A cloud-ready infra: Fundamental shift in how new-age businesses deliver value to customers

By Porkovan Veeramani, Head – Solution Engg. & Partner Management, Orange Business India

In today’s digital age, the landscape of business operations is being reshaped by new technologies and online applications. Businesses are undergoing a fundamental transformation in how they deliver value to customers. The shift to an online landscape necessitates constant reinvention and transformation to meet current market trends and customer demands.

As business leaders adapt to the fast-paced digital world, they are compelled to rethink their strategies to offer an agile, trustworthy, personalised, and seamless online experience. At the core of this transformation lies the adoption of a cloud-ready infrastructure, which is reshaping traditional paradigms and empowering new-age enterprises to thrive in a dynamic and interconnected world.

The proliferation of cloud technologies has ushered in an era of unprecedented agility, scalability, and innovation. A cloud-ready infrastructure represents more than just a technological upgrade; it signifies a strategic imperative for organisations seeking to remain competitive and relevant in today’s fast-paced market landscape.

According to the NASSCOM Tech Start-up Report 2022, the adoption of cloud computing could boost India’s GDP to $380 billion, approximately 8% of the projected total of $832 billion by 2025. This shift to cloud services has the potential to create 14 million new direct and indirect jobs by 2026. In India, cloud-based government services have enhanced transparency, efficiency, and accessibility, enabling citizens to access services and information online. For example, the Arogya Setu app, initially launched in 2020 as a contact-tracking app for COVID-19, has now evolved into a National Health App offering digital health services.
It is increasingly evident that for government and business operations to thrive in the digital age, they must harness the power of cloud technology. This is essential for remaining relevant in a landscape where products and services can be brought to market faster, while also enhancing business resilience and reducing technology risk.

What is particularly interesting is that this change is not being driven solely by businesses, but rather by customers and end-users themselves. They are demanding more personalised, seamless, and accessible experiences, prompting organisations to embrace cloud technologies to meet these evolving expectations.

A global reach
Cloud computing has emerged as a cornerstone for new-age businesses to reach global audiences. Before the advent of cloud computing, individuals and businesses heavily relied on on-premise servers to manage applications and programs. However, the emergence of cloud computing has revolutionised this landscape, enabling powerful capabilities such as app creation, data storage, audio and video streaming, and data-driven predictions.

To ensure ubiquitous cloud availability, connectivity has undergone a fundamental shift from traditional enterprise Wide Area Networks (WAN) to a cloud-first approach, forming the basis for app and networking strategies. Hybrid cloud architectures enable the seamless deployment of Orange-restricted applications and services across premises, creating a fully connected ecosystem. This shift towards a cloud-first model leverages services offered by global hyper-scale networks, facilitating connectivity across premises and enabling dynamic selection of optimal paths through intelligent software-defined traffic engineering technologies. These advancements empower operators to dynamically navigate network faults and congestion scenarios in near real-time, ensuring maximum uptime and reliability for mission-critical applications.

With the availability of unlimited bandwidth and multiple redundant paths, businesses can now penetrate new markets faster than ever before, armed with actionable insights about potential customers worldwide. Cloud computing’s vast processing power combined with seamless connectivity enables businesses to expand their reach and engage with customers regardless of geographical constraints.

Furthermore, the value-added services of cloud technology extend beyond connectivity, encompassing collaborative tools, telephony, SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), SaaS (Software as a Service) applications, and digital workspaces. These services empower businesses to enhance productivity, streamline operations, and foster collaboration in an increasingly digital and interconnected world.

The integration of cloud computing and advanced connectivity technologies marks a paradigm shift in how businesses operate and engage with global audiences. By embracing these transformative technologies, businesses can unlock new opportunities for growth, innovation, and success in the digital age.

Cloud for Secure business-critical applications
Cloud computing has emerged as a robust and secure platform for data storage, offering unparalleled protection against extreme conditions and disasters. Today’s cloud-based providers offer robust security and disaster recovery capabilities, ensuring the safety and integrity of critical data assets.

For example, in the healthcare sector, cloud-based solutions provided by Orange Business have revolutionised patient care, particularly during the critical challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Cloud technology has played a pivotal role in elevating patient care, enabling telemedicine, and supporting the secure sharing of medical records among healthcare professionals.

This includes empowering doctors and nurses to access patient records securely on their own devices and facilitating remote consultations through virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). This instant access has transformed the way healthcare professionals interact with patient data, allowing doctors to review charts on tablets during rounds and nurses to retrieve medication histories from any workstation.

By storing data on secure servers rather than end-client devices, cloud-based solutions guarantee the protection of critical medical records in the event of theft or compromise of an end device. This approach not only ensures data security but also meets the stringent requirements of healthcare institutions while allowing for scalable systems connected to the hospital’s network.

Cloud-based solutions have become indispensable tools for critical businesses -like the healthcare sector, offering unmatched security, accessibility, and scalability. By harnessing the power of cloud technology, organisations can enhance customer care, streamline workflows, and ensure the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information. Cloud options to help businesses succeed Private, public or hybrid cloud: The richness of the cloud ecosystem has also birthed different options of cloud solutions, each with its advantages.

When it comes to private cloud, these dedicated infrastructures stored in either the organisation’s premises or the data centers of a technology partner generally provide greater control and lower ongoing costs than say a public cloud, which requires higher capital expenses. Private clouds also offer scalability in which companies can seamlessly scale as demands evolve.

Whether businesses witness a sudden spike in traffic or require more capacity for new initiatives, a private cloud gives them the agility to scale up or down with ease. Meanwhile, public clouds offer significant benefits for businesses looking to optimise IT resources.

Rather than purchasing hardware and software outright, one only pays for the computing power and storage that they use. Public clouds provide agility, and reliability at an attractive price point. They remove the burdens of maintenance and capacity planning. For these reasons, public cloud computing is becoming the preferred choice for most companies looking to reduce costs while also improving business performance.

There is also the hybrid cloud solution, which eliminates the painful choice between building out capital-intensive local infrastructure to handle temporary spikes in demand or putting everything in the public cloud and relinquishing control. Businesses only pay for the extra computing power that they need, and precisely when they need it.

Multi-cloud:
According to a study by 451 Research commissioned by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – 98% of enterprises already use or plan to use at least two cloud infrastructure providers, while 33% use four or more

1 . An overwhelming number of companies use multi-cloud environments to dish out their computing resources across their respective organisations. This not only minimises data loss but also enhances the amount of computing power an organisation has at its disposal. According to a HashiCorp survey, 53% of IT decision-makers believe that multi-cloud helps them to achieve their business goals

2. A multi-cloud ecosystem also allows organisations to pick and choose from a range of service providers, each of whom is best suited for a particular task. Businesses need no longer restrict themselves to a single provider, and cease running into issues related to data security, interoperability, and cost.

Through a multi-cloud strategy, a company can combine several public or private cloud offers to build a technically and financially optimised IT infrastructure while maintaining control of its main public cloud providers.

Cloud of the future
By 2025 more than 85% of companies will embrace a cloud-first principle and 25% of the new digital workloads will be based on cloud native platforms. The next generation of the cloud is about building a more integrated and harmonised enterprise. It is envisaged to enable complex supply chains and sales and marketing functions to collaborate better and share data for smart decision-making. From being an agile business enabler to stretching the longevity of current investments of an enterprise, the future of the cloud is burning bright in providing the building blocks for transforming an organisation, people, and processes with accelerated innovation.