Digital transformation most effective at the intersection of strategy, technology and design: N Manish of Wipro

Enterprises have to be agile, get to market faster and more efficiently. In such a demanding business environment, enterprises are migrating their SAP workloads to cloud to enhance performance, simplify operations, and reduce costs.

The ‘Enterprise Transformation Series’, hosted in association with AWS, features experts who have helped enterprises undergo digital transformation by migrating their on-premise SAP workloads to the cloud.

In this episode, N Manish, VP, Head Application Service Lines, Integrated Digital and Engineering Application Services (IDEAS) India, Wipro Ltd., spoke about the role of cloud technology in improving agility, key drivers of efficiency and the factor that should define a business's cloud adoption strategy.

Meeting customer requirements crucial to developing business agility

Manish mentioned that the fundamental premise for business agility is to deliver value to the customer faster than the competition. This is one of the key reasons for cloud adoption. “Agility means the ability to innovate, harness various technologies and integrate them across multiple solutions. It (cloud technology) underpins the need for meeting customer demands quickly,” he said.

Rapidly scaling compute power according to current needs, and integrating with multiple solutions to test proofs of concept using cloud technology solutions promote agility. Additional benefits include not having to worry about logistical aspects, such as finding the right infrastructure and integration points for deployment of third party solutions to carry out these operations.

Leveraging cloud technology, better decision-making

For Manish, gathering insights from data is crucial to change the trajectory of the organisation’s growth

“The better insights you have into your customer, stakeholder, and supplier behaviour, the more efficient your supply chain, manufacturing and fulfillment process becomes,” he said. “To gain insights, you need data stores and data lakes from which you can visualise the right insights. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are the components that can help to this end,” he noted, adding that system integrators (SI) like Wipro are necessary to have the right solutions in place.

“While customers have an intuitive understanding of this (process), we work with them in a consultative manner to understand their business processes, break them down into solutions components, and provide a strategy,” he said.

How cloud technology can secure operations beyond boundaries

Security has to be at multiple levels for remote working environments that have devices on public networks, Manish noted. “This includes right from providing the basic infrastructure system of patching Operating Systems, to identity management, access control, data encryption and ensuring compliance according to the security standards,” he said.

The security services that a cloud environment provides are far more advanced than in on-premise setups, Manish noted. Apart from cloud services, organisations also have the option of taking up services of leading third-party security service providers.

Enable transformation downwards from a business process level:

Enabling a transformation with cloud technology is not an overnight journey, Manish said.

“All of these changes should be at the intersection of strategy, technology and design. Cloud will definitely be a component (to facilitate these changes), and the best way to approach it is from the business process downwards.”