The cloud advantage: Driving growth and operational efficiency in modern enterprises

By Madhan Raj J, Associate Vice President, Cobalt Cloud Solution Strategist, Infosys

Jan Dhan is an incredible success story featuring digital public infrastructure (Aadhaar and UPI) which brought in financial inclusion with 530 million new bank accounts in just 10 years. This and other initiatives of the digital rail, provide tremendous opportunity to India Inc. to drive profitable growth in further digital transformation of India. Across the globe, cloud computing has been an enabler of digital transformation for both enterprises and governments. India’s public cloud services market will expand at over 23 percent CAGR between 2022 and 2027, to reach $ 17.8 billion. However, in comparison with global peers, currently, Indian companies spend about $17.5 per employee on public cloud services, which is just one-eleventh of the global average.

The biggest obstacles to adoption include a lack of appreciation of features and benefits of cloud, difficulty in integrating and migrating legacy systems, and shortage of cloud transformation skills. Addressing these challenges without delay is imperative because estimates say that slow adoption could potentially cost the country’s GDP a whopping $118 billion, apart from 5 million jobs by 2026. India Inc. needs to move forward on cloud not only because it is a source of immense value, but especially because it is the key to survivability.

Surviving post Covid
Cloud was essential for remote work during the pandemic, but global supply chain impact continues to cause disruptions. Building resilience requires real-time visibility through seamless data flows across supply chain participants, further enhanced with analytics and AI. In the manufacturing industry, data and AI solutions on the cloud can help improve shop floor productivity and optimize production with real-time visibility. This visibility lets businesses anticipate demand changes, market disruptions, and risks, allowing quick intervention. Only cloud provides the platform capabilities, services, computing power, and agility needed for real-time business and data intensive operations.

Surviving in the market of the future
Markets remain in flux due to changes in technology, consumer expectations, competition, and regulations. For example, ChatGPT gained 100 million users in two months and now generative AI is considered in every industry segment. Future markets will feature non-traditional players using technology to create new models with low-cost, agile, cloud-based solutions like a digital-only bank.

To compete, established large businesses need same level of agility, scalability, cost-efficiency, and innovation which can achieved by adopting cloud to build solutions leveraging trending technologies such as AI, IoT, Edge Computing, Metaverse, for competitive edge and new business revenue streams. For small businesses, cloud offers easy access to technology and scalability without upfront investment.

Surviving natural and other disasters
Cloud technology offers built-in redundancy and disaster recovery, ensuring continuous operations during natural disasters and contingencies. This is crucial for Indian businesses, as 40 percent of them lack disaster recovery capabilities. Moving workloads to the cloud allows enterprises to run core systems and data remain accessible remotely even when one facility is affected. Customers and business partners can access services nationwide, benefiting from the cloud’s resilience. Additionally, the secure infrastructure of hyperscalers improves resilience to cyberattack which otherwise was not feasible.

Surviving through climate change
A World Economic Forum survey of large global corporations estimates the cost of climate change at equivalent to 10 percent of annual sales. India’s Centre for Science and Environment says the country experienced 318 extreme weather events in 2023, affecting all states or union territories. In the interest of long-term survival, Indian organisations need to prioritise climate action and make more sustainable choices, such as low carbon footprint in processing technologies, IT infrastructure, starting now.

Migrating workloads from enterprise data centres to public cloud can drastically reduce energy consumption, as hyperscaler manage superior capacity utilisation, build energy efficiency data centres and source green energy to power their data centres. This reduction in carbon emissions within the IT landscape contributes positively to green initiatives and accelerates the carbon reduction goals of organisations.

The value of cloud continues to grow
In the beginning, cloud was seen as an efficiency enabler. Then it was valued for its scalability, agility and analytical capability. Going forward, cloud will be crucial to the survivability of enterprises.