Perspectives
Enabling markets digitally with business on the cloud
Shivendra Singh, Executive Director, Digital Enablement Advisory
Today, the cloud is viewed as a business necessity. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and firms in the mid-market segment have realised the pressing need to make the transition to digital. Be it an SMB with a turnover of a hundred thousand dollars, or a multi-million dollar company, every entity sees IT as the foundation for its business to operate and propagate. With the rise of business opportunities, an organisation cannot afford to spend a significant amount of its time and money on its IT architecture and platform when it should be focusing on its business engagements. Given the plethora of cloud vendors, a CEO is now under continual pressure to focus on the patterns of deliverables and not be distracted by the platform supporting them.
A digital adoption strategy should be carefully investigated and implemented to increase the revenue and business opportunities from various channels like search engines, social media, and aggregators. With newer models of business emerging on various channels, several potential players are now evaluating and adopting the cloud to tackle the uncertainty around computing. With data storage getting cheaper each day, businesses no longer fear data explosion and are instead starting to embrace it.
This has led to a sort of democratisation of technology, with advanced and complex computing solutions becoming available to a wider market. Areas like artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cognitive services, DevOps, and advanced cyber security threat protection are now within the reach of cash-strapped mid-market companies owing to the economies of scale promised by the cloud.
The Digital Enablement Advisory team at PwC has worked on several exciting cloud engagements. Be it digital adoption for an infrastructure company, smart city management of an Indian city, compliance monitoring for a SaaS product, or management of GST-related changes for one of the largest automobile manufacturers in India—the cloud has served as the underlying platform for all of these projects. Our commitment to ‘build trust in society and solve important problems’, especially in the mid-market segment, has been further strengthened by our Tier-1 Cloud Solution Provider partnership with Microsoft. This has enabled us to approach the mid-market segment with cloud-based solutions, resulting in quick go-to-market strategy with minimal capital expenditure. Our partnership with Microsoft also allows us to provide Enterprise-grade cloud products from Microsoft at introductory prices. Microsoft Exchange Online, for example, can now be purchased for as low as 100 INR per user, enabling many mid-market companies to strengthen their email infrastructure with the technology used by Enterprise customers. This is a perfect example of democratisation of technology brought about by cloud vendors.
The adoption of the cloud is no longer a choice—it is a business need for growth and enablement.
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