Public Cloud computing market in India is expected to cross more than USD 7 billion by 2022 according to Nasscom with infrastructure-as-a-service market growing at more than 25% during the same period.
The exponential business benefits of using Cloud services are underpinning this growth—from lower capital expenditure to reduced time to market, Cloud is helping large businesses and start-ups live lofty dreams by beating established players in the game with lower entry barriers and high velocity of innovation.
Cloud facilitates easy scalability allowing expansion and growth within minutes without having to invest time and capital in buying IT infrastructure. This is a huge advantage as it significantly reduces the cycle to make operations go live—eliminating the time required for assessment, identifying right servers, shipment time and making the environment go live.
Imagine a scenario where business is experiencing tremendous growth. Isn’t this the wow moment, isn’t this what businesses strive for? Yet at the cusp of success to be constrained by infrastructure woes is a common scenario. Cloud steps in to fills in that gap and delivers beyond as it enables to control unnecessary cost by allowing to scale down when traffic subsides.
Another draw of is that Cloud enables digital to become more powerful. Technology proliferation has resulted in easily accessing a large population directly while also touching consumers via multiple medium. This means businesses are generating an extraordinary amount of data which can be richly mined for business benefits. However in the traditional environment, time, cost and effort were prohibitively high. Cloud has reduced this barrier by commoditizing massive storage and distributed computing model has made huge amount of resources available at a fraction of the traditional cost.
Third and most important benefit of Cloud is that it has drastically reduced the cost of innovation—providing enterprise-class technology and resources to all businesses. This has popularised new concepts such as fail fast wherein businesses are encouraged to experiment more and failure is deemed necessary for learning and eventual success. Innovation has taken on new meaning with better collaboration and transparency amongst different teams, involving all stakeholders including consumers. Companies are launching minimal viable products which are improved with feedback from users to develop full-fledged offerings.
A distinctive Cloud feature is that it extensively leverages automation which enables continuous improvements, bringing in cost efficiencies and enhanced productivity. That is why it is important to view Cloud as a journey and not an end in itself—businesses can push frontiers with new technology, take advantage of emerging ecosystem and develop new business models to become leaders and game changers.
Embracing Cloud is not an option but a compelling reality that is enabling businesses to explore experiment and dominate the market.
--Mr Gurprit Singh - Co-founder and Managing Partner at Umbrella Infocare
