Catalyzing Rapid Growth in the High Tech Industry with Cloud-led Innovation

Jun 25, 2021

HIGH-TECH | 6 min READ

How Has Cloud Adoption In The High Tech Industry Picked Up Pace

Cloud has been a significant driver of value in the High Tech industry since the very beginning of the last decade. However, as the digital ecosystem consolidates with changing customer behaviors and ways of working, the cloud has now emerged as a non-negotiable part of High Tech businesses.

Nitesh Mirchandani

VP and Global Head

Communications, Media & Technology (CMT) Vertical

Birlasoft

The global pandemic has only amplified the need for rapid adoption of the cloud in an enterprise-wide context, as demand for touchless experiences and rising costs of working digitally on the manual mode place newfound operational constraints on the bottom lines. Moreover, rising customer expectations around hyper-customization and 24x7 service paradigms have further necessitated not just adopting cloud but also the very strategy that drives today’s (digital) business in the High Tech industry.

Yet, deriving value through cloud adoption and breaking over efficiency and cost-gains when transitioning from an optimized on-prem configuration of the digital enterprise is not a trend - but instead, an exception. So what sets the leaders apart, and how can CIOs bring value to the enterprise with cloud?

Efficient Data Management With Cloud

As data takes center stage in the post-2020 digital strategy, the cloud is turning into a given - data-intensive applications that support smarter workflows and come to be called innovative products must use scalable, fail-proof infrastructures that are agile and responsive. After all, a data-driven business must act upon insights derived from massive data lakes to deliver value to the last mile. In this regard, the cloud is becoming the key to an effective data management strategy due to the following factors:

Cloud security management

Beyond the traditional enterprise firewall, the cloud supports the role and tier-based access to various levels of data-driven insights founded on the same, granular data points.

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Moreover, the cloud also supports new-age security paradigms like privacy-preserving techniques, anonymization, and serialization to drive secure applications that bake privacy into the architecture from the get-go.

Cloud is scalable and drives better decisions

In addition to being secure, effortless, and near-instantaneous, scalability along both directions is one of the key value propositions of the cloud. As a result, enterprises can handle peak workloads by temporarily scaling their compute capacities and network bandwidths, and downscale significantly around open hours. This approach also substantially impacts the costs and supports a zero-wastage system at the infrastructure level.

Catalyzing Rapid Growth in the High Tech Industry with Cloud-led Innovation

Use Case of Cloud in Product Innovation

In addition to bringing agility and cost-effectiveness to enterprise IT, the cloud also powers innovation in today’s digital ecosystem if leveraged right. Here are a few ways in which enterprises are using the cloud to innovate their products and services:

Rapid prototyping and rollout

Cloud not only supports distributed teams to rapidly prototype complex deployments but also helps roll out products to the market fast while bringing a continuous approach to improvement and feature expansion - this can help enterprises leverage an early mover advantage while bringing innovations to the market more quickly at lower costs.

Power highly customized journeys

With a centralized data management strategy and an exhaustive cross-integration of the enterprise toolset, the cloud can empower highly customized journeys for users, thereby helping enterprises acquire new customers fast while raising NPS scores significantly.

Modularity and technological maturity

In highly competitive industries like manufacturing and biopharma, the cloud serves as the meeting grounds for multiple technologies - like IoT and AI. As a result, it can bring real-time and high-precision use-cases to action, thereby helping enterprises climb the ladder in their respective industries.

Cloud for Product Innovation

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Impact on Subscription-Based Services

In addition to enabling product innovation, the cloud is also a key enabler of subscription models. The XaaS (anything-as-a-service) economy is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 25% till 2027 - and this statistic hardly sounds surprising as most B2B and B2C customers look for a greater degree of financial control over their spending across various segments. In addition, the XaaS economy also lowers the entry barrier by significant margins, thereby opening the enterprise up to a new segment of customers.

Cloud subscription management models can bring the finance, IT, sales, and product teams on the same page. Moreover, with the right capabilities, the cloud can eliminate revenue leakages by tracking usage levels with high precision and automating the quote-to-cash cycle. Ultimately, subscription services can bring greater fidelity to revenue forecasts and help enterprises build a steadier revenue stream using the cloud.

Modernize Enterprise Systems

Cloud is no doubt driving significant benefits across segments in the High Tech industry. However, a lift-and-shift approach to cloud adoption is usually not profitable. To bring profitability with the cloud, legacy applications must be modernized. This, however, requires a significant amount of refactoring, rehosting, modularization, or rearchitecting. However, the adoption of cloud along a well-strategized roadmap can make cloud adoption simpler, more profitable, and sustainable in the long run.

CIOs must understand their legacy and target systems from a cloud-first perspective and reimagine their applications from an ecosystem approach to modernize enterprise systems. In this process, the cloud becomes a significant enabler - since it provides the flexibility of a phased modernization approach, a side-by-side deployment and reconfiguration, and one-off deployments. This helps CIOs choose the right method depending on their specific business context.

Enabling Remote Work With Cloud

Beyond all the technical benefits of the cloud, one of the most tangible ones is its role in enabling work-from-anywhere and hybrid work models that are being forecasted as the future of work across industries and geographies. When the pandemic resulted in nationwide lockdowns across the globe, cloud adoption shot up significantly. This was apparent in the doubling of stocks of cloud providers while everything else was falling apart.

Here are three ways in which cloud not only enables but also empowers the hybrid/ remote work model:

Cloud enables seamless access: An enterprise that integrates its work platforms and environments with the enterprise cloud essentially opens up the possibility of logging in from anywhere, anytime, and pick up from where an employee left the last time they logged in.
Reduced infrastructure costs: While eliminating the need for elaborate physical workspaces, the cloud instead helps enterprises scale their work environments (like code production environments) in tune with the time at which the highest number of employees log in and downscale on weekends and after-hours.
Better security and compliance: In industries with strict regulations and compliance requirements, the cloud can help enterprises fulfill data residency, flow, and usage requirements by constructing their workflows around certain regions and in compliance with local laws.

Enabling Remote Work With Cloud

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Cloud Computing: From Essential to Vital

Cloud computing is a non-negotiable element of the High Tech industry from here on. This is because the cloud empowers remote work models, effortless and instantaneous scalability, and brings major cost benefits to the enterprise if leveraged along with the right adoption roadmap.

Diminishing Returns of the Lift-and-Shift Approach

A lift-and-shift approach to cloud adoption and migration is usually a value-killer. CIOs must devise an cloud adoption roadmap that pulls the right modernization levers - like re-platforming, rehosting, rearchitecting, and refactoring.

Data-led Cloud Innovation

Done right, the cloud is a significant piece of the data-driven future of business - as it is at the heart of an effective data management strategy and subscription services and can power some of the most innovative products and services through effortless collaboration and faster time-to-market.

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