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The need for enterprise-grade capabilities

Often organisations shy away from the public cloud due to apprehensions over scaleability and robustness. They want their cloud to provide not just compute choices but configurable auto-scaling that allows them to optimise for dynamic, demanding, sensitive, and secure workloads. They also seek a wide range of choices in how they migrate and provision workloads. The bottom line is they need enterprise-grade capabilities that they normally do not associate with the public cloud.

The security dilemma

Over the last few years, most players in the highly regulated industries such as BFSI, healthcare, life sciences, and telecommunications sectors were merely migrating non-critical applications and data to the public cloud as a test to validate cloud technology and to extend the capacity of existing applications. However, most of these sectors are at an inflection point as they continue to combat newer and disruptive business models from startups. Adding to the woes is the impact of unprecedented events such as Covid-19 requiring organisations to consider cloud as a credible option as they look to increase their digital presence.

The good news is that the modern-day cloud technologies allay their cybersecurity concerns by improving data confidentiality, encryption, and isolation--the three essential elements of cloud security. By leveraging identity and access management, networking and host security (security groups and firewalls), the bring-your-own-keys model for data encryption, application security, and DevSecOps and single pane of glass view for cloud-based workloads, organisations are treading on a path to secure public cloud. Already, a few visionary companies across the globe are successfully embracing public cloud platforms tailored to address their specific requirements. Such businesses have been able to improve their innovation cycles and time-to-market while trimming IT costs.

Open techpath to innovation, trust, and value

Organisations face barriers to innovation from a technology standpoint when they are burdened with legacy proprietary software and solutions that prevent them from leveraging technologies that foster innovation. It is widely accepted that open architectures based on Kubernetes and containers will drive the next wave of cloud-based business innovation. When open-source technology is at the heart of the public cloud, organisations gain from instant deployment, automated vulnerability management, and self-healing resiliency without vendor lock-in.

Leapfrogging the adoption curve

Cloud has evolved leading to maturing of foundational technologies but enterprise-grade, secure and open environments are vital to wider adoption and innovation. India has a unique opportunity to leapfrog the curve in the adoption of the public cloud for mission-critical, enterprise workloads. The country has always been a great adopter of disruptive technologies and innovative solutions across highly regulated industries--be it blockchain for banking or Unified Payments Interface for cashless transactions. The opportunity is ripe for India to take the lead in public cloud implementation and reap the benefits as businesses shift from migrate and modernise to build and innovate on the cloud.

Views are personal.

The author is general manager of IBM India/South Asia

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The evolution and emerging imperatives of public cloud - Fortune India