Successful CIOs will drive innovation using the best available platforms, including public cloud.
While you are a leader and not just a technology guardian, you need to determine when, which, and how many public cloud services to consume, says Technology research firm Forrester.
Until recently, CIOs across India and Southeast Asia (SEA), especially in regulated industries, had limited access to services from local cloud or colocation providers, as global providers with more mature services were based only in Singapore.
Now that global cloud providers are opening new cloud regions in India and SEA, CIOs will have more choices.
Vendors across India and SEA still engage in a lot of cloudwashing, as it garners attention. If a service does not offer cloud features like self-service consumption, pay-per-use pricing and elastic scalability, it should not feature in the CIO’s portfolio of cloud services. Make sure that the cloud you are buying is actually a cloud.
Forrester cautions not to start shopping for services until you know who you are trying to empower with cloud, what problems you are trying to solve, and how you will get there with the team and skills you have today.
Firms in India and SEA are increasingly using public cloud services to drive their digital business agenda.
The availability of innovative public cloud services has had an impact on industries and business models, turning traditional businesses into digital ones across the banking, insurance, communications, eCommerce, and transportation verticals.
For example, Mahindra’s SmartShift startup is using a collection of Google cloud services to digitally enable goods transportation.
The research firm says a cloud-first strategy can transform your business into a digital predator, whereas a no-cloud strategy could make you into digital prey.
In India and SEA region, local providers like Bharti Airtel, NetMagic, and Singtel win, serve, and retain customers in their respective domestic markets on the strength of factors like the perceived security of the services hosted within the country. It will help them address the security-related concerns and win over local businesses.
IoT in India
Technology leaders in India are in the early stages of adopting Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for business innovation.
Organisations’ unfamiliarity with the new technology is compounded by the number vendors claiming to have exactly the solution you need, making it difficult to select the right IoT partner.
The key industries leveraging IoT in India are manufacturing, energy and logistics. Forrester says, these verticals need to look beyond cost savings and link IoT initiatives with revenue generation or business model enablement to fully realize their potential.
Forrester says technology leaders will benefit from emerging IoT vendors. The firm identified three vendors – Flutura Decision Sciences and Analytics, Altizon Systems and Entrib Technologies – who offer compelling IoT software and application platforms.
