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Tech Trend: Transforming sectors with industry clouds
In another exciting episode of our ‘Tech Trends 2024’ podcast series, we explore industry cloud platforms tailored for specific businesses to boost efficiency and collaboration. Guiding us through this topic is Abhinav Johri, EY India Technology Consulting Partner for cloud and digital transformation. Join us as Abhinav provides valuable insights into the world of industry clouds and their impact.
Abhinav Johri
Partner, Technology Consulting, EY India
Key takeaways
Industry cloud platforms offer tailored solutions, enhancing efficiency and collaboration specific to the sector's unique business needs.
Industry clouds offer a comprehensive ecosystem, prioritizing vertical integration and aligning with unique requirements of sectors like BFSI, insurance, and energy.
Sovereign clouds ensure data compliance with local laws, which provide organizations greater trust and security in their cloud operations.
Emerging technologies, such as AI and edge computing, will significantly influence and enhance the capabilities of industry cloud platforms.
Industry cloud platforms transform businesses by offering tailored, sector-specific solutions, driving efficiency, security, and innovation in a unified stack.
For your convenience, a full text transcript of this podcast is available on the link below:
Pallavi: Welcome to EY India Insights Podcast! And I'm your host, Pallavi, and you're tuned into another exciting episode of Tech Trends 2024
In this series we delve into the upcoming tech landscape with our leading Tech consulting partners. In today's episode, we’ll be exploring Industry Cloud platforms. To set the context – Industry cloud platforms are digital hubs tailored for specific businesses, boosting efficiency and collaboration. To facilitate the discussion further we are joined by Abhinav Johri, our EY India Tech consulting partner in cloud and digital transformation, who will guiding us through this dynamic space. With a diverse global clientele, Abhinav's expertise spans across technology, digital natives, hyperscalers, private equity, eCommerce, and mid-market organizations.
Thank you for joining our podcast, Abhinav. It's a pleasure to have you with us in this episode.
Abhinav Johri: Thank you very much, Pallavi. Pleasure to be joining this podcast with you today.
Pallavi: Thank you. To start off with the core discussion, Abhinav, could you explain the difference between generic public clouds and industry clouds?
Abhinav Johri: Absolutely. It's a good start. It sets the context as well. Cloud, per se, or the technology has been around for some time. You know, so when we think of cloud, we tend to think about a bunch of compute and storage being made available by a third party. It's just that you're not owning it. It also comes loaded with a bunch of utility software and productivity tools, which you can use as a bundled offering for your business purposes.
What has happened over the past several years is that organizations have realized that while the power of cloud is immense, there is a particular need for the utility of the cloud to converge with the business context. This led to the rise of something called industry clouds. Simply put, industry cloud or industry cloud platforms are designed to meet the specific needs of an industry sector.
It's just that those needs are not adequately, or many times not at all, served by generic clouds. One can expect highly specific and contextualized use cases and an enabling technology stack that is very purpose-led and built to support certain kinds of business components. These could be business processes, operating models, or nuances of your own sector, for example, pharma, BFSI, manufacturing, retail, and so forth. So, we may consider Industry Cloud as a very verticalized form of cloud, which is core-centric to the business context.
Pallavi: Thank you Abhinav. Now, let's dive into the value proposition. According to you, what benefits do industry cloud bring to sectors?
Abhinav Johri: Great question, Pallavi. So the benefits of industry cloud are very straightforward. Now, if you remember, at the beginning of the podcast, we spoke about how industry cloud is different from a generic cloud. And we discussed the different components of a differentiator. So let's build upon that and think it through. Industry Cloud, as we said, offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities tailored to the specific needs of the sector.
Now, because they are tailored to the specific needs of the sector, organizations can consume the full power of the cloud in the form of one single unified technology stack, from infrastructure to application to data, to most of the user-specific tools, and readily deploy them for business processes. Now, what it does is it takes away the whole headache and heavy lifting of complex engineering, which an organization would have faced if they had consumed the resources from a generic cloud. So not only does it add value, but it also makes a lot of tooling and components from the resources of the cloud available in a very composable format. In addition to that, organizations benefit from enhanced security, which often happens to be an inherent feature of generic cloud. But because the security requirements are contextualized to, let's say, a regulatory ask or certain standards and requirements specific to the business, as we spoke about earlier, the security requirements are often taken into account by design as companies consume the industry cloud for their business processes.
So most of the issues they might encounter during external or internal audits or when obligated to report back to the authorities come as preset, pre-configured controls, which also prove to be a significant cost-saving measure. The reason being, you're not putting in a lot of effort—in fact, almost zero effort—to think about, design, and implement those controls. So very mission-critical priorities of the organization with respect to the nuances of the business process for their sector are preserved in a unified, consumable format. I think that's a significant benefit organizations can look forward to while adopting industry cloud platforms.
Pallavi: Thank you Abhinav for those valuable insights. Moving on. What are solvent clubs and why are companies increasingly gravitating towards them?
Abhinav Johri: Good one. In fact, this question is relevant given the very recent developments within our country itself. But let's go to the definition first.
A sovereign cloud is a cloud that is designed and built to provide access to the technology stack in compliance with local laws and regulations. Therefore, any sovereign cloud service provider ensures that each subscriber's data and each tenant's data is protected from access outside the country and that it is processed and stored in compliance with the originating country's data privacy mandates.
It's a great leap in the way cloud technology has evolved. Now let's take an example: most of these CSPs (cloud service providers) are global in nature, with distributed data centers across various regions worldwide. An organization operating or headquartered in India, with many local operations and not beyond the country's boundaries, might find it very difficult to establish trust with global cloud service providers. The reason being they may not always be sure where their data is being stored and processed. Additionally, they may not have clear visibility on who the employees of the third-party cloud service provider responsible for managing the infrastructure and software are.
So, it's a combination of trust regarding the data being processed and stored, and the ability to have a clear understanding of the operations performed by the manpower responsible for the infrastructure served as a cloud to various subscribers worldwide.
What a sovereign cloud does is provide a very unified, defined boundary scope of operations for the cloud providers, enabling them to offer a greater level of assurance to their consumers. They can establish that their data is within the boundaries of the country in which they operate. Secondly, the infrastructure and their mode of working are fully compliant with the laws of the land. This also gives greater comfort that the data or components they have subscribed to do not leave the nation's boundaries.
As cloud technology adoption increases worldwide, I believe there will be a time in the near future when every country will plan for a sovereign cloud. This will lead to not only wider adoption of cloud technologies but also the establishment of larger, more powerful data centers within developing nations such as India. The biggest benefit of sovereign clouds going forward will be that organizations, previously skeptical about moving to the cloud, will establish greater trust and be more open to adopting new and emerging technologies, directly benefiting their business.
We are looking towards a future where, irrespective of business size and scale, and whether operations are local or global, cloud technology will become a levelling field. Every technology served through the cloud will be accessible to organizations, allowing them to affordably consume these services.
In terms of what it means for businesses, sovereign cloud is definitely a promising area that could also pose a threat to most global cloud providers.
Pallavi: Thank you for those excellent insights, Abhinav. Now, could you also share some specific examples of how Industry Cloud are making a difference in sectors like BFSI, energy, utilities and healthcare? In addition to that, according to you, what are the common challenges that companies face when choosing in adopting industry cloud solutions?
Abhinav Johri: Sure. Well, there have been early adopters of industry cloud across multiple sectors. For example, banking, manufacturing, retail, and health services, to name a few. We also understand that nontraditional sectors, such as media and culture, have been very enthusiastic about the prospects for their business as they consider adopting the cloud. So, it would be difficult to say that there are any sectors today which are not thinking about and have not progressed to a certain extent in terms of the use case for the cloud.
It's very fascinating that in the early days of cloud, it all started with a story around infrastructure. When everybody said they had tons of metal residing on their premises, which was very heavy on the Capex, they didn't want to continue operating like that. That's when the cloud came into the picture, saying, "Let me take you from a Capex to an OpEx model where you don't really own anything, but you just consume because somebody is on it, and then you continue as you consume it."
So, it almost became a service model in today's time. The story has pretty much changed, and it is important to appreciate this as we think about the use cases because use cases have matured along with the cloud itself. We moved from infrastructure to applications, which became software as a service, and then continued to mature into platform as a service, where consumable, computable, developable components are made available as a service.
Now, this massive jump from software to platform has fuelled the imagination of businesses in terms of what they can achieve. For example, in the BFSI sector, we know that payment banks have sprung up quite a lot in the past few years. When a payment bank is thinking of starting, they have a greenfield business; they don't need to set up huge data centers and buy large, massive compute and storage just to have a strong backbone. Instead, they can go to market with pre-curated business processes that help them onboard customers and immediately start providing services. Industry cloud is the answer here.
In this case, they not only get personalized customer experiences through pre-built digital assets and services, but they also get tailored solutions enabled for time-bound upgrades, catering to various aspects of the banking stack from both technology and functional perspectives, which eventually minimizes risk. Payment modernization solutions available via Industry Cloud help many greenfield payment banks launch operations with real-time payment data, allowing customers to send money anytime, anywhere.
In the insurance sector, cloud solutions offer pre-built advanced analytics, automation, and data integration capabilities. These complex engineering and software architecture conversations are simplified by insurance cloud solutions, helping drive better decisions across the enterprise by combining all enterprise value chain functions such as finance, actuarial, investment, and data management. Likewise, we see grid adoption in other sectors, such as energy and utilities.
Cloud platforms are enabling the implementation of large-scale smart grids, helping drive accuracy while monitoring and controlling the energy distribution network. This is a great use case. In the energy and utility sector, all services target general public consumption, with complexities including geographical spread, climatic conditions, and operational and monitoring challenges. Cloud platforms providing unified monitoring and control are a fantastic use case. These solutions help understand risks and operational costs due to the power of central data processing, driving deep insights through analytics, connecting multiple heterogeneous stacks, and enabling asset optimization and agility.
The energy sector is very asset-heavy and capital investment-heavy. These solutions help optimize assets and facilitate proactive maintenance, highly appreciated benefits by clients in the energy sector. These are some examples, and I encourage our listeners to read our Industry Cloud report, which discusses live examples and case studies from other sectors as well.
Pallavi: Thank you Abhinav. we have one last question for you. Looking ahead, what are your predictions for the future of Industry Cloud and how do you foresee emerging technologies such as generative AI and edge computing influencing and shaping the landscape of industry Cloud offerings?
Abhinav Johri: Well, what you're observing across all the sectors is that the focus on data and the emphasis on what data can really do for businesses is getting more and more intense. Therefore, most organizations view Industry Cloud as a very strategic conversation and initiative when you think about their business multiplier.
With the advent of artificial intelligence and generative AI, the erstwhile focus on digital transformation is only gaining more importance. In my view, the urgency of undertaking digital or AI-led initiatives for every industry is becoming very, very real.
For such initiatives, there will be three important imperatives. First, ensuring an enterprise-wide data strategy and architecture. Second, having a clear vision of platform and product strategy and its roadmap. Lastly, but most importantly, having a solid and versatile engineering team. Industry Cloud becomes the conduit that brings all three imperatives to reality by providing the business and technical capabilities which organizations need to deliver such successful transformations.
Lastly, given that the evolution of technologies is happening at a speed which is very difficult for any user organization to match, the best way to continue to remain a beneficiary of such pathbreaking innovations is to latch on to the Industry Cloud.
Pallavi: Thank you Abhinav. That brings us to the end of this conversation. Once again, thank you for sparing the time and sharing such detailed insights on industry cloud platforms. It has been an enlightening conversation.
Abhinav Johri: Thank you very much, Pallavi, for having this time with me and giving me an opportunity to share my thoughts. Thanks very much.
Pallavi: It's a pleasure, sir. and thank you to all our listeners. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel across all of the podcast platforms. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to unravel the latest in tech trends and innovations. Until next time, this is Pallavi signing off.
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