The world is going through an unprecedented phase. Businesses are struggling to stay afloat as various curbs and resource crunch are ailing all aspects of the business operations. IT, as we know, is an important aspect in all businesses. As work from anywhere becomes the new normal, teamwork and collaboration in an office room becomes a thing of past and throws up challenges aplenty. For example, connecting to datacenter servers to resolve an issue may not always be possible from home due to network or security limitations. Moreover, resources are spread out and work in silos from their homes. In a situation, where a large number of organizations are working with reduced staff, what happens if there is a network issue or VPN server or power outage in your datacenter and no one can access the location? How do you ensure you maintain your critical applications and IT operations without disruptions?

Meeting customer expectations and demand is important for every business. As going digital becomes increasingly mainstream, banks, insurance companies, and even car manufacturers are taking their services online. Have you recently called a contact center only to be directed to use their online portal? Have you experienced booking your next car online or have a virtual tour of an upcoming residential property? As customers are getting attuned to getting online services, frequent unavailability of your customer-facing applications will result in losing your customers to the competition. Customers also want additional features on these feature-rich applications, thus making it necessary to ensure their availability at all times. How do you ensure availability and service resilience while enabling new services quickly for your customers?

All organizations want to maximize their profits. IT too needs to play its part to optimize the spending. Demand keeps changing frequently, there are months when the demands increase, while there are months of lean usage. Similarly, there are days or times during the day when the demand peaks while there will be times when the demand becomes lean. Tuning the infrastructure resources to this behavior would help optimize cost. The automation of all aspects of IT is imperative to optimize costs and bring maximum utilization of existing resources. It is thus critical to inculcate automation at all steps and make repeatable patterns. How do you achieve the required elasticity of the infrastructure and application resources?

There are pros and cons to providing online services that we should be aware of. While shifting all services online helps increase customer satisfaction, the imperative to ensure the uptime of operations and provide error-free services with an intuitive user interface to customers is on the organization. How can you utilize artificial intelligence and predictive analytics in IT to detect and prevent major downtimes and prevent errors/issues or intrusions/security attacks?

While cloud adoption is at an all-time high and most customers want to host their applications on the cloud, some services and data cannot be moved to the cloud immediately. This could be because of the nature of service, compliance, or security reasons. The need of the hour is to adopt a hybrid configuration. And it’s not about having a few instances running on cloud. A hybrid architecture provides an integrated perspective for operations, monitoring, security, event correlation, logging etc., across the datacenters. These activities, if performed in isolation will result in increased complexity. How do you build a secure hybrid architecture and manage it efficiently?

While the first step to public cloud is to use public cloud IaaS services, the real benefit is to maximize the usage of PaaS services. It is important to invigorate your applications, dismantle them, and integrate with the Cloud PaaS services. The ideal state should include Kubernetes services, serverless capabilities, etc. Have you assessed your applications to integrate with PaaS services and discovered what it would take to modernize them?

Cloud, digital transformation, and modernization are not one-time affair but journeys that one needs to undertake. What may be a transformed and modern application today would become a legacy tomorrow if not regularly revamped. Technology is changing at a terrific speed and we ought to keep pace with the advances to stay relevant. How do you sustain the leadership position you attain?  Do you have a culture of continuous innovation and change to keep pace with the industry and disruptions that will happen? How do you ensure your resources are continuously trained and skilled with latest trends?

These are just few of the questions that we at HCLTech address through Cloud Smart. These are pillars on which we base the Cloud Smart strategy. Cloud Smart helps customers with appropriate use cases based on their industry. With this capability, our customers become the pioneer in their industry vertical by continuously adopting innovative solutions. Cloud Smart partners with all hyperscalers to deploy customer’s applications on cloud and enabling ubiquitous secure access. HCLTech brings in vast capabilities to modernize and revamp applications that are designed keeping in mind the best practices of loosely coupled application patterns built-in cloud-native and cloud-first architectural patterns.

With HCLTech’s Cloud Native labs, ecosystem partnership with hyperscalers, and dedicated technology Centre of Excellence, Cloud Smart ensures to continuously improve, innovate, and optimize the customer services. HCLTech Cloud Smart also brings in automation at all levels to quickly build, migrate, extend, and expand on cloud while ensuring the availability, resilience, and secure operations of the services and applications for our customers. Cloud Smart brings in extreme automation, observability and predictable analytics as well as AI/ML inclusions to the systems.  A well-rounded cloud culture and cloud strategy powered by industry patterns and FinOps principles is the end goal achieved through Cloud Smart.