How business leaders are gearing up for the next wave of digitisation

Six months ago, many organisations would have viewed ‘digital disruption’ as a buzzword – something to gradually work towards once a ‘well-thought-out’ digital strategy was in place. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, all that changed, and in a bid to stay relevant, businesses suddenly found themselves having to move their entire operations to the digital space almost overnight.

Now that everyone has had time to catch their breath, many are realising that a digital journey is a gradual process and a giant transition towards a single destination. Therefore, a long-term view, driven by data, and with the right technology partner to help manage that journey is essential.

To help understand how organisations are planning their digital journeys, Google Cloud India and YourStory organised a roundtable session ‘Leaders Forum - Solving for the next wave of Digitization in India’ that featured 10 leaders from a broad spectrum of businesses. The participants were: Anil Kumar, CTO, ToneTag; Anjani Mandal, CEO, Fortigo Network Logistics; Anurag Verma, Head of Engineering, Niramai; Bhaskar Vadlamani, COO, Pi Datacenters; Mugunthan Soundararajan, SVP- Technology, Matrimony.com; Prasad Rajappan, Founder, Zing HR; Sanjay Netrabile, CTO, Pepperfry; Sreevathsa Prabhalar, Founder, Servify; Manoj Sharma, CTO, ClearTrip and Kapil Bharati, Co-founder, Delhivery.

Building multi-cloud environments

The event began with a keynote address by Andrew Haschka, APAC Technology Practice Lead, Application Modernization, Google Cloud, on Simplifying to drive innovation & efficiency.

Andrew said that with business continuity, operational optimisation, and the constant pressure to deliver being the top priority for business leaders, many were looking at a solution that allows for, ‘openness, integration, data harmonisation, with standardisation and consistency of standards.’

He also spoke to the panel about Anthos, Google Cloud's managed application platform for the delivery of cloud services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Anthos, which marked Google’s official entry into the enterprise datacenter space, is one of the first official multi-cloud platforms from a mainstream public cloud provider.

Click here for Andrew Haschka’s presentation on Simplifying to drive innovation & efficiency

The keynote address was followed by a panel discussion with Andrew, Manoj Sharma, CTO, ClearTrip and Kapil Bharati, Co-founder, Delhivery; and a roundtable moderated by Dr. Madanmohan Rao, Research Director, YourStory. The Google Cloud team also answered queries from the participants, who in turn shared their expertise with the other panellists

Here are some of the key learnings on how the cloud is powering the next wave of digitisation in India:

Enabling critical business decisions in real-time

The rapid rise of e-commerce has resulted in a lot of transformational changes in manufacturing and supply chain logistics. With customers expecting more transparency and faster deliveries, leveraging technology, product, and data in real-time to augment things that are happening on the ground becomes crucial. Being on the cloud, and operating with cutting-edge infrastructure can help businesses scale and make real-time decisions that aid business growth by collecting data from multiple data sources and aggregating the data to use it to scale the business.

Building more resilience

When setting up a business, certain things have to be ingrained into it. Having a setup across multiple clouds across different regions puts businesses in a better position from a business continuity or disaster recovery point of view. Being in a cloud environment ensures that applications running on it are fault-tolerant and resilient to some disruptions like a network failure or a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack on one of the data centres.

Simplifying risk management

Organisations today are driving towards simplification, which boils down to a single view – state once and deploy many times over. This means that if there is an outage in a particular cloud or location, organisations will not have to apply a huge volume of manual effort to redeploy the application. A consistent level of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that drives innovation and allows organisations to release new features as part of the cycle is essential.

Managing customers at scale

All organisations today invest in digitisation. The pandemic has only made them realise that this investment has to be significant so that customer experiences do not suffer. Investing in the right cloud technology will help businesses to react rapidly and create solutions that can be quickly taken to market and scaled to reach many customers.

Reducing human error

Many businesses still view a management layer as an overhead. However, they are still spending money on humans and labour. Spending that budget on software will not only cost less but will be more efficient than delivering multiple times over in many silos with different individuals. This not only reduces the amount of human error but also the security risk.

Click here to see the complete roundtable session and learn about the personal journeys, insights and recommendations from the participants on how the cloud can help businesses of all sizes scale efficiently