While Indian enterprises were on a steady pace toward cloud adoption over the last decade, Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the demand for cloud technologies to ensure smooth business resilience and growth. Bengaluru-based Quadrasystems.net sees a surge in cloud demand that has resulted in cloud-based offerings outshining traditional products. In an exclusive conversation with CRN India Prashanth Subramanian, Co-Founder, Quadrasystems.net explains how cloud innovation can improve business resilience. He also discusses how it is helping enterprises to navigate technological change and complexity, while enabling them to connect technology with business outcomes. This year again, Microsoft has recognised it as Global Partner of the Year winner.
Lockdown situation and the lessons learned
The lockdown made people realise the importance of technology, and the role it plays in business continuity. In fact, technology was the only thing that helped people to maintain a semblance of normalcy – be it connecting to their business, vendors and customers, to ordering essentials online or relaxing with a movie at home. It also brought to the fore the ubiquitous nature of the cloud and how it provides a scalable, resilient backbone for businesses. Cloud-ready customers were able to continue operations remotely, from wherever they were. Sadly, this was not the case with customers who used older on-premises technology.
Cybersecurity in remote working
From situations where businesses had hundreds or thousands of employees in a single location, to a world where they are working from different locations, the implications for cybersecurity are huge. Traditional cybersecurity measures don’t even apply to this situation. The rules of the game have changed completely, and this is where our partnership with Microsoft has made all the difference for our customers. In a traditional cybersecurity model, customers spend lakhs and crores of rupees every year in multiple point solutions, yet do not have the confidence and conviction that they are secure.
Today, security is all about identity and access management, as well as something called the zero-trust model. Here, we do not trust any endpoint or user unless is meets a certain set of conditions. We adopt new norms such as assumed breach. Delivering this functionality demands scale at a global level— and Microsoft, which analyses trillions of threat signals in a day, along with billions of authentications and emails is uniquely poised to help customers navigate this new world through partners like us who have the domain expertise and last mile technologies and IP frameworks. We are able to simplify security for customers, and help them manage this frenzy of data through curated, actionable insights using solutions such as Threat Doctor, which is a unique IP framework that we have developed. It sits on top of the Microsoft 365 cloud, and is able to reduce complexity, provide deep and meaningful analysis of a customer’s security posture along with managed services. This means that our customers can now focus on running their business, without worrying about managing tens of discrete cybersecurity solutions.
Enabling remote working
There are two sides to the remote working trend – one is security and compliance. The other, and equally important aspect, is employee experience and productivity. As we work from home, people struggle to balance their personal and work lives, along with managing children and elders. This becomes even more pronounced when multiple members of the same family need to work and learn from home. Video calls, while enabling instant global connectivity, actually increase brain fatigue. In the midst of all this, employees find it difficult to relate to team and organisational goals. Customers need to adopt modern collaboration tools, which help to deliver an always connected experience, while reducing the time and effort it takes to accomplish work, thus freeing up more time for personal life.
Our Modern Workplace practice at Quadra provides services and IP solutions that enhance the employee experience regardless of where they work from, and enable them to ideate better and innovate, while fostering team bonding and connectivity. Modern video technologies can help customers reduce video fatigue. Powerful collaboration features enable employees to manage work across different time zones by timing delivery of emails and communication so that people are not under pressure to respond. At Quadra, we say “you need to win in the workplace before you can win in the marketplace”, and this has never been truer than it is today.
Recovery and business priority
The recovery will be gradual and not V-shaped. The pandemic has irrevocably altered several aspects of our work and personal lives, and we will not see a return to old ways in many aspects. But this is not to paint a picture of gloom— there are always two sides to a transformation— disruption and opportunity. Focusing on the opportunity side of the coin is how we believe that businesses all over the world can emerge from this stronger than ever. We have a theme for our customers, that we call Recover, Reinvent and Rebound. And at the heart of this is digital transformation powered by the cloud. This will help businesses to be agile and nimble and put them in the best position to address the new opportunities that are cropping up. For the short term, our priority will be to make sure that we help our customers address business continuity and security, even as we help them to recover. The next will be to reinvent their business models to take advantage of the new normal, and enable them to rebound to a position of even greater strength than before.
Meeting customers requirements
Cash flow has been impacted for most businesses, and hence almost every customer is reexamining their spends. However, in the case of essential services, such as the cloud, the value proposition is stronger than ever before, and thus customers are still continuing their core and critical technology investments to help them tide over the crisis while planning for the future.
Cloud accelerated digital transformation
Digital transformation has morphed from a ‘good to have’ to a ‘must have’ feature of business. If you examine the impact on businesses worldwide, those with a high degree of digital readiness have fared well, and many of them have even grown during the pandemic. We are seeing abundant signs that digital transformation is a condition of survival. These are reflected in the everyday conversations that we are having with CXOs and business leaders. Even traditional businesses which were not very bullish on digital have now actively started charting a digital-first and cloud-first strategy.
Strong partnership
We have been a Microsoft Partner for over 18 years now, of these, for 16 years, we have been recognised as a Global Partner of the Year. This we believe, is testimony to the strength of our partnership, and the resilience of our team in staying ahead of the curve when it comes to technology changes. We are focused on helping customers build agile and intelligent enterprises, and are a trusted technology advisor to India’s top business houses, helping them to navigate technological change and complexity, while enabling them to connect technology with business outcomes. We offer consulting, services and solutions, including IP solutions and managed services to mid-sized and large customers, many of whom represent the largest and the most well-known brands in India.
Achieving business growth
Business agility is the need of the hour for any business, and the technology solutions that we provide help them to rethink their business for the digital age. These challenges that customers are facing today include:
- Effective collaboration with a distributed workforce
- Secure, fail safe access to mission critical data
- Business continuity – mitigate future risk to operations
- Powering growth and innovation through enhanced employee experience
- Reduce costs through automation
- Build and deploy intelligent applications and processes
- Scale without capex
We help our customers to:
- Lay the foundation for success with a robust and resilient IT infrastructure
- Grow without constraints by leveraging a pay as you go, scalable cloud model
- Innovate without fear by automating business processes and deriving meaningful, actionable insights from data
- Protect their business with secure yet productive technology tools and processes
- Work better together by reimagining the employee experience with intelligent and modern end user experiences
