[India MSME Summit 2021] How cloud technology can optimise business cost, operations, unlock new growth opportunities

As businesses start to leverage tech to overcome challenges posed by the pandemic, they are also looking  to unlock new growth opportunities. 

Industry leaders Ravi Daparthi, CTO at Oorwin Labs; Dr. Saurav Dutta, CTO at Payback; Rajiv Agarwal, Director at Boloro, India; joined Harshad Satam, Head of  Business Development, Amazon Internet Services, at YourStory’s India MSME Summit 2021 to discuss how MSMEs can leverage cloud for growth.

The panel titled ‘Unlock your growth potential with cloud’ churned out key insights on how they have leveraged technology in their organisations to unlock a lot of growth potential in these types.

Focus on what is available 

While setting up Boloro India, Rajiv, who has over 37 years of industry experience, realised one of the biggest challenges was to either invest in building the infrastructure or to use what's available on the ground.

Deciding on Amazon, he explained said, “The US branch was already using Amazon and we saw a lot of flexibility in the way it helped us construct our requirements.”

He added, “For all of us who are in the startup mode or maybe the next phase where we've gone beyond doing pilots or looking at rollouts, tech from the perspective of available infrastructure is very critical. We focus on our strengths and leave the heavy lifting to partners who have the PaaS infrastructure as a service and so on.”

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Preventing security threats with cloud

Other than the user ID and password login, which is the standard process, Rajiv advised businesses to get authenticated on their phone. 

He said, “When we don't use the internet, we don't use the operating system. The internet is inherently the most vulnerable channel today. We do not choose any part of the phone operating system either. So essentially when you finish a user ID password on the laptop or any application on your phone, you still don't have access to your backend, you get that access only when you authenticate yourself on your phone on a separate channel, other than the internet.”

“Hyper-personalisation becomes very easy with the cloud. With the available data and tools, it is easier to tweak models, reduce compute time and helps running campaigns seamlessly,” added Sourav.

Ravi explained, “With cloud, there is a huge flexibility in terms of what you want to do. It helps fast track a lot of aspects like turnaround time on getting everything on the system, meeting customer expectations, security, and compliance,”

According to Rajiv, it is important to choose a service provider who will guide a business with a long-term perspective.

Saurav said, “Anybody who wants to venture into a technology, which is upcoming or new in nature, but would require scaling up should definitely go into cloud. Moving to cloud would help any industry — small or big — to scale up, be in terms of saving revenue, or in terms of hardware refresh or with upgradation of service.”