Cloud Computing Holds the Future

By: Biswas Nair, Founder & MD Inspirria Cloudtech

With digital transformation, organizations across the industries have been steadily shifting towards cloud-first strategies. Most of the technology innovation has become cloud-centric today. This shift has brought in operational agility for the businesses with growing or fluctuating demands. The ease of setup and management of IT hardware seems to be simplified with the pay as you go model offered by cloud. In addition, collaborating with teams, editing and sharing documents, and remote accessing has become much easier. Cloud has driven offerings also take care of corporate data security and other aspects like providing sustainable solutions.

According to Gartner, there will be continual and rapid growth of cloud adoption, trending towards public cloud. The public cloud service market is expected to grow 17.2 percent in this year. In fact, cloud application services that cater one of the largest segments in the global cloud services market is expected to grow 21.7 % to reach $38.9 bn. Also, by 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors' new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.

The widespread implementation of cloud technology is expected to have a transformative effect on small businesses, on large companies, law firms, finical sector, government organizations, healthcare industry and many more. All in all, cloud has enveloped most of the possible business segments, creating a paradigm shift. Be it ERP, CRM, e-commerce, accounting, PSA, ECM or any other solution, all the essential application platforms have been moving to cloud for quite some time now.

Cloud’s Impact on the Industry

· E-Commerce

E-Commerce is one of the major services of cloud computing. Many e-commerce companies, big or small, have been drifting towards the cloud. Gartner predicts that, by 2018, at least 30 per cent of service-centric companies will move the majority of their ERP applications to the Cloud. The easy implementation and cost effective model of cloud ERP helps SMEs to pace-up with their bigger counterparts. The optimization in ownership cost and minimal maintenance can channelize their resources in innovation, giving a stiff competition to their contenders.

· Manufacturing

Cloud can revolutionize the way manufacturers do business. It not only helps accessing and sharing data, but also allows manufacturers to connect machines, materials, and people in real time. The location irrelevance is the key concept that could facilitate that has made collaboration easier for the manufactures. It has brought the supply chain partners, even closer while encouraging live communications and easy monitoring. Managing multinational sales and services also becomes convenient. This increases the scope of sales and performance. As the entire customer data is available in the cloud, just a click away, a clear view of sales, service and marketing performance is available. The real-time 360-degree view of customer information refines the customer service while improving the company’s productivity.

· Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)

It is a diverse and a very competitive market. Thus companies need to be efficient and smart in their work. In order to drive greater business values, businesses are choosing cloud computing. FMCG is able to manage all the major aspects of the supply chain on finger tips due to cloud. It can ease down production, logistic and capacity management. Forecasting and planning have also become much convenient because of social media and cloud based analytics. Companies can now easily understand the consumer segment, their preferences and the effects of promotional offers and new product launches.

· Banking and Finance

The scale of change in this industry has been unpredictable since few years. In fact, the BFS has been adopting possibly the most advanced technologies so far. With advanced business process automation, development of the functional portfolio, straight-through-processing and demonstrable technology outsourcing, the industry can be benefited significantly by cloud adoption. The financial information also remains safe with cloud security. Cloud security takes care of access management, authentication, encryption and other aspects of data safety. Because this particular sector carries highly sensitive data of the customers that needs to be preserved, disaster management becomes favorably convenient.

Additionally, cloud accounting helps to create detailed invoices, view business inventory, purchase history and other accounting essential without investing in expensive business accounting software. Cloud accounting deals with real-time data, reducing human intervention and improving accuracy.

Cloud computing is being flexible, cost effective and accessible, has grown into a method to manage all aspects of business today. It enables a fundamental shift from a capital intensive focus to a flexible operational management model. As cloud supports on-demand computing paradigm based on pay per use pricing model is continually gaining tremendous attention of decision makers of all business sizes.