Why late cloud adoption can hurt your business

Despite being one of the world's leading exporters of software technology talent, the truth is that India is still playing catch-up with the rest of the world when it comes to digital transformation. Indian talent helps navigate technological challenges for multinational corporations but technology is still not a driving force for most businesses in the subcontinent. Small and medium businesses, and especially family-owned affairs, form a wide chunk of the economy. Most of these are not tech-savvy setups but rather institutions where things are done the way they always have been.

However, things are slowly changing. Deep smartphone penetration has helped the digital revolution touch lives across age groups through various chat and video content apps. It won't be long before this revolution transforms business too. The fact that India has one of the world's fastest internet speeds certainly doesn't hurt.

The widespread adoption of digital payment methods, catalyzed by the pandemic, means that businesses are warming up to the idea of leveraging technology as a driver of business. India is on the cusp of change. It is during such paradigm shifts that the new crop of winners emerge, and speed plays a key role. As we go forward, cloud adoption will be one of the factors in deciding which businesses become successful and resilient, and which ones fall behind. It means that if you're not extracting the most value out of the cloud for your business, your competitor may beat you to it. In this blog, let's explore the risks that businesses face by not leveraging the transformative potential of the cloud.

Note: The focus of this article is the software as a service (SaaS) delivery model of cloud, and not the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) models.

Business continuity and data recovery are problem areas

Your employee just stayed up all night working on an important document that needs to be presented at a client meeting the next morning. Just as she is wrapping it up, she realizes that her cursor isn't moving. She moves the mouse vigorously, but the cursor stays put. The truth dawns on her. She hopes for the best, presses Ctrl Alt Delete, and ends up restarting the system. She prays that the file is still available on her word processor. She knows that newer word processors are slightly better at recovering files, but unfortunately, she is on an old system and an old version of the processor. She checks the program and finds nothing.

All the painstaking progress she had made vanishes into thin air. During this crucial time, hours before your client meeting, the last thing your business needed was for disaster to strike in the form of a data loss incident.

Most of us have had similar experiences in our lives. Data loss incidents are par for the course when working in the knowledge economy. However, that doesn't mean accepting it as a fact of life.

With the power of the cloud, data loss becomes a thing of the past. With SaaS apps, your systems can't lose any of your files since none of them were on the systems to begin with. Instead, the files you work on are saved on the internet in real time. The condition of your physical computers becomes largely irrelevant since they will all be running instances of the same web-based applications. This simplifies issues such as machine specification and operating system requirements for running applications. After all, the machines are not doing the heavy lifting. They are simply a conduit for the web.

What we illustrated with the scenario above is a minor example of a data loss incident on the scale of a simple employee. But most Indian businesses are vulnerable to larger incidents of this nature since much of their data is hosted on physical servers or across individual computers. Such incidents can prove to be time-consuming and expensive to remedy. However, when they impact your clients or customers, it is more than a nuisance; it affects your business's credibility. It offers customers an excuse to evaluate other vendors who may promise service without disruptions.

Consider another scenario:

There's an important meeting and Suresh is the only one with the file the client asked for. But Suresh is on vacation and his system is at office.

Remote data access is another issue that becomes simple on the cloud. Thanks to data being hosted on the web, important files can often be retrieved on any system or smartphone by accessing the SaaS application on the internet. This means that your employees will be able to access their work from any location. It is especially useful in a world that is adapting to hybrid and remote work. Today, when most people have constant access to the internet, the cloud makes sense as an ecosystem that enables users to navigate their digital office environment across a range of devices.

Software-related overheads are unnecessarily high

From buying servers and software licenses to staffing the IT personnel required to manage all of it, technology-related costs can mount real fast. It's a daunting prospect for new businesses and yet it's surprising how easily cloud is able to cut through this Gordian knot.

Servers? Say goodbye to physical servers and say hello to online storage. Software upgrades? Forget manually updating software; updates happen online automatically, managed by your SaaS vendors, and completely independent of your hardware. Security? SaaS applications come with a host of top-tier security features built in, from encryption to continuous monitoring. IT personnel? Surely, that can't be helped by the cloud? Well, when all your IT challenges are solved as effectively as illustrated in the above examples, your human resource investments can afford to be a lot less.

And we haven't even talked about pay-as-you-go yet. One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is that it enables you to scale up and scale down your resources (and consequently, costs) according to demand. Typically, once companies invest in computing and storage resources, they realize that there is a lot of wastage, and that they dont get utilized adequately. This is especially true if the industry is one with seasonal demand. This means that in times of low workloads, much of the resources are criminally underutilized.

The pay-as-you-go cloud model is revolutionary in that it enables businesses to avoid wastage of resources and to optimize costs on an ongoing basis. Flexible pricing allows you to pay for the scale and loads that you require at any given time. For instance, one doesn't need to invest in a physical server outright but can subscribe to the required storage and compute costs for a fee that's vastly more economical.

Collaboration—have you experienced the relief of a single source of truth yet?

Here's a trope that is common in sci-fi stories: an individual undergoes a cloning process and creates multiple versions of himself. Skip forward in the story a bit, and now the many versions are fighting over who is boss. The original individual has a hard time proving his legitimacy, and other characters can't decide who the 'real' one is.

Professionals in the modern world experience something like this every day, and it costs businesses time and money to navigate. Yes, we are talking about document and file version control.

You search for an important presentation and open up the folder on your computer where it ought to be stored. You're confronted with 'deck final', 'deck final final', 'deck UPDATED', and 'deck version11'. Which one do you present?

Companies invest time into creating elaborate documents about file naming conventions and file storage best practices that are entirely dedicated to fixing this issue. These precious man-hours could have been saved by using the cloud.

Imagine the amount of time you will save by having just ONE version of a document on the cloud. Forever. Any time that somebody needs to make an update, they can make it on this document that lives on the web. They dont need to save it locally on their system to be able to make changes. The cloud model facilitates easy collaboration, wherein multiple people can operate on a single document at the same time in an intuitive and seamless way.

Consider this pre-cloud scenario:

• Akash works on a file and saves the file on his system.
• Yohan asks Akash to send the file to him so that he can work on it.
• Akash finally sees the message 30 minutes later but takes another 45 minutes to get to the system and send the file over.
• Yohan receives the file but doesn't realize that it's in his mail. 30 minutes pass before he does.
• Yohan works on the file and sends it to Akash.
• Akash now needs to make another batch of changes, and the cycle goes on.

Both Akash and Yohan want to finish the project quickly but their infrastructure has built-in friction that inhibits their progress. Now consider a cloud example instead:

• Akash works on a file which Yohan is also a part of.
• Yohan needs to add some new details to the document but doesn't need Akash to do anything. Yohan just starts adding his new section lower down in the document.
• There's no mailing, no waiting, and no saving files to the system.

Consider the wasted time in the pre-cloud scenario and how it compares against the post-cloud one. Cloud collaboration translated into easy and quick collaboration in the second example. Imagine how these benefits scale across an entire organization. In the absence of friction, organizations will be able to improve their workflows and transform their ideas into action much faster.

The cloud is the silver lining

The shift to the cloud is perhaps the most significant shift in technology for businesses in India, since the jump to digitization and computing in the previous decades. It will take time for business leaders to dislodge the idea of physical data storage and offline work from their idea of what computing is about. But re-imagining computing as a web-first experience will enable them to leverage a whole range of efficiencies and benefits that can transform their business, and give them an edge over their more conservative peers.