Why cloud will be tech foundation for any business in 2022 and beyond?

2021 was a year of inconsistencies, massive disruption and uncertainties. The pandemic has evidently changed business dynamics and has proven, that in last one and half years, cloud has become the foundation for business. It can be viewed as the prime enabler that was helped support and sustain growth for organizations during tough times.

Early adopters of cloud witnessed an advantage over other organizations still testing waters. Businesses across industries namely telecom, healthcare, pharma, banking, finance or insurance, retail amongst others were early adopters and were able to ensure business continuity, to a large extent, on account of their cloud-based infrastructure and application services. At the same time, cloud enabled remote working and discovery alongside the need for scaling their capacity up and down, as was needed. Cloud has been truly transformational for organizations that embraced it.

As per Statistica, organizations worldwide are expected to spend an eye-popping US$1.78 trillion on cloud and other digital transformation technologies in 2022. Even though this research indicates that businesses are inching towards reaping benefits provided by cloud, several organisations are still reluctant to adopt cloud and go all digital. They are still confused and as a result are awarding one-off contracts or initiating isolated projects. This is not an ideal approach for digital transformation, and it is definitely not a strategic or thought through one.

Given the hesitance around cloud adoption, here are the three top pillars of cloud that ought to get your attention:

Speed to innovation
Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is being created and this is only going to grow as more digital technologies come into play. With data being at the centre of all innovation, any organisation’s growth rests on their ability to process and analyse large amounts of data quickly, sometimes in real time. Cloud has an unmatched ability to help businesses navigate in these uncertain times and ensure they continue to leverage data, innovate and yet create world-changing products…

Even small organizations that are equipped with cloud can now have affordable access to vast, elastic compute resources on demand with cloud. Not only that, they have access to applications with artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, blockchain, and other advanced technology capabilities built-in. Cloud today has made it easier to detect any kind of breakthroughs in fields of medicine, agriculture, science, energy, pharma, and more – helping them to take timely actions.

Let’s look at the example of what the Ministry of Commerce recently did. The Logistics Division, under Ministry of Commerce launched its pilot project known as "Secured Logistics Document Exchange" or SLDE in July this year, with an aim to further improve ‘ease of doing business’ with India.

The SLDE platform was developed by Oracle partner, CargoExchange (a Hyderabad based start-up), using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Blockchain Cloud Service. This solution replaced the present manual process of generation, exchange and compliance of logistics documents with a digitized, secure and seamless document exchange system.

This enabled the generation, storage and interchange of logistics-related documents digitally using Aadhaar and blockchain-based security protocols for data security and authentication; it also provided a complete audit trail of document transfer, faster execution of transaction, lower cost of shipping and overall carbon footprint, easy verification of authenticity of documents, lowered risk of fraud, etc.

Improving efficiencies
Cloud has an unparalleled potential to improve efficiencies and free people to focus on more mission critical tasks. Organizations must have the ability to prevent their key resources from investing time in manual processes dictated by legacy systems.

Every hour and amount of money an organization spends on manual tasks by key resources corresponds to an hour and money it is not spending on higher-value, customer centric and revenue generating work. Progressive companies need to utilize their talent and time efficiently while ensuring they reduce man hours in implementing advanced digital technologies like cloud.

Protecting data and mitigating risk
As per the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, India witnessed a whopping six lakh+ cyber security incidents in the first six months of 2021. The pandemic induced remote working gave way to a significant rise in cyber security incidents. Looking at the current situation and the new normal work set-up, organizations need to protect their data in the best way possible.

A company usually has many different configurations of databases, operating systems, and applications which are managed in its data centres. IT teams, as efficient as they are, can’t patch their systems in a timely manner every time a software vendor issues a fix. This step actually puts any organisation’s valuable intellectual property at risk along with customer, supplier, employee, and other confidential data.

In order to secure systems, companies must replace their complex environments with more sophisticated, uniform cloud-native ones which are managed offsite by providers that not only have the security expertise but also the financial resources. They are also equipped to protect the underlying company data.

-- Srikanth Doranadula, VP, Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India.