Rahul, a first-generation entrepreneur, is the Founder and Director of Cloud.in, an established player in the Cloudtech sector, delivering high-performance, customised Cloud solutions. These solutions are scalable, cost-effective and highly available too. Established as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and an AWS Channel Reseller Partner, Cloud.in serves, start-ups as well as leading enterprises across all sectors. Rahul is responsible for driving the organisation’s value proposition, business development, strategy and operations, in addition to building the team and equipping employees with high-level competencies. His deep domain knowledge and exceptional execution capabilities have significantly contributed to the robust year-on-year growth of Cloud.in, the flagship brand of Hostin Services.
Legacy IT systems are quickly getting replaced and organisations are in different stages of digital transformation to address the fast-evolving customer expectations aspect. Traditional or legacy on-premise infrastructure has limitations in terms of flexibility, scalability and other benefits.
To remain ahead of the curve, organisations have to adopt a ‘constantly catering to customer demand’ mindset. Delivering exceptional customer experience is the top business priority of every business, big, medium or small. Individuals are willing to pay for a stellar customer experience and do not think twice to switch brands even if they had to face only a single instance of a poor experience. Brand loyalty is not a common occurrence in today’s market. Reducing customer churn and generating higher revenues are key business objectives compelling organisations to formulate a robust customer experience strategy.
For better customer experience, organisations have to understand the former’s needs, gain insights to take further action, connect with customers emotionally, capture their feedback in real-time and improve the product or service through innovation. CIOs and CTOs are recognizing the immense value digital technologies are bringing to customer experience efforts. Legacy systems are not flexible for digital transformation and technology vendors are not willing to support on-premise applications. Digital transformation will require the respective organisation to migrate to a public or private cloud. Hence organisations are now accelerating their digital transformation journeys with cloud services. Cloud is empowering their businesses to innovate, reach out to market quickly, grow, scale efficiently and deliver enhanced customer experience.
Let us now take a deeper look into how the cloud can ensure the success of digital transformation initiatives.
Stability of the cloud model
To ensure optimum performance of the cloud model, organisations, irrespective of the infrastructure – private, public or hybrid they operate in, need to have complete visibility to constantly monitor across the entire spectrum. Monitoring should cover, network and application performance, login and access to the cloud services in addition to resource and license usage. This will lead to much-required stability, preventing outages or downtime. Cloud environments can eliminate the constant crashing of the computer systems and servers, which have to be rebooted regularly. They do this by delivering high availability of resources, reliability with automatic restart function and resilience by restoring from any disastrous failure. Cloud replication will provide the necessary backup in instances of failure.
Cloud Security is another critical aspect when established, will address data breaches that are increasing in number and getting more sophisticated, by the day.
Offers faster time to market
Business agility which improves the operational efficiency to support innovation is not feasible with any physical server, due to the high time consumption for the entire process. Organisations may also resort to postponing the innovation process, leading to a decrease in productivity and efficiency. On the other hand, many CIOs and CTOs confirm cloud services will significantly reduce the time for the organisation to reach the market and also it acts as a catalyst for new launches. The setting up of the cloud infrastructure can be established in a few minutes with the environment made production-ready. A cloud server can thereby deliver a competitive advantage to the business by providing the necessary resources as and when required due to its flexible aspect, enabling better customer service.
Significant cost reduction
The first clear cost advantage with public cloud services is that no investments have to be made for the hardware equipment and office space can be optimised, thereby reducing energy costs as well. Secondly, the manpower deployment for running the data centre is decreased and so are the maintenance costs. These employees can focus on more important tasks than mundane maintenance and spend time efficiently leading to higher productivity. They can develop higher-order skills sets and even support the innovation process. The initial capital investments made by the organisation can be significantly decreased with the cloud’s pay-as-you-go business model where resources are also scaled up and down as required.
Security and Privacy issues addressed
At an in-house data centre, where shutdowns are at unexpected times and frequent, organisations more than often encounter risks of losing critical business data, leading to losses on revenues, customer numbers and brand reputation. Such instances are much rare in a cloud hosting environment, where there are multiple backups at different levels, enabling smoother digital transformation.
The Cloud service provider generally takes the responsibility of the security of cloud infrastructure with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other such providers owning the security of their applications running on the cloud. The organisations will thereby become the custodian of business as well as customer data and overall security of the cloud.
According to the recent market research by ReportLinker, the global cloud computing market size is estimated to grow from US$445.3 billion in 2021 to US$947.3 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 116.3% during the forecast period. The pandemic has no doubt accelerated digital business transformation with high demand for cloud solutions across IT, Telecom, Education, Healthcare, BFSI, media and entertainment, and other sectors. Cloud effectively leverages machine learning, big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), chatbots, augmented reality and other such technologies to enable digital transformation initiatives. In today’s digital era, Cloud has evolved as an integral component for any successful business strategy leading to better growth, higher revenues and better business outcomes.