantages that are contributing to business efficiency are choice, speed, and experience.

Parag Arora, Area Vice President, Networking Sales, Asia Pacific & Japan Region, Citrix

This is also why enterprises across the world, fuelled by the pandemic induced urgency, have been having continued conversations with their CIOs and IT vendors on how cloud can be leveraged to augment theirbusiness growth. Let’s look at the various ways in which these enterprises are turning the light on in cloud.

Enhancing employee experience  

While almost all businesses want to make concerted efforts toward enabling “digital transformation”, the underlying aim is to facilitate agility and flexibility above all else. In an effort tomake this possible, the role of a CIO has evolved.

The CIO is now tasked with providing all teams in the organization a cloud-enabled digital workspace that provides productivity and enhanced user experience. Especially when businesses are getting their employees back to office in phases, in many ways, cloud is changing the way work has been done traditionally.

In today’s hybrid, multi-cloud, and multi-device environments, with the help of unified and intelligent workspace tools, enterprises are able to enhance the work experience for their employees.

Data management

Regardless of the sector, all companies need infrastructure that can support their growing data needs. To ensure on and off-site presence at all times and minimal disruption to business, the need to work remotely is bolstering the demand for cloud based collaborative applications.

Cloud provides an easy way out by not just storing this data but also allowing us to mine it to glean valuable insights. It ensures that people have swift and easy access to data so that they can analyse real-time and make innovative leaps.

Emerging Technologies

In these times, virtual networks are fast becoming the enabler of work. For the longest time, cloud computing has only been associated with basic storage and network-based services. Increasingly, however, integration with machine learning and AI has expanded the capabilities that we know of, to create what we know as “intelligent cloud”.

The data management capabilities of cloud along with its ability to deliver an unmatched level of computing power at a relatively low cost makes this a must-have tool for every business.

The Future of Cloud Computing

It has now become a strategic priority, more than ever before. The core function of any IT department is to enable transformative capabilities for their enterprise so that the enterprise can do what it’s good at.

With the help of this transformative IT, businesses can infuse innovation and expertise effortlessly across functions to enable customer success and long-term satisfaction.

This is also why a considerable part of the economy is shaped by evolving technology. Hence, in the future, these technologies will continue playing a crucial role as key IT and business enablers. Cloud computing in particular will have a major role, adding the most value for money and proving to be the better choice compared to other traditional alternatives.

In the coming years, it will be a mixture of heterogenous infrastructures and technology. Almost all enterprises will need to live in a hybrid-cloud world within a multi-cloud setup. In fact, we’re already on our way to this becoming a reality. According to an analyst report, half of Indian firms will be operating in a hybrid multi-cloud environment by 2021.

In conclusion, cloud has been a powerful enabler of transformative IT over the last decade, more so in the past few months, and is expected to grow in adoption during the next decade. We’re already in that headspace where cloud computing is simply a way of life and is a must-have to conduct business functions efficiently.

We can’t wait to see what the future holds for “cloudy” businesses in the future!

• Parag Arora, Area Vice President, Networking Sales, Asia Pacific & Japan Region, Citrix