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Silloo: Hello, this is Silloo, welcoming you to a new episode of the EY Tech Trends Podcast, where we look at the most important issues that India Inc needs to know in its digitization journey. Today, we are discussing the new trends shaping up in the enterprise cloud sector. The cloud has become the primary driver of business growth in the post-pandemic world. Organizations are adopting the technology for various reasons, such as business transformation, security, innovation and many more. With so much action in the sector, cloud technology itself is also undergoing many changes to cater to the ever-growing needs of the industry. To explain all these recent developments, we have with us Abhinav Johri, Technology Consulting Partner, focusing on cloud and digital transformation at EY India. A very warm welcome to the podcast Abhinav, and thanks very much for joining us today.

Abhinav: Thanks for inviting me, Silloo.  

Silloo: Abhinav, let me start with a straight question — how has the pandemic reshaped cloud adoption, according to you?

Abhinav: Well, the COVID-19 pandemic is the one factor that has prompted organizations to advance the pace of digitization, and we all have seen that. More importantly, the pandemic has shifted the mindset to considering cloud as a lever for growth, innovation, and enhanced security rather than just as a technological improvement. Progressively, organizations are seeing cloud as the pivot to execute transformation initiatives – be it for business or for internal technology functions – that are mainly aimed to improve indicators of interest for the CXOs, such as time to market, systemic touchpoints reduction, derived experiences for our customers, employees and suppliers, and delivering IT services at scale. So, in a nutshell, what most of the CXOs could not have achieved with innovation in the technology, the pandemic has proven to be a great boost. And that is what we are seeing in the market today.

Silloo: That is interesting. Abhinav, what makes industry clouds special? How do they help? 

Abhinav: Per se, the cloud ecosystem has evolved considerably, from just being an alternative to an upfront capex-heavy, on-premises IT model to an opex or subscription-based model, thus providing visible impact on the economic profile of the technology. One of the challenges during cloud adoption is to achieve unification and standardization of the business processes, including the IT services supporting the business. And that is not as easy as it sounds. It is often an impediment to a successful realization of the business case for cloud adoption itself. And we see this in the market very often with our clients as well. Therefore, the next wave of advancements in the cloud ecosystem needs to resolve the friction related to its adoption. Hence, it should provide out-of-the-box capabilities or normative capabilities in the form of process templates, intelligent insighting, low-code/no-code features which are very contextualized to sectorial nuances. 

If the cloud has to be the answer to solving complex business challenges, then one has to start preempting the use cases by sectors and deliver them in almost a ready-to-consume format. That would be the ‘Aha!’ moment for the industry when they are looking forward to adopting cloud more than where they are today. 

Silloo: Wonderful. Of the various cloud solutions available now, one is Environment-as-a- Service. What is it? How is it different from other forms of cloud such as software, platform, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service? 

Abhinav: It is a classic example of how shift-left in product strategy can be instrumental in adding value to an ecosystem and providing frictionless access to the building blocks that are needed to build cloud-native capabilities. For example, think about applications buildout or modernization of legacy systems, or even digitization based upon cloud-native products. In simple words, it is a step further to the existing capabilities that are extensively used in the organization, such as infrastructure-as-code. I take that example to make it easier to appreciate the value that Environment-as-a-Service brings to the table. In infrastructure-as-code, in addition to the deployment of the infrastructure, one can also take advantage of existing configurations and settings, and even code for that matter, which are needed to run various components of it, including software, but in an ‘as-a-service’ model. The highlight of Environment-as-a-Service is that it brings pace to a lot of operational activities such as product development life cycles, test sprints, quality and performance activities, migrations, and in many cases, production support as well. In short, if the Environment-as-a-Service is adopted well, it has a direct impact on time to market.

Silloo: Very interesting. Abhinav, what role does metaverse play in cloud redesign?

Abhinav: Fantastic. We could not have completed our podcast on cloud without talking about metaverse. The metaverse relies heavily on the cloud, we all know this. Simply speaking, as a market or an organization generates more and more business impacting and tangible use cases of metaverse, it would result in scaled consumption of cloud capabilities such as compute, storage, and security. The fact is, the world is still to come to a point where there is a fair understanding of metaverse and its use has been fully translated from a concept to a scaled implementation. That is a phenomenon that every technology progression undergoes as its evolution trajectory. If one were to predict, then one of the offshoots in cloud evolution would shift focus to provisioning infrastructure with very high-processing capabilities, such as higher usage of GPU-enabled cloud compute and storage. Further, it would pave the way for a metaverse-focused cloud — very similar to the industry cloud that we just spoke about. If we can provide a model wherein metaverse can be provided on a service-based model, that would become the epitome of the metaverse impacting the cloud and its redesign. Lastly, as meta in cloud evolves, the other topics that would get further attention and would need immense thought leadership are data privacy, cloud or multi-cloud architectures, and resilience. We cannot take our eyes off these as we continue to evolve metaverse-like use cases in the cloud ecosystem.

Silloo: So, what are your thoughts on how organizations should reap all the cloud benefits and still keep their cloud budget under check?

Abhinav: Successful cloud adoption stories are often built on three main pillars: sponsorship from the top; clear multi-year roadmap tied to business-oriented use cases; and operational governance, which includes the aspect of “cloud economics”. Cloud mandates in many organizations often lose momentum when they suffer inconsistent funding and lack of talent to run and manage them. Organizations should consider focusing on financial operations of cloud as one of the qualification criteria to assess the efficacy of the cloud strategy. I think that is the main qualifying point if organizations were to have a successful cloud adoption within their aimed budget. 

Certain strategic interventions can be considered. For example, a tool-led monitoring of consumption and utilization of cloud resources on a real-time basis. Second, designing a combination of detective plus corrective controls on the cloud ecosystem that can ensure budget thresholds are not breached while running cloud resources. And lastly, dedicating a team or a POD responsible for stabilizing the governance of the cloud operations and continue reporting till the time FinOps (financial operations) becomes a part of cloud operations by design. 

These are some of the strategic interventions that organizations can consider to continue reaping the benefits of cloud, and to mitigate a budget spillover. 

Silloo: Thanks a lot for sparing the time, Abhinav. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Abhinav: Thank you, Silloo.

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