It’s the decade of cloud

Cloud is the name of the game. When billions of people worldwide are gluing to their mobile phones using scores of apps for their varied needs, the paradigm shift in consumer behaviour is palpable. As more people use digital interfaces, enterprises are also keeping up the pace. Financial services companies are developing user-friendly apps to provide all financial products under one roof.

Healthcare companies are taking the help of multiple technology solutions for providing more personalized treatments for patients without physical interactions. Similarly, whether it's video game makers or real estate companies; retailers, or travel companies, all are coming up with multitudes of digital interfaces to win new customers. And such an app-heavy digital environment is powered through cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet. The major benefit for the enterprise is that as it can pay as use basis. Instead of investing upfront for buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, the enterprise can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on as they need basis. Such subscription-based pricing with core features of agility and scalability is accelerating the pace of cloud adoption. According to global consultancy firm Gartner, public cloud revenues is likely to exceed $330 billion by 2022.

While enterprises are migrating to the cloud, many of them are using services provided by multiple cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure & IBM Cloud among others. Organisations are choosing a multi-cloud environment to avoid vendor lock-in. Such an approach also provides enterprises with a wide range of services to choose from. Within the service offerings, businesses are also using multiple services including SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) among others based on their requirement. When enterprises are using services from multiple cloud vendors, it poses its own set of challenges in terms of integration, testing, implementation, and security protocols.

Therefore, IT services companies globally are investing heavily to build up cloud capabilities. From Accenture to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), from big to mid-tier and small IT companies are tying up with cloud hyperscalers, training their engineers, and building up Center of Excellence (CoE) to provide cutting-edge & customised solutions to their clients. Many of the big players are also bundling all their cloud offerings under one roof. For instance, Infosys has bundled all its cloud offerings under ‘Infosys Cobalt’.

We in ITShastra provide secured cloud-based solutions to enterprises to help them accelerate their cloud journey. With strategic collaboration with all hyperscalers, we enable businesses to select multiple cloud-based offerings, integrate them seamlessly with their existing system, and scale up those services as & when the need arises. Our ‘Center of Excellence’ with dedicated engineers is trained to co-innovate with the enterprises for effective business solutions.

The current era of software services belongs to digital technologies. The use of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), and blockchain is throwing up a humungous amount of data. Drawing insights from these raw data need their storage and higher computing ability. This is only possible in a cloud environment. Also, the current pandemic has accelerated the pace of cloud migration globally. Undoubtedly, this is the decade of the cloud and any service provider with the right capabilities will emerge as the winner

By Rajendra Patil
Director, ITShastra