Cloud: A silver lining for businesses amidst pandemic

Soma Tah

Indian businesses have started leveraging Cloud technologies to a great extent as they attempted to cope with these uncertain times, ensure business continuity, and power innovation- making way for greater adoption of Cloud across various industries

Embracing the New Normal of Work 

The unprecedented global crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic has not only rendered states, and people helpless and homebound, but made it equally challenging for businesses to operate as usual. With Remote Work becoming the new normal, organizations had no option apart from adopting cloud infra and cloud services for business continuity.

The need to work remotely caused a huge spike in demand for cloud-based collaboration, security, and productivity tools to ensure business continuity. Video conferencing tools and Virtual Private Network (VPN) became more important than ever. Organizations are also using cloud-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions to onboard new remote workers.

Due to stringent lockdown and social distancing measures, industries like media, retail, education, and healthcare also have embraced cloud-based tools for new demands online entertainment, gaming, shopping, virtual classrooms, and e-consultations, etc.

The empty offices and full homes, however, posed other challenges. As per data shared by ComScore, India saw a 36 percent increase in Internet use between February and March 2020, and the average time spent on the Internet increased by 23 percent creating immense pressure on the network infrastructure. But edge solutions providers, regulators, and carriers all came forward and took steps to reduce load during peak traffic times and helped businesses avert any online gridlock.

Powering Contactless Solutions

COVID-19 crisis had shoved us all into a no-touch world, leaving a large piece of the jigsaw puzzle for the businesses to solve- figuring out the ways they can create new customer experiences, and no-touch interfaces that align with a contactless world.

Providing quality experience with minimum physical contact was one of the most challenging tasks at their hands as retails, travel, hospitality, and airline industries started reopening across the country. The same is true for the banking industry as well. But building contactless and branchless banking requires web-scale applications. Hence going forward we will see organizations focusing more on building cloud-native applications as they are better at responding to change and uncertainty. Enterprise Kubernetes platforms also allow businesses to take their ideas to market faster by providing developers with a consistent, secure, and zero-configuration development environment.

A vast majority of people will continue to prefer touchless interactions post – covid pandemic also, reveals a recently conducted survey by Capgemini survey. Besides speeding up adoption for touchless interfaces, this pandemic has created a unique opportunity to accelerate the use of voice-based interfaces in physical settings, and facial recognition technologies, mobile-based contactless transactions also. Cloud will be a major enabler for these contactless technologies and solutions.

Fast-Tracking Business’ Cloud Journey

India has witnessed rapid digital adoption, as people and businesses adjusted themselves with the new ways of working.

Although Digital Transformation itself also has been a broader requirement that continues to drive the demand for cloud solutions for the past few years, COVID-19 crisis made it an absolute necessity for many businesses to prioritize their digital transformation agenda.

The pandemic has brought everything to a standstill. Inability to woo customers, declining sales, and stalled production, piled up inventories made businesses recognize the value of new-age technologies like Cloud, and embrace digital tools.

A substantial increase in usage of cloud infrastructure is also being observed in the sectors such as BFSI, Healthcare, Education, and Events, etc. With social distancing becoming a part of day-to-day life, educational institutions adopted remote learning, patients opted for an e-consultation with their doctors, and events turned completely virtual.

Bharat Akkinepalli, Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks said, “COVID-19 has made financial enterprises, for the first time, to leverage cloud computing and open up firewalls for people to securely work from home. The highly regulated sector benefits from having its core banking services managed as part of the private cloud and its customer facing services hosted on public clouds (closer to customers)”

Pay-per-Use models see an increased demand

More companies are looking to maximize resources and move from Capex and hardware-based systems, to Opex and ‘as a Service’ solutions.

The India cloud market will witness an increased adoption with public cloud leading the forefront of all infra-related investments. IDC’s Covid-19 Impact on IT spending Survey found that 64 percent of the organizations in India are expected to increase demand for cloud computing while 56 percent for cloud software to support the new normal, as it enables businesses to scale at speed, at a predictable cost.

Keeping the crisis in mind, many Cloud solutions providers have also been extending free access to their tools for small and medium business usage.

Rise of Distributed Cloud Computing

The COVID-19 crisis has proved the value of public cloud services in supporting businesses and workers even in the Distributed Workforce scenario. Public cloud providers have now begun to distribute their public cloud services to different geographical locations. The operation, governance, updates and evolution of the services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider. In this way, the cloud is broken up into multiple smaller datacenters in different locations. The benefits it provides include reduced latency, lowered overhead costs, and improved compliance with data-location related regulations.

Speaking on the new trends in Cloud Computing, Sid Nag, Research VP at Gartner said, “We are seeing increased availability of distributed cloud from the hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud with offerings such as Outpost, Stack and Anthos respectively. Distributed cloud computing is a style of cloud computing where the location of the cloud services is a critical component of the model. Distributed cloud supports the tethered and untethered operation of like-for-like cloud services from the public cloud ‘distributed’ out to specific and varied physical locations.”

The lines between IaaS and PaaS are also blurring, pointed out Sid. Gartner defined this as CIPS (Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services). The degree of integration may vary but it includes the use of a single self-service portal and catalog, shared identity and access management, a single integrated low-latency network context, unified security, unified monitoring and unified billing. Most customers that use a hyperscale CIPS provider, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, have adopted a blend of the provider’s IaaS and PaaS capabilities. IaaS resources are typically supplemented with cloud software infrastructure services, such as dbPaaS, aPaaS and iPaaS, explained Sid.

Security continues to remain on Slippery Slope

Security remains a major concern, no matter where you are in terms of the cloud journey. The sudden transition to Remote Work has made it more difficult to manage. Also now that people are working from home, the organizational data is spread across multiple clouds, cloud apps, personal devices and data centers. It is critical for organisations to secure their data and their people wherever they are.

As this was the first time many of these individuals were working away from a secure corporate environment, they were vulnerable to malicious attacks from hackers who were eager to exploit people’s fear and anxiety over their personal health.

A cloud security research conducted by Trend Micro highlights misconfiguration as the primary cause of cloud security issues. Hence, it recommends some best practices which can help secure cloud deployments:

Employ least privilege controls: restricting access to only those who need it.

Understand the Shared Responsibility Model: Although cloud providers have built-in security, customers are responsible for securing their own data.

Monitor for misconfigured and exposed systems: Use tools that can quickly and easily identify misconfigurations in your cloud environments.

Integrate security into DevOps culture: Security should be built into the DevOps process from the start.

Experts Speak:

Experts Speak:

Vikas Arora

VP - IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software & Services, IBM India & South Asia  

“With only 20% of mission-critical workloads having moved to the cloud, it is making it difficult for organizations to maintain business continuity while transforming IT operations specifically in times like these. Hybrid cloud is swiftly becoming the dominant force driving change in the industry. Enterprises can fully optimize their hybrid cloud and accelerate transformation by leveraging internal and external resources to solve current challenges. Today, 80% of workloads are yet to move into a hybrid cloud environment. Also, most clients manage between 6-15 different clouds. This has made Hybrid multi-cloud as the new normal for enterprises investing in IT modernization. It is estimated that 50% of enterprises will have moved to ‘write once, run anywhere’ hybrid and multi-cloud environments by 2023.”   

Prasad Rai 

VP - Applications, Oracle India 

“The current crisis has forced us to rethink our daily lives from work to school to entertainment. In response to lockdown and social distancing norms, most of us had to resort to digital tools to keep some impression of normalcy. We do not have any choice but to digitally transform work and education so that we can operate effectively. Businesses that will use technology well to keep going and rethink their business model for the future by fast-tracking their digital transformation journey will be ones ahead of their competition. The success will depend on how businesses are going to leverage technologies like ERP, HCM so that your people can work, collaborate, and be productive remotely and safely.”   

Trideeb Roy 

Director - Sales, Data Center, Cisco India & SAARC  

“Now, having realized the criticality of making their businesses agile and resilient in the event of a crisis, organizations are increasingly focusing on building a robust cloud infrastructure for elasticity at scale. As the home becomes a base for working, learning, shopping, etc., hybrid cloud architectures, powered by AI/ML, are seeing increased adoption as well. These architectures must be coupled with automated cloud-based management systems to ensure a seamless user experience. In the emerging low-touch economy, as companies strive to leverage new business models and revenue streams, the demand for cloud-delivered, scalable, secure, and simplified management will continue to gain tremendous traction.”  

Balakrishnan Anantharaman

VP & MD - Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix 

"Until now, the flexibility to Work-from-Anywhere was a ‘nice to have’ and not a necessity. This pandemic has changed that and made remote working mainstream almost overnight. Enterprises are looking to cloud technology to help them operate with a remote workforce. Additionally, more companies are looking to maximize resources and move from Capex and hardware-based systems to Opex and ‘as a Service’ solutions. However, as cloud becomes crucial for survivability, the businesses that fail to choose cloud environments with interoperability in mind, are at risk of simply replacing their hardware data silos with data silos in the cloud – reducing the value of their investments.”  

Arun Balasubramanian

MD- India & SAARC, ServiceNow  

“India has witnessed rapid digital adoption, people are adjusting to new ways of working and we’ve reached a new era in 2020, where organisations are adopting a cloud-first or a cloud-only strategy to meet business imperatives. In traditional industries, we have seen complete makeovers, putting digital workflows at the centre of their entire operations. For digital businesses, innovation has been rife as companies use automation to free up people from admin to focus on delivering the best digital products and services to meet changing consumer demands. India also has many shared services centres for global multinationals, run directly or outsourced to technology partners, looking for digital workflows at scale.”

Experts Speak: 

Mitesh Jain 

Country Sales Manager – Media & Carriers Division, Akamai Technologies   

“Since the pandemic hit, we have been working with our customers and carrier partners to maintain continuity for their businesses and helping them mitigate and minimize network congestion. Since our infrastructure is deployed deep into carrier networks, we can help them avoid overload by diverting traffic away from areas experiencing high levels of congestion. Despite the major network congestion caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, Akamai’s customers were able to enjoy enhanced web and mobile app experiences along with improved website performance. Our platform also protected various applications from the largest DDoS threats by responding to application-layer attacks within seconds.”

Kishore P. Durg

Senior MD, Lead – Intelligent Cloud & Infrastructure, Accenture Technology   

"Organizations are looking to tap the cloud to manage the immediate challenges of business continuity, demand fluctuation, security threats and workforce productivity, to build a resilient business. The pandemic also continues to present global business with cybersecurity threats, including opportunistic phishing campaigns, discontinuity of information security operations and long-term financial constraints. While adopting cloud, companies across industries should plan for these challenges to persist for months and to have long-term effects. They must ensure control over the security of their data when hosted on the cloud with the right security protocols and solutions to mitigate these risks.”

Nitin Jadhav

Head of Solution Engineering, Yotta Infrastructure  

“We have come to terms with the new norm of remote working. Enterprises who were evaluating cloud computing till now, have realised the need and importance of the same. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) has gained tremendous acceptance, as companies are looking to provide secured and reliable access to their employees. Besides this, High Compute Intensive (HCI) services are in demand by design houses and video production houses who cannot access their local machines but want a powerful system on the cloud that can process their graphic intensive tasks with ease.”

Sandeep Soni

GM & VP - Engineering, Clumio India  

"With work from home and remote learning scenarios being rapidly deployed, the attack surface for these organizations has been greatly increased. Organizations can quickly plan for these new realities by leveraging enterprise SaaS applications. Data protection is also a challenge that companies face during this crisis. As organizations learn that the availability of needed hardware may be interrupted and that people may be locked down and unable to physically access data centers to do hardware installs, a touchless cloud application delivered as a service becomes very attractive to them. In the case of data protection, choosing the right solution can give users instant access to data protection capabilities to ensure SLAs can be achieved even when capacity runs low on existing systems."

Experts Speak: 

Hitesh Sahijwala

Director - Sales at Red Hat India & South Asia 

“The pandemic has underlined the importance of being resilient, flexible and agile for organizations across the globe. As a result, businesses will continue to focus on strengthening their digital capabilities using hybrid clouds. Hybrid cloud allows seamless interoperability of applications, workloads and data across IT environments (i.e. on-premises, private, or public clouds) as necessary. Organizations will also focus more on building cloud-native applications as they are better at responding to change and uncertainty and helps them to take their ideas to market faster. For example, the demand for services has increased in the telco industry, and they need to significantly scale up their infrastructure and dynamically prioritise their services as more people work from home. They are prioritising projects such as universal cloud across IT and network functions to achieve flexibility and cost optimization.”

Ashwin Kumar

Director - Data Center & Cloud Operations, Linode India  

“Today digital transformation and cloud planning are at the heart of all business strategies. We’ve seen a sharp spike in demand as a result of companies rapidly moving workloads to the cloud, especially from companies in the IT & ITES, pharmaceutical, banking, and e-commerce sectors. SMEs, too are rethinking their business models and rapidly embracing the cloud to enable collaboration and remote working, minimize infrastructure ownership expenses, and manage fluctuating demand. We suspect this increased demand will continue as companies turn to alternative providers like us to better manage their cloud computing costs and strengthen their multi-cloud and business continuity implementations."

Gautam Rege

Co-founder & Director, Josh Software   

“We have seen a great surge in digital-first services over the last few months, and much of this growth can be attributed to the cloud. It’s almost become a way of life for workplaces to function now! The biggest example shows how efficient cloud can be, is that of telemedicine. Three months ago, people would patiently (pun intended) wait in line for doctor appointments. Now, no one wants to visit clinics till absolutely necessary! Telemedicine has blown up and how! It’s a similar case for education. Collaboration tools have seen a massive surge in usage in the education sector, and almost every other school that can afford it is using it without raising the child!” 

Experts Speak:

Gaurav Agarwal

Senior Director – Enterprise Sales, VMware India  

“With an increasing number of businesses embracing Remote Work, workloads also will be moved to the cloud increasingly. But there's a lot of pressure on businesses to cut costs these days due to the ongoing crisis. Businesses for their existing contracts with cloud vendors are spending a lot of energy on making sure that their money gets well spent. Hence, every business is re-evaluating its cost as a whole- for example, the utilization of the cloud, re-examining the workload that they have already moved to the cloud, whether they justify the costs or not, whether they can be run in a comparatively cheaper cloud, so on and so forth.”

Rajesh Awasthi 

Associate VP, Managed Hosting & Cloud Services, Tata Communications  

“Moving forward, as we continue further into this new normal, IT budgets will naturally take a hit. CIOs will face a crunch as they need to ensure their projects are executed, but with lower budgets. Opex models will continue to be preferred in these circumstances as opposed to large or long term Capex investments. The pay per use flexibility that cloud solutions offer is preferred and likely to continue as a trend. However, the value of the cloud has gone beyond simple cost savings. Its ability to improve productivity, agility, resilience has been proven and tested during COVID times. Going forth, more and more organisations will look at digital means for doing business and will explore options on the Cloud especially retail, travel, manufacturing, etc.”

Nikunj Vora

Regional VP, APAC, Qubole 

“Businesses across verticals, barring a few, have been adversely impacted by the COVID-19 situation. This has shone a very bright light on the need to Innovate on Total Cost of Growth. Our customers are pegging the cost of technology against growth targets. There is pressure on improving unit economics. For a few verticals such as EduTech, HealthTech, and Gaming, the challenge has been to scale rapidly without degrading customer experience. Cloud as an infrastructure choice provides an elastic building place that fast-paced innovation needs and the end-user experience for daily services using Cloud is far superior than the services using legacy technology.” 

Narendra Bhandari

SVP, Persistent Systems in the Chief Strategy Office  

“With the disruptions from COVID-19 and the potential uncertainty for future disruptions, there is more urgency to move to the cloud. Cloud usage is accelerating and many companies are expecting cloud usage to exceed their prior plans. The evolving world-wide financial conditions due to COVID-19 and the increasing adoption of cloud usage have accelerated the need for continuous cloud cost optimization. On-demand cloud spend provides nearly immediate savings once idle resources are eliminated or over-provisioned resources are downsized. A focused plan for cloud cost optimization can provide significant cost savings. Companies are likely to see flat cloud costs or even price cuts as well for the foreseeable future from cloud service providers.”  

Phanikishore Burre

SVP & Delivery Head – Network, Cloud, Infrastructure & Security Services, CSS Corp 

“We have been witnessing a mixed trend in cloud adoption depending on the health of different sectors. While telecom and healthcare companies have significantly increased cloud solutions adoption, the IT & ITES and the BFSI segments have maintained their spend. However, we have witnessed a slight decline in cloud spends by the retail and manufacturing industries, who were heavily affected by the pandemic. As forecast by IDC, as a result of the pandemic, 64% of the organizations in India are expected to increase demand for cloud computing and 56% for cloud software. We witnessed an increased market demand in hybrid cloud migration models, especially in the healthcare sector.”     

Experts Speak:

Lionel Legros

General Manager, Asia Pacific, OVHcloud  

“We believe that a multi-cloud approach provides the most comprehensive mix of public and private clouds, and they don’t necessarily need to be integrated, unlike the hybrid cloud. Moreover, businesses today don’t have to be locked into one provider. Combining on-premises and cloud infrastructure with a multi-cloud strategy has allowed our customers to connect to networks in a totally isolated and secure way, via numerous points of presence around the world. It has also allowed organisations to shift to the cloud at their own pace and take a flexible approach – all while responding to their strategic objectives. Businesses can control and run an application, workload, or data on any cloud (public, private, and hybrid) based on their individual technical requirements.”

Sandeep Bhambure

VP & MD, India & SAARC, Veeam Software 

“Projects requiring new hardware deployments are stalled due to the operational challenges on the ground. There are not enough staff on the ground to install them also. Hence businesses have been looking at Cloud very seriously to move certain workloads to the cloud. Cloud service providers have built enough capacity, which customers could use easily. To help customers adopt hybrid cloud easily, cloud service providers have been leveraging solutions that can instantly migrate multiple virtual machines or workloads from the customer environment to the cloud of their preference. Businesses are also increasingly turning to cloud data management solutions to protect the mission-critical workloads in the cloud and a faster recovery of them.”

Rahul Ambegaoker

Senior Director & Region Head, West, NTT Ltd. (India)  

“In the rush to move to the cloud, workloads were shifted irrespective of whether they are cloud-ready and viable. Transparency of managing the infrastructure in cloud lends itself to sprawl and the eventual dissonance on the corresponding ROI. There are talks of repatriation of workloads that clients are not seeing adequate benefit from the ad hoc movement. CIOs can find it hard to get a single view of performance and compliance information. A robust cloud management platform (CMP) with a managed services partner can go a long way in giving them the ability to handle a complex and fast-changing cloud-based environment.”

Experts Speak:

Nilesh Jain

VP, Southeast Asia & India, Trend Micro   

“Threats and security weaknesses in several key areas of cloud-based computing can put credentials and company secrets at risk. The findings from our cloud security research highlight misconfiguration as the primary cause of cloud security issues. Cloud-based operations have become the rule rather than the exception, and cybercriminals have adapted to capitalize on misconfigured or mismanaged cloud environments, costing businesses large sums of money and even their reputations. As the number of components for various cloud architectures increase, we expect to see a rise in the number of misconfigurations. We identify 230 million misconfigurations on average each day, which proves that this risk is widespread.” 

Adam Palmer 

Chief Cybersecurity Strategist, Tenable  

“Even before the health crisis, the adoption of cloud services afforded organizations enormous speed and agility advantages and has driven the emergence of DevOps practices. Yet for all of their advantages, cloud computing and DevOps introduce new complexities for security teams, as serverless assets can create security blind spots. This combined with the recent transition to remote work, where personal devices are introduced to the corporate network, only further expand the attack surface. We’ve seen several phishing scams, misinformation and fraudulent work-from-home opportunities making their way around the internet. These could potentially put the wider corporate network at risk if accessed.” 

Rajesh Maurya 

Regional VP, India & SAARC, Fortinet 

“CISOs who were methodically planning their cloud security strategies suddenly didn’t have the luxury of time in their “to cloud or not to cloud” deliberations. With the prevalence towards multi-cloud, security teams needed experts who could handle different cloud architectures, security tools and integrations needed to secure multiple clouds can become a complex burden on security teams that are already stretched thin during the crisis. Businesses were turning to service providers for help and guidance, but opening the environment to integrations from multiple third-parties may solve temporary challenges, and may even become part of the long-term business strategy. t Hence it is more important than ever to thoroughly vet and evaluate these partnerships to ensure their security standards meet or exceed that of the business requirement.”  

Dhananjay Ganjoo 

MD -India & SAARC, F5 Networks 

“According to the IDC’s Covid-19 Impact on IT spending Survey, 64% of firms in India will increase demand for cloud computing as it enables businesses to scale at speed, at a predictable cost. But no matter where you are on the cloud journey, security remains a major concern. In a hybrid cloud environment, security challenges include the lack of visibility across application portfolios, tool sprawl from multiple application architectures, and the shortage of skilled security professionals to adequately support the complexity of security requirements in the cloud. With cities lockdowns and a remote workforce, where millions of people migrate to online applications so quickly, security challenges grow commensurately. We have seen many cases where bad actors have worked to exploit the new stay-home economy.” 

Brijesh Miglani 

Lead – Security Consultant, Forcepoint   

“Many organisations have begun migrating to the cloud and they are using different types of cloud services to ensure their employees can work remotely and collaborate. Now that people are working from home, the organizational data is also spread across multiple clouds, cloud apps, personal devices and data centers. Organisations must secure their data and their people wherever they are. CISOs can no longer work within templated security programs. By understanding the behavior of identities on the network, IT security would have visibility into user actions and be able to differentiate between legitimate and risk behaviors. By Combining it with automated threat detection, companies can keep critical data from getting out.”

Milind Borate

Co-founder & CTO, Druva 

“In response to the pandemic and remote work, organizations are adopting Data-as-a-Service to manage small data sprawl. As data centres no longer meet their needs, they are adopting data management solutions that provide a cloud “metadata centre”. Data is moving out of the data centre to locations all over the world. While real-time processing happens at the edge, the data must be centralized for analysis, protection, and compliance. Meanwhile, an increasingly remote workforce is expanding the use of endpoint devices, SaaS, and cloud-native applications to do their jobs, and that data must be secured and protected.”