By Ramesh Chougule, AVP – SAP Cloud and Digital Lead, Infosys
For a while now, organizations across the world – and industry domains – have been charting a course for their digital transformation. The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption as companies have begun to realign their operations as well as businesses for the ‘new normal’.
The rise of digital consumerism requires businesses to leverage insight-driven personalization, focus on environmental sustainability, build business resilience and respond to host of other macroeconomic changes. Thus, organizations have to strive to modernize operations and evolve to stay ahead of their competition in a cloud-first future.
The broad increase in the cloud’s storage and compute capabilities, the set of intelligent applications it offers, and the power of computing on edge have helped organizations to modernize their IT landscape, bring in more business efficiency and has helped them strategize about building business models for the future.
Bringing efficiency to businesses
One of the important reasons for the uptick in cloud adoption is the higher level of resiliency it offers against outages. Business continuity is paramount, and the lockdowns necessitated by the pandemic have re-emphasized it further. The hyperscalers and cloud service providers have mastered the art of keeping the lights for all IT infrastructure and hence the business operations. The inherent resiliency of the cloud allows these companies to offer service level agreements with 99.99%of uptime. A few years ago, the same organizations were contented with about 98-plus uptime for their IT infrastructure.
Then there’s also a big improvement on the total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure. Cloud technologies, by their very nature, enable organizations to consume applications on a ‘per-use’ basis. Organizations can provision and deploy the capacity at any point in time and pay only for the usage without worrying about the upfront investments or the fixed operating costs on a continuous basis.
The third aspect of efficiency in new-age businesses is the significant reduction – of cost and effort – in the support and maintenance of IT infrastructure as well as applications. The standardization of cloud applications, and hence their maintenance operations, results in a much lower failure count in an organization’s day-to-day operations. This in whole contributes to reduction of TCO and the balance sheets.
Building businesses of the future
While cloud adoption and IT transformation have aided organizational efficiency, these technologies are also enabling organizations by opening new avenues for businesses as well as pivoting their business models for the future.
Connecting to single consumer – In a digital, connected ecosystem, organizations have been able to reach out to individual customers via cloud applications – directly via several integrated customer touchpoints across retail, mobile, and on the web as well as indirectly through social media and other community platforms. Businesses can leverage this external information for internal operations to offer targeted and insight-driven products and services. Organizations have essentially been compelled to redefine their business models focusing on ‘a single customer’ market segment.
Redefining the processes for smaller segments – With target segment sizes reducing significantly, organizations are now compelled to plan for a smaller segment, design and execute with nimble processes to address the personalized needs of diverse consumers. Many organizations have also had to let go of the efficiencies of mass production to align their manufacturing processes for specific market segments. In contrast the multi-tiered distribution channels and layers have made way for direct-to-consumer distribution. With cloud applications enabling consumer insights, efficient manufacturing operations and optimized distribution channels, more and more companies are expected to bring about definite changes into their supply chain model in this decade.
Hyper responsive real time decisions – All organizational operations involve several decision-based actions, and decisions and actions both have undergone tremendous change. While automation technologies and artificial intelligence solutions have allowed the lessening of the manual activities, the critical decision-making component too has evolved. The decisions are now based on insights, driven from readily analyzed information instead of crude, un-analyzed data sets. It is also real-time, allowing organizations to correct the operational plan on the fly and respond momentarily to address changing market situation.The entire organizational ecosystem is being transformed into a sentient and responsive enterprise.
The learning organization – The cloud ecosystem has enabled continuous learning in organizations. Interactive online learning, cloud communities, and access to expert resources have taken learning beyond the boundaries of the organization with employees learning more from what’s out there than depending only on the internal training enablement. This aids upskilling as well as knowledge sharing on a continuous basis.
Workplace of the future – The adoption of cloud applications has also enhanced productivity and workplace collaboration and removed the hard-lined limitations of devices, platforms, and even locations. The fluid and seamless experience of the modern workplace solutions is a step up from the traditional, sequential internal collaboration methods and brings employees as well as external stakeholders on to a seamlessly connected singular platform.
The cloud revolution is definitely building future enterprises.
Conclusion
Cloud applications have allowed enterprises to significantly enhance the efficiency of their business processes with minimum infrastructure overheads, costs, and manual effort.They will now enable organizations to define their future for the next 5 to 10 years by transforming their business models for an evolved hyper-connected consumer centric ecosystem.
