Digital transformation has become crucial to sustaining and enhancing business operations in the post-Covid era. Today, businesses want to accelerate their processes, improve margins, reduce costs while driving growth, and produce best of class customer experience.

With a fast-paced transition to online mode of conducting business, buying, and working, organisations see digital as their key operating model, resilient enough to support the peak traffic and to also respond to any disruptions to the business.

Contactless interactions are now ruling the roost, and soon, every organisation will be a digital firm where collaboration tools, artificial intelligence, analytics, IoT, and high-speed internet will be on the forefront of operations.

Invoking the game-changer

Enterprises need help in regenerating the core, consolidating data centres, and modernising their applications to achieve their business aspirations. Cloud technologies can modernise application landscape of an enterprise while mitigating the risks that come along with the transition from legacy to digital.

Moving to cloud enables organisations to work in continuous deployment and continuous delivery mode where they can keep pace with the ever-changing demands of customers and infrastructure needs. Organisations using cloud can ignore the infrastructure worries that accompany any modern enterprise and lets them focus on their core priority.

Leading cloud providers have taken an extra leap and even resolved the pain point of privacy and regulations compliance by assuring relevant data that is stored on cloud is deployed to appropriate data centres with the right security provisions. With the plethora of benefits offered and the optimised pricing, cloud is an essential step for any organisation on its journey towards digital transformation driven by the need for low costs, availability, ease of scalability, and robust infrastructure.

A hybrid cloud strategy allows users and businesses to focus on their application and business requirements while not having to worry about infrastructure provisioning or cost optimisation.

It has become imperative for IT leaders to turn their emphasis on hybrid cloud adoption over single-cloud or public-cloud-only implementation.

Many organisations today have three-pronged imperatives when they plan for their future-state technology infrastructure. The first, is to protect the sensitive data and provide data security.

The second imperative is to comply with privacy and data regulations to the geographies they operate their business in. The final imperative is to outsource all infrastructure pains while almost nullifying capital expenditures and reducing operational costs. The cloud strategy that emerges as a winner in meeting these three imperatives is hybrid cloud.

Due to its distributed nature, hybrid cloud enables minimising outages and improving agile scaling of an enterprise and necessitates the use of private data to store sensitive information rather than publishing it on a public cloud. It further enables organisations to have localised data centres to meet specific compliance needs of a region and pick and choose cloud services thereby establishing a perfect return on investment.

What makes cloud so attractive to businesses? One of the reasons is that there are different cloud services offered in the market that a business can pick and choose to suit its needs.

Private cloud addresses a set of customer requirements, which can be handled by either the organisation or a third-party systems integrator who can offer public cloud like cloud native capabilities.

Hybrid cloud with its robust capabilities is emerging as a winner in many digital transformation initiatives. It leverages a combination of IT solutions to bring the best of two worlds — the security and control of private cloud coupled with the flexible and cost-saving elements of public cloud.

The writer is Executive Vice-President, Head of Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions and Infosys Validation Solutions

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