COVID-19 Conversations: Cloud Computing

The business landscape as we know it has changed significantly, over the past few months due to COVID-19. With the virus continuing to cause worries, many businesses will be using the final months of the year to look back in the year to see how their organisations have adapted to the changed business landscape and if their strategies need a change.

I caught up with Ramanan Ramakrishna, our expert for Cloud Computing, to understand how the agenda for the technology has changed over the past few months, how businesses have adapted and what lies ahead. This is what I learnt.

How has COVID-19 pushed your portfolio’s agenda and which sector has made the most progress in this regard?

Before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many firms were looking to cloud computing as a way of accelerating the digital shift but were held back by the change barriers that inevitably come with business technology transformation. The tipping point was the realisation that the risk of doing nothing to adapt to the challenges caused by COVID-19 were far greater than the risk of deploying new technologies. And ever since, cloud has been leveraged by public and private organisations at pace never thought possible before.

One of the biggest advantages of adopting the cloud is that any business can regain business continuity even in unforeseen circumstances. Something that can prove crucial just like we’ve all experienced with COVID-19. It means that no matter where you are or your staff is, you can maintain business as usual without minimal to no disruptions.

Also, there is little debate that there are big advantages to be had with cost savings when moving to the cloud in the right manner. And when it comes to ROI from cloud, comparing capital expenses (CapEx) to operational expenses (OpEx) reveals the cloud is a great way to switch IT spending to a pay-as-you-go model and reduce CapEx costs, as well as reap other benefits. This has also been proven all over again in how businesses have adapted to the pandemic when they have needed to free up resources for the business.

Another result of COVID-19 pandemic has been the greater adoption of cloud computing solutions to ensure an easy transition into and continuity of working from home. With the variety of solutions available, employees can access the computing infrastructures, platforms and services they need to work seamlessly from any location. These can include data business apps, email, file sharing and much more. This is made possible by the cloud’s ability to scale and offer a secure reliable connectivity

Cloud solutions are also proving very useful in different sectors. For instance, manufacturers and media companies are able to better manage spikes in consumer demand, as well as enabling businesses and schools to quickly pivot to remote work and distance learning scenarios that many were not prepared for.

Many small players in the retail sector have moved to or introduced an e-commerce model within a matter of weeks during the pandemic, made possible due to cloud computing.

Another example is the quick adoption of cloud computing in the banking sector. Others than a few evangelists, most banks had only dipped their toes in the technology. The pandemic showed many banks are eager to dive in because cloud-based systems proved their mettle when banks needed to pivot to remote working, quickly upgrade customer-facing software, and snuff out fraud.

What has been the most unexpected outcome of COVID-19 for your portfolio area?

There have been a few changes that are noteworthy.

• The fact that the pandemic has prompted an acceleration in the adoption of cloud technologies by IT leaders worldwide, which looks set to continue for the foreseeable future.
• As remote work and collaboration intensifies, cloud computing has emerged as an ally for enterprises. We are noticing a certain kind of aggression in a few businesses that want to make the move to the cloud, especially those ones who have been procrastinating are now beginning to understand benefits like security and scalability they have been missing out on.
• The lockdowns introduced by the government, has seen companies accelerating the facilities for seamless remote work. With the need to access critical applications and scalability of the infrastructure as a pertinent question, cloud computing has emerged as an essential technology to better enable remote working and ensure a seamless collaboration and access to tools. Cloud technology is enabling employees to work from any location, giving them access via a virtual environment to the same information that they’d have access to from the office via several tools such as Teams, zoom etc.
• Companies with on-premise datacentres are facing challenges in maintaining uptime. This is going to force CIOs to look into cloud adoption and more cloud-based workflows. This will also motivate CIOs in enabling the move as many applications that they have on-premise to the cloud
• Organisations are also migrating to the cloud to gain flexible computing power, to lower the cost of backup/disaster recovery, better business continuity or to turn capital expenses into operational costs.
• We are witnessing Cloud providers offering high level of incentives and discount offers for cost-neutral migrations to cloud – way beyond what makes common sense aimed at locking up customers as much as possible

A number of factors are driving businesses to choose the cloud as the standard for applications, data, and storage. As a result of these experiences business leaders will look at the cloud more seriously than before – both for business continuity, workforce enablement and in general to de-risk their operations. These reasons are not new but the acceleration in cloud adoption to solve these problems is expected to take more prominence.

What trend/practice/process has ended forever?

• Setting up own data centres- The alternative to cloud computing is the traditional on-premise solution, which includes hosting and maintaining private datacentres and servers on a company’s own balance sheet. The inconvenient features of this are that the company will have to maintain the equipment which requires a level of expertise as well as the management of security, licensing and patching of software, and technical support. There is a high upfront cost, increased operational costs, and can take weeks to scale up storage capacity and processing power. This is now on a steady decline.
• Planning and sizing infrastructure for peaks– organisations are no longer planning special infrastructure for peaks. This has been a traditional way of working for example in retail organisations during specific seasons – that has stopped due to COVID as organisations are able to benefit from the scalability of cloud and size optimally and lean on instant burst capacity from Cloud for seasonal workloads.
• Customer notions- customer preconceived notions of what workloads can go on to cloud are also going through a major change. Previously there was a hesitation without any analysis of whether that is possible in moving on to the cloud workloads that were considered critical. With COVID-19, workloads are being evaluated on their own merit and we are now in the position where organisations are approaching situations with a why not attitude even for mission-critical applications.
• Proprietary software- a lot of customers have accelerated the use of enterprise open source software on cloud replacing proprietary software for common applications

What skills are coming to the fore in your portfolio area as a result of COVID?

The pandemic has accelerated the demand for certain skills and disciplines across the jobs market, specifically cloud and security roles.

• Software development, cloud migration, DevSecOps professionals and project management experience are top of the list for hiring managers going into 2021, as well as the security skills to meet a rapidly growing range of attack vectors being faced by modern enterprises.
• Another interesting observation is the rise in demand of business analysts who are able envision the ‘next step’ on the use cases for digital transformation for the business. These employees are able to comprehend and decide the kind of tools a business needs to adopt to leverage the PaaS services cloud has to offer
  • There is also a dearth of FinOps professionals in the market today. The aggressive move to cloud by organisations have caused “OPEX sprawl” – a unique situation of unlimited OPEX spend on cloud infrastructure unknowingly due to the ease of on-the-fly provisioning. This has resulted in a need for FinOps professionals who are able to drive a optimum spend of cloud (someone who understands the financial aspects and optimum level of cloud tech needed) and govern the usage in the right manner.
• Another area where the industry needs skilled professionals is that of DevSecOps. With security being embedded in the cloud, DevSecOps professional are needed to be able to ensure the security is configured and maintained in the way it is compliant.

Have there been any significant developments in your portfolio area that weren’t COVID-19-related this year? What were they? 

• Bigger focus is on using cloud adoption as a lever for sustainability. Corporates are looking at how cloud can help them to drive towards being able to attain their sustainability goals and get on track to attaining carbon neutral commitments. This was in play pre-COVID-19 too but has been accelerated due to the pandemic
• Multi-cloud adoption is starting to increase due to reasons beyond COVID

Has the changing business landscape also changed your approach to how you interact with the industry?

We are being more assertive on the benefits of migrating to the cloud with our customers given we see businesses are more keen than ever to adopt the technology. We are also showing customers a shorter ROI timeframe for migration to cloud even if it means a longer journey to end-state optimal solution. In the current landscape we understand the importance of businesses reaping the benefits of faster ROI to aid funding subsequent iterations and we are focused in delivering that.

Personally, I started providing a lot of pre-read material for most of my meetings to ensure I have everyone’s attention in driving to a solution to help the customer in a faster manner.

I also don’t force anyone to turn on video for calls since we all realise it does not make much of a difference in most meetings and eases many people in the team to contribute to the meeting better instead of being worried about background happenings at home or needing to wearing work clothes !