By Manju Naglapur, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud, Applications & Infrastructure Solutions, Unisys
Cloud adoption is accelerating across industries, transforming how organizations operate, innovate and deliver value in India and worldwide. Banks use cloud computing to scale operations in the financial sector, enhancing customer experience and fraud detection. In the healthcare industry, cloud solutions enable telemedicine, electronic health records and AI-driven diagnostics. Additionally, students benefit from virtual classrooms and collaboration tools in the education sector.
However, with rapid transformation underway, organizations are facing new vulnerabilities. New cybersecurity complexities expose gaps in legacy defenses, resulting in a surge in cloud-related security incidents that cause financial and reputational harm to the companies impacted.
In the face of these evolving threats, it is paramount that organizations prioritize the adoption of resilient security strategies that can keep pace with cyber-criminals and regulatory demands. Through a business-driven cloud strategy, enterprises can better invest in the right tools — both externally and internally — and take action to turn their strategy into reality.
Where to Start: Adopting a Centrally Controlled, Secure Cloud Architecture
As organizations scale their digital operations, many are turning to multi-cloud models. Using multiple public clouds across different vendors, enterprises enjoy greater flexibility and can increase their systems’ resilience during the best times. However, this approach can make it harder to maintain consistent security controls across cloud systems, endangering sensitive information. If breaches occur, they can lead to costly downtime and steep declines in trust with clients.
With hybrid cloud systems, organizations can ensure that sensitive, latency-dependent or regulated resources remain on-premises while scalable, data-intensive and client-facing applications move to the cloud. Through this approach, organizations can manage the strengths of both private and public clouds while incorporating emerging technology, like AI, to drive further results.
Using AI-Driven Automation to Revolutionize Threat Detection
While the challenges of implementing a centrally controlled cloud infrastructure may seem daunting, AI offers a powerful solution, especially for security. AI-driven automation can transform how organizations detect, analyze and respond to threats — often before damage is caused. This technology can help teams prevent breaches, block phishing attempts and reduce false positives, saving organizations time and resources.
Furthermore, by automating routine tasks — like monitoring security threats — AI can bolster team productivity. According to The AI Equation: 2024 AI Business Impact research by Unisys, 83% of employees report that AI positively impacts their day-to-day productivity, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives and continuous improvement.
Using AI Effectively is Based on Data
While AI can potentially advance security for organizations rapidly, it is not a silver bullet. AI-driven solutions require a lot of high-quality data to operate effectively and become immensely more important when combating security threats. Without it, AI models could return incorrect outputs, leading to false positives and unintended biases, which at the very least take up time and resources, and at the worst, put an organization at further risk.
Workforce Upskilling Is Key to Future-Ready Security
In addition to good, comprehensive data, a skilled workforce is also needed to ensure organizations can use AI-enabled cloud architectures productively. While Unisys’ recent research shows that AI can help employees save time, training is instrumental in seeing results, with 82% of employees trained to use AI reporting that they saved time when using the technology compared to just 54% of employees who were not trained. This only emphasizes that while AI is useful for helping teams understand, analyze and respond to security vulnerabilities in real-time, it is not a replacement for human teams.
Compliance and Data Sovereignty Are Rising Priorities
As cloud adoption grows, so does the complexity of regulatory compliance. Enterprises must navigate a patchwork of global and local regulations, from GDPR in Europe to India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act. These frameworks require organizations to demonstrate control over data location, access and usage.
Failure to meet regulatory requirements can result in significant financial and reputational damage. Unified security platforms and adaptive AI can help streamline compliance by automating policy enforcement, audit readiness and reporting. By embedding compliance into the fabric of cloud security, organizations can reduce administrative overhead and focus on innovation, without compromising trust.
Conclusion: Security as a Catalyst for Innovation
Cloud transformation is redefining the cybersecurity landscape. To thrive in this new era, enterprises must move beyond reactive defenses and embrace proactive approaches. By aligning security needs with business goals and digital innovation, organizations in India and around the world can turn security from a constraint into a catalyst for growth, turning security not into a barrier to innovation but a strength.