To stay relevant with the ever-changing trends of the technology industry, organizations are now prioritizing growth, speed and innovation over cost. This, in turn, is leading these organizations to expand their digital investments for achieving operational excellence, accelerating business performance, and becoming more agile. With CIOs considering cloud technology as a catalyst towards technology modernization, the result is substantial increase on spending to procure technology.
Unlike the conventional ways of working, and with the technology ecosystem changing rapidly, many organizations are adopting cloud services and cloud platforms to shift their workloads; thus, increasing their expenditure on technology infrastructure to build a more robust cloud-enabled/high-availability environment. A study conducted by global research giant Gartner suggests a sharp spike in the technology deployment of over 80% organizations, due to fewer options available for cost optimization.
The most prominently used, hybrid cloud technology, is a fusion of on-premises, private, and public cloud technologies, in a well-orchestrated environment. It enables organizations to achieve economies of scale; simultaneously providing data security and scalability. Markets and Market research predicts the hybrid cloud market to reach $97.6 billion by 2023, growing exponentially at a CAGR of 17%; with major growth governed by North America. This accelerated hybrid cloud adoption over public cloud services is not only due to the standalone fact that it provides multiple advantages of working in a public cloud environment like scalability and business continuity, but also, that it comes with an option of retaining some of the legacy apps on-premise cloud.
Hybrid Cloud and Intelligent AI is the Next Big Wave
Businesses are transforming rapidly with artificial intelligence (AI) reinventing the ways of working and minimizing the need of human intervention. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that spending on AI technology will overrun $79 billion globally by 2022. Artificial intelligence has a profound impact on every industry and every aspect of business– from strategy to IT infrastructure, including cloud adoption.
The symbiosis of cloud and AI is resulting in accelerated adoption of both. Both intelligent AI technology and hybrid cloud technology together provide accurate, affordable computing and a channel to leverage large chunks of data. Their technological union enables businesses to manage their data effectively– streamlining the data management process and scalability (broad scope), highlighting patterns and trends in data, delivering strategic insights and recommendations, improving customer experience, and optimize workflows.
Robotic process automation (RPA) using AI technology in a hybrid cloud environment provides promising improvements via AI applications:
- Costs: With businesses tending to shift their capacities on to a cloud environment and increase container usage, cost optimization becomes the biggest problem. Here, AI technology comes into the picture by helping in detecting significant increase in costs– deep insights of used and unused resources and helping businesses install intelligent automation to address such issues. Further, AI applications run on systems that require advanced GPUs which can prove to be highly expensive, especially, for pilot projects. However, with hybrid cloud, artificial Intelligence as a service allows organizations to pay only for what they use and suspending if the pilot project does not work out. AI services rolled out on hybrid cloud platforms, in the form of image and speech recognition, etc., eliminates the need for organizations to have a high-cost, skilled AI talent workforce.
- Security and Compliance: Organizations stay security-compliant with AI embedded in a hybrid cloud environment. The technology provides real-time information about any configured event by issuing an instant alert and generating logs, hence, facilitating a better understanding and providing a mechanism to track the relevant activities. With the paradigm shift in the technology ecosystem, organizations are constantly struggling to maintain compliance with respect to data security and privacy. AI plays a critical role in helping the organizations to stay updated with the ever-changing compliance universe; thus, promoting business resilience.
The HCLTech Perspective– Hybrid Cloud Automation
Enterprises are competing continuously because of the dire need to stay relevant in the market. They are undertaking huge technology transformations to drive business success and thrive in the industry. At present, a CIO might want to have a seamless hybrid cloud experience with the benefits of private cloud for control and security, extended to public cloud and vice-versa.
To achieve an equilibrium of technology and economics, organizations are fast adopting a DevOps approach backed by the hybrid cloud model. Infrastructure agility, automation, and simplified orchestration become the key pillars in helping business operations modernize with not only improved efficiency, but also the competitive position in the market to stay ahead and head in the direction of a more service-oriented economy.
HCLTech’s DRYiCE framework is one such means of transforming complex IT and simplifying business operations by leveraging artificial intelligence and driving cloud automation. While HCLTech works with its global customer base in defining their hybrid cloud journey; one of the biggest asks from these customers is faster time to market. As a service provider, HCLTech understands that each enterprise has a unique motivation behind deploying a cloud platform. The objective can be as simple as to gain access to a better functionality to as convoluted as to become agile, achieve scalability or to do away with complex IT infrastructure and data center ownerships (cost savings). HCLTech’s cloud-native solutions infused with intelligence bring in improved efficiency with automation, reduced cost of maintenance, optimum resource utilization, enhanced AI applications, and improved customer experience.
HCLTech strongly believes that a cloud state-of-mind is essential for enterprises to be service-led, reliable, scalable, and robust with reduced effort. HCLTech has the experience and capability to integrate IT with cloud platform functionalities, right alliances, and partnerships, along with the appropriate tools to support the enterprise cloud journey. HCLTech follows a very strong and structured approach to deliver cloud services starting with advisory/consulting (assessing and creating a road map for the ease of developing future automation and optimization initiatives) followed by a design phase where IT transforms the traditional operations model into an extended model which is faster, dynamic, drives automation and provides a seamless client experience.
Conclusion
With the current pandemic outbreak, technology will be seen through a new lens and dynamics will change. Business and technology will work more collaboratively in the future. On-premises IT infrastructure would need to be moved from a more complex CAPEX-heavy to a simplified OPEX model.
Where Indian businesses were following a steady pace toward adopting cloud, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst. Hybrid cloud has emerged as an ally for enterprises and ensured seamless remote working. To ensure business continuity and workforce enablement, CIOs will now take cloud technology and artificial intelligence more seriously than before to de-risk their business operations, increase profits, optimize costs, and build new channels of reaching customers and much as, maintaining security and compliance.
