The pandemic, while a colossal challenge for humanity, had an interesting outcome: the acceleration of digitisation for not just the big, enterprise scale businesses, but also small, niche, and agile ones. Customers today have access to a global marketplace, and are increasingly savvy to online marketplaces. Digitalisation, then, isn't just about having a website and an e-commerce solution anymore. It is about flexibility as a business, the ability to identify and market to the right customers, meet wild swings in demand, store customer data safely, leverage data to gain customer insights, and the ability to pivot to new offerings, in time.
This is where Cloud solutions have come to play a crucial role for enterprises and SMEs. Capital expense becomes a variable expense: dedicated data centers, investments in expensive software, and dedicated IT teams are replaced by virtualized servers and custom software in a SaaS model, providing cost effective, flexible, secure and reliable service - better than internal IT teams. Reinventing the wheel with internal processes and in-house Security Operations Centers becomes redundant, when cloud partners bring with them their deep experience in managing data security and bespoke data security models.
To further empower businesses to accelerate their digitalisation journey, CNBCTV18.com launched The Digital Bharat 2.0 initiative in association with AWS. This initiative aims at creating a strong digital community that helps support SMEs through masterclasses, techshalas, and knowledge depository of articles and infographics.
SaaS, IaaS models are Pay As You Go, and businesses have the ability to quickly scale up and down, and retire things they don't use. The businesses only need to pay for the things they use, and cloud providers like AWS provide monthly, consolidated invoices and bundle in one-tap support. The support offered also results in much greater reliability. Not only do businesses have lower downtime which saves productive hours, cloud providers also have stronger data security, data backup and recovery processes for when (and if) things go wrong.
Cisco's 2020 APAC SMB Maturity study has the numbers to prove it. 69% of SMBs are accelerating the digitalisation of their businesses as a result of COVID-19, and the top 3 technology priorities are Cloud, Security and upgrading of IT infrastructure. A recent NASSCOM study backs this up. The three major opportunity segments for cloud adoption are Security, Analytics and Offline to Online. The study also estimates that India's Public Cloud market which stood at ₹ 170 billion in FY2020 and is growing at ~30% CAGR, will reach ₹ 630 billion by FY2025. The demand for cloud is fuelled by the results that the best in class SMBs are getting: a 25-30% productivity improvement and 15-20% reduction in operational costs.
While SMB's might account for 28-30% of the cloud market by 2025, more than 50% of the NASSCOM study respondents cite lack of management support, talent and capital as key constraints for cloud adoption. Raghavendran Balasubramaniam, Head of SMB Segment for India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Service Pvt Ltd, believes that these teething troubles can be overcome with support and education from Cloud providers”.
In January 2020, Amazon announced an investment of almost $1 billion to digitally enable 10 million SMBs, e-commerce exports worth $10 billion and create a million additional jobs in India by 2025", he said in a recent masterclass. AWS launched the AWS India SMB Digitisation initiative with attractive bundles and programs for SMBs to adopt cloud technology at scale, without significant expense. AWS SMBHAV program offers AWS native services to address business use cases like data storage, disaster recovery, sales forecasting, modernisation of websites and applications.
The new normal is a technological one, and the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to adopt technology is through the cloud. For SMEs and enterprises, it is becoming crucial to adapt fast and adapt well to changing customer preferences, market disruptions and technology-driven paradigm shifts. All innovations involve failure, and to innovate fast, one needs to fail fast and often. Cloud enables this by flattening the costs of failures and risks; making it possible for businesses to innovate economically. It also helps accelerate the pace of innovation by giving businesses access to custom solutions which need not be created from scratch. Ultimately, the biggest competitive advantage cloud confers on businesses is the freedom for teams to focus on what they do best: run their business.
Technology has emerged as the backbone for businesses, and for continual growth it is imperative to tap on the newer technologies and upgrades. To know more about innovative solutions and products for your business, stay tuned to the Digital Bharat initiative.
To enhance the digital capabilities and develop a robust tech-backed infrastructure, Digital Bharat 2.0 will be a support mechanism for enterprises of tomorrow and will create a strong community for them.