Industry Cloud to revolutionize Vertical Cloud Computing

Abhrasnata Das | Friday, 11 February 2022, 12:20 IST

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Given the Covid-19 situation, an accelerated hype towards the implementation of cloud computing for business operation was noted. So much so that Gartner projected a $651 billion public cloud market by 2024. However, in reality organizations have barely scratched the surface of public cloud adoption. Now the question arises “Why did many organizations refrain from this transition?”

In reality, certain sectors have been resistant to the shift brought about by cloud computing because it does not meet the very unique objectives of vertical market organizations such as a banking or medical institution. Such organizations need cloud infrastructure that is specifically tailored to their industries, and this brings “Industry Cloud” into realization.

With a major focus towards vertical integration and vertical operations, Industry clouds are heavily customized to fit the need of a specific industry in order to accommodate the business, operational, legal, regulatory, as well as security and other considerations; which hugely lack in the general cloud computing model.

Having said that, in this article, lets understand the key advantages that Industry cloud brings for an organization.

Vertical Integration 

The first and foremost opportunity that Industry cloud brings with it is core vertical integration. In other terms, with industry clouds an organization can avail an expansive menu of industry-specific, modular business processes available through APIs that can be accessed at the push of a button. 

Customized features built into cloud service platforms are obviously an excellent solution to ensure that various security and data protection norms are satisfied automatically.Employees' valuable work hours can also be freed up to focus on innovation by minimizing the requirement for them to focus on manually completing compliance activities.

The healthcare sector is a prime example of how the use of industry-specific cloud platforms can make a genuine impact on everyday operations. In the past the general purpose of implementing cloud processes in the healthcare segment was to leverage the internal workflow. However, with Industry cloud on the view, the healthcare industry can revolutionize the way patient data is stored and used. Further, with data storage, implementing industry specific programmes can also sing patient data to create a truly data-driven healthcare system that benefits customers will be most effective when cutting-edge tools are used.

In the coming days, Industry cloud computing and artificial intelligence may be used by healthcare-specific cloud platforms to extract insights from huge amounts of patient data. 

Standardized Foundational components

As Deloitte explains, Industry clouds can help companies to standardize foundational components common to their competitors so they can focus more energy on building upon the capabilities that differentiate their own businesses. Industry clouds are developed by cloud vendors, software providers, system integrators, and others as modular building blocks that speed up the development of industry-specific business processes. They provide a continually evolving digital core on top of which companies can build differentiated capabilities.

Basically, Industry clouds serve as a roadmap for industry-specific changes, allowing businesses to upgrade and develop one capability or business use case at a time. Instead of a multiyear, dangerous, and expensive wholesale replacement of old capabilities and systems, this allows for a more progressive, flexible modernisation strategy. As a result, change may be concentrated on the most important issues. 

Organizations may also use industrial clouds to access some of the most cutting-edge technologies, such as AI and machine learning models, the internet of things, 5G, cyber, blockchain, and augmented and virtual reality.

Fast Transition

As multiple organizations rely on indigenous legacy programmes or industry-specific software developed for on-premise data centers, migrating their key business applications to general-purpose public clouds can be difficult. These businesses must make a difficult decision. Simply moving programmes to the cloud and "lifting and shifting" them might result in sub-optimal performance. Rewriting or optimizing them for the cloud, on the other hand, would be time consuming and expensive. Industry clouds offer the ability to speed up and reduce the risk of cloud migrations for businesses.

With an already pre-built cloud process, the organization does not have to build the process from scratch. This in turn will lead to fast and effective transition of the business operation to cloud platform, in a cost-effective manner.

Wrapping up

Although it is still early to predict any conclusive picture of Industry Cloud, it will be safe to say the future will be vertical. As, today the specific need of different industries is left unattended by the horizontal cloud programmes, Industry cloud will have a bigger role to play. 

As a matter of fact, big  firms like Microsoft have expanded their industry-specific cloud offerings for financial services firms, manufacturing companies, and nonprofits. Whereas, conventional public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform, are already offering industry-specific cloud platforms to their customers. In the days to come, it will be interesting to observe the transition in the cloud spaces.

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