By Biswakesh Patnaik, Associate Vice President & EMEA Service Transformation Practice Leader, Infosys
Industry cloud solutions are growing increasingly important for modern enterprises looking for customised strategies to transform their businesses in the digital realm. According to a recent Gartner survey, about 39% of North American and European enterprises have begun adopting industry cloud platforms, with an additional 14% conducting pilots. Roughly 17% are contemplating deployment by 2026. In essence, most respondents aware of industry cloud platforms see themselves as current or potential adopters.
Although public cloud adoption is widespread, it is the adoption of industry cloud, which provides specialised benefits by allowing the transformation of technology layers onto the cloud that can help companies innovate faster and speed up their capability to change and enable more modular solution designs. Unfortunately, adoption has yet to catch up. An industry research found that only 20 percent of the respondents said that their company’s top priority for 2023 was to use the industry cloud.
Inadequate understanding of industry cloud technologies, as well as limited awareness of its advantages and necessities, are some of the impediments that have slowed industry cloud adoption.
Industry cloud refers to a set of composite applications tailored to certain industries. Enterprises can use the cloud’s scalability, availability, and performance to a greatest extent with cloud-native design. As a result, the industry cloud allows for digitisation, digital transformation, and rapid adoption of cloud computing.
By integrating software, platforms, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities, the technology caters to different verticals with tailored solutions.
It also facilitates a smooth and effective digital transformation, which is making this form of cloud popular among value-conscious enterprises. Many have found that a well-defined industry cloud strategy has proven critical for avoiding the loss of significant opportunities.
Industry cloud adoption has thus grown increasingly strategic as it evolves from a technology-focused tool into an important business competency. It aligns with a variety of technologies, such as 5G, IoT, AI, data analytics, and edge computing, as well as facilitates customised solutions tailored to various industry needs while also boosting technology progress across sectors.
The true value of cloud solutions can only be achieved by guaranteeing relevance to the industry-specific use cases, which should be future-ready as well as for new business models or processes that the industry is moving into, and also the adjoining technologies that will support such businesses.
In the financial services sector, for instance, “operational resilience”—the ability of a financial system to operate uninterrupted while complying with regulations—is vital. That demands an IT infrastructure that orchestrates and integrates enormous data and IT systems amongst departments, ensures the reduction of risks, and mitigates issues in real-time while enhancing the customer experience with powerful digital solutions and real-time inputs from regulators and service providers.
Again, a manufacturing facility’s “equipment breaks down” might be a nightmare. Thus, outdated systems, procedures, and point solutions must be updated with cutting-edge technology and processes to prevent plant shutdowns. This change may be accelerated by installing a sophisticated cloud solution that monitors and automates plant maintenance activities, digitises dealer and distributor activities, and expedites support.
Online shopping and new-age retail use “logistic excellence” to provide services on time and inform customers. Industry cloud can help digitalise every process in this sector, from collection to shipment, and ensure efficient customer delivery.
The solution should ensure automated and real-time workflows that not only reduce the actions and eliminate errors by the human workforce behind these tasks but also a real-time notification to customers at every step of the process.
Clearly, the industry cloud brings distinct capabilities for business agility. Going forward, cloud spending is expected to shift from growing and disrupting rather than just saving and optimising business processes. Enterprises these days prefer to derive the value of the cloud for launching new products and services, elevating customer experience, creating new markets, and growing revenues.
The emergence of AI has also necessitated the shift from simply adopting the cloud to saving money; for every AI project, the cloud is going to be the foundation.
Given the value it can provide enterprises in the form of flexible and applicable industry solutions, industry cloud platforms stand out as a notable new trend predicted to be adopted by over 70 percent of enterprises by 2027 for accelerating their businesses.
