The Evolving Cloud Landscape in India - Present and Future

The impact of cloud technology throughout the world continues to be significant and the cloud landscape is fast changing in India.

It’s radically reshaping how businesses operate, providing a platform and integration that delivers new levels of agility, automation, and interactions. It’s allowing organisations to roll out new services fast, in turn increasing revenues or even creating whole new businesses. In the back-end it’s streamlining operations, unifying traditionally siloed data and eliminating cumbersome, manual and error-prone processes.

Cloud Adoption in India

With this in mind, it’s no surprise the major hyper-scale cloud platform vendors – AWS, Google and Microsoft, as well as other cloud service providers - have opened additional regions in India in the past year. The opportunities for growth and the demand for the most advanced cloud-related technology skills is only growing and India is of course well placed to meet that need of evolving cloud landscape.

Reasonably low-cost internet and mobile access is prompting more growth in digital consumption, from shopping to banking and healthcare services, which in turn fuels cloud-based growth. The irony though is that cloud adoption in India still has a way to go since the majority of businesses have yet to begin their cloud adoption journey.

But the pandemic has only accelerated the demand for and growth of the cloud landscape. Many organisations flipped to a remote workforce, literally overnight, putting new demands on enterprise networks, security and collaboration. Many consumers also turned to the Internet in place of in-person visits – whether shopping or banking or health care appointments. We all had to shift to a virtual world, where an organisation was ready and able to accommodate that.

Supporting this amount of remote connections into the datacentre, many via VPN, was not always ideal. It made more sense to be connected via the cloud. It provides more bandwidth to the applications and makes access faster for many users. This has also increased demand for virtual PCs as they are easier to deploy, control and manage for an organization and can be spun up quickly in a cloud. The network really is the computer. More organizations are hosting their applications and user environments in the cloud.

In turn, this is removing the need for traditional datacentres and the major effort and expense required to run them. Let your cloud service provider worry about that. The cloud provider worries about the security and availability, while organisations can focus on running their business much as they do with plugging into an Internet service of the power grid. And as more applications are migrated to the cloud, they are now “cloud native” meaning they are now able to run across most popular cloud environments. Think Salesforce or Appian, for example.

This shift away from legacy systems is also providing an opportunity for overall IT modernisation, modernising applications to cloud-native and using micro-services for greater flexibility. For organisations supporting thousands or millions of users, they have little choice.

The Future of Cloud Adoption

None of these shifts are going to stop. The pandemic simply accelerated a transition already underway.

We’re excited to see organizations across India begin to see the advantages of moving to the cloud - the economics, modernisation imperatives and customer expectations of digital engagement will continue to push demand in this space. Digital transformation will continue to drive E-commerce and omni channels to be built either in a cloud-native fashion or on-premises apps being migrated to cloud. In India, a country with a billion mobile phones in use and a billion internet subscribers – organisations have little choice but to shift their operations to a model that supports this level of engagement.

We’re already seeing the next waves of digital transformation and cloud technologies. Data lakes, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and automation are becoming widely applied.

Leveraging the vast amounts of data organisations hold, traditionally in siloed, disconnected pockets, is delivering new levels of customer insights, customer experiences, compliance and decision-making.

Moving to the cloud does not have to be a massive project or expense – it can be carefully planned and rolled out gradually as the business moves along its digital transformation journey. But the transformation in Cloud landscape is happening and organisations must be prepared to adapt to the new demands of consumers and other businesses, which means a level of agility, speed and data previously out of reach. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that you’ve got to move quickly to survive.

By Nitha Puthran, Senior VP, Cloud & Infrastructure, Persistent Systems

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