HIGHLIGHTS
There is an increased focus on industry-specific solutions and how cloud can accommodate the unique regulatory, governance, and legacy technology challenges specific to the business needs. In the latest Big Questions Blog, Deepak Gadkar, Head of AWS Business Unit, Asia Pacific and Japan, explores one of the biggest technology trends — industry clouds.
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Staying ahead of the curve
Enterprises over the years have embarked on the adoption of multi-cloud. Today we see most enterprises are already committing to migration and modernisation programs, gradually moving the public cloud-ready applications. It has given respite to shrinking IT budgets and agility to businesses to deploy products faster, securely and with scalability.
However, it has not fully addressed the assurance to businesses using relevant industry compliances or solutions that leverage the power of cloud. More so, while delivering a capsulated platform that combines all the above aspects into a vertical focussed package. This is where the need for industry cloud-led business solutions arises.
Industry clouds are more than just repackaged sets of services -– they are specifically designed to meet an industry’s needs and accommodate industry-specific workflows that general-purpose cloud solutions cannot. For instance, cloud-based business solutions for the financial services and healthcare industries would have provisions to address data security and protection, both of which are top concerns for highly regulated industries.
These business solutions identify and build functional requirements of an organisation to deliver operational efficiency and to create new business services for their existing and potential customers. For example, in the complex, siloed, manually driven operations of the aviation sector, cloud-based business solutions can enable connected insights and intelligence for comprehensive operations visibility. It leads to higher productivity and the airline being operationally more responsive while delivering an enhanced customer experience.
Continuous evolution
Established organisations must continually find ways to differentiate themselves to remain competitive, lead the market and keep at pace, especially from the smaller native digital disruptors backed by what can seem endless new investment monies courtesy of private equity and venture capitalists.
Consequently, such organisations carry significantly high levels of technical debt and often experience poor performance due to their legacy systems. Commonly, the siloed front-of-house systems do not integrate well into the back office. Rewriting such techniques takes time and financial investment that is often unavailable. Whilst ‘lift and shift’ might reduce the total cost of ownership in the short term, it does not address the challenge of ageing technology that is less relevant to the business operation as an industry evolves.
Simply put, public cloud vertical solutions have greater potential to create value for enterprises.
Talk about value
Industry cloud business solutions have the potential to accelerate and take the risk out of cloud migrations and deliver both economies at scale and cost, as well as enabling an organisation with disruptive technology that is specifically relevant to their market.
More recently, TCS partnered with an Australian neo bank to build a payments ecosystem on AWS leveraging its flagship core banking software. The core objective was to create a payments ecosystem to power payment as a service while collaborating with partners and Fintechs to give the business the ability to launch innovative products and deliver a superior customer experience. While addressing these business and technology innovations, our domain expertise in banking and financial services ensured adherence to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) compliance norms for the payment system.
These examples demonstrate that the value no longer lies in just having a systems integrator or management consultancy that can lay down references in any given domain and quote how many implementations they have done and how quickly they have done them.
It lies in having a partner who can bring to the table the blueprint for your given industry, backed by a relevant knowledge basis and an ongoing commitment to stay relevant as your business evolves through legislation, industry practice or innovation.
Industry cloud business solutions have the potential to accelerate and take the risk out of cloud migrations and deliver both economies at scale and cost, as well as enabling an organisation with disruptive technology that is specifically relevant to their market.
