By Anjali Yadav, Industry Principal Analyst, Infosys
From mainframes and client server distributed technologies, we have moved to the World Wide Web and Internet and mobile technologies and have now graduated to the world of cloud computing. If that was not enough, we have quickly moved past the era of single isolated cloud apps to an integrated cloud ecosystem that can facilitate predictions, calculations, do cognitive recognition, and can self-drive cars.
So what are the new norms of the Cloud ecosystem that impact the ways of working in an organization?
Cloud Collaboration
Global enterprises are in need of hyper connectivity and cross company collaboration. Business units and knowledge bases are fragmented and distributed in silos. Collaboration in organizations has remained limited within the enterprise and private networks. There is a need for Production to talk to Sales for accurate forecasts, Product Engineering groups require inputs on customer preferences and pain points from the Service Organization.
More enterprising business units of organizations have adopted cloud to cut down their IT operating expenses. Following the success of these businesses, other units in the organizations have gone for cloud based platforms for their requirements resulting in every unit having their own collaboration platforms. While employees within a specific unit are able to share customer and contact information, customer intelligence and learning and best practices from engagements, the data continues to reside within the boundaries of specific business units. Many organizations have had separate collaboration platforms for internal employees and external stakeholder- partners/customers. Organizations are not able to provide a consistence customer service experience across various channels.
Collaboration platforms have been horizontal focused primarily accessible to sales, marketing and service organizations. Other LoBs such a Product Engineering, Field Service, Operations are not able to benefit from the information sharing capability provided by the collaboration platforms.
The new generation collaboration platforms are addressing the collaboration requirements across LoBs and across enterprises. They are being bolstered with advanced search capabilities that will enable users to search for the relevant information from various data sources.
The collaboration platforms are being upgraded to allow information sharing in a more efficient way. On the new platforms, ‘Production’ will be able to share the inventory information with ‘Sales’ thus enabling better forecasting, prospect details can be sent from ‘Sales’ to the ‘Vendor network’, Channel Partners can place orders online and share with internal sales and so on.
These collaboration platforms come with REST based APIs that can be used for integration and providing a console view to the users with feeds from different platforms on one screen. The interface helps disseminate information to different platforms via single text box updates.
Collaboration platforms are being used as Idea funnels for product innovations, Live chat collaboration is being used to provide context based service to internal and external customers, Knowledge is made available not only from the knowledgebase but from relevant public forums and websites.
Cloud Analytics
Organizations are collecting huge amount of data across all possible channels and want to leverage this data to their advantage. Organizations want to be Customer 360 degree enabled and derive intelligence from structured and unstructured customer related data and unearth patterns and resolutions. Reports are required for workflows such as approval history and tracking changes in the system. Since a lot of customer data flows in from 3rd party cloud systems and social platforms making a strong case for Cloud as the Data management. This source of information is leveraged by businesses for deriving reliable business insights. The bigger advantage is democratization of business intelligence that allows the cloud analytics platforms to represent data in a more personalized and easy to understand format. Owing to the flexibility that comes with the option of adding or removing servers on demand and higher user adoption resulting from improved data rendering capabilities, Cloud Analytics is quickly evolving as an enterprise analytics choice for organizations.
Cloud Mobility
Mobility solution offerings on the cloud have changed by leaps and bounds. Cloud solutions have helped customer service reps to create requests while on the move and to log calls and emails, update activities and access dashboards. There is a growing demand for context based (zip code, segment) search for customer information on the mobile app increasing the proliferation of hybrid and native mobile apps that integrate with Mobile utilities such as the GPS. Increasing interest in blogging, following conversations, sending updates to social networking sites while on the move has led to the integration of cloud solutions with Google APIs, Facebook and Twitter. In today’s world where there are different kind of mobile devices with different form factors, cloud based mobile solutions will continue to evolve their mobile displays to match the form factors provided by the devices.
Cloud Security
While the effectiveness of cloud in sharing and managing customer information across all touch points is well established, mitigating risk, complying with regulations and policies, and meeting SLAs have been areas of concern e.g. how we ensure business critical information while being sent from an email is secured. The fact that email communications over the cloud are managed by multi- tenant data centers it makes it more difficult to ensure regulatory compliance and reduces control of service-level compliance. Risks to a company’s reputation include “spoofing,” uncontrolled authentication. There is an opportunity for creating a unified messaging system within the cloud by creating a centralized console for logging and auditing messages, associating messages to particular IP addresses within the corporate domain, providing ability to capture, index, and archive messages and notifications such that they comply with policies and regulations.
Cloud solution providers are also enhancing their security features. Data level security is managed by encryption and decryptions, networks that connect data centers are also being encrypted, IP based restrictions are ensuring the cloud solution instances are not being accessed via un-authorized machines and networks. Data centers are being cryptographically isolated from authorized cloud traffic.
Artificial Intelligence through the cloud
Organizations are looking at developing the AI capabilities without investing in infrastructure. Cloud vendors are looking at providing solution options covering Cognitive capabilities such as image and voice recognition, Machine learning, intelligent and predictive analytics. Higher processor speed is helping with slicing and dicing of huge amount of data and achieving higher computational intelligence. Cloud platforms are evolving to provide integrated analytics and data management capabilities and machine learning algorithms combined with voice and image recognition capabilities.
The world of technology is changing at a rapid pace. IT has come a long way from a server/infrastructure heavy set up to a ‘no hardware’/infra on demand centric environment. Cloud platforms in their new avatar also possess higher processing powers, are less costly due to the commoditization of the services and are more secure and can be leveraged by organizations in many different ways. They will continue to remain the nucleus of IT strategies until the next new wave of IT revolution.