Forecast for 2022: Head in the Cloud

Although playing a vital role in IT landscapes before 2020, the cloud has evolved to become indispensable following the breakout of the pandemic. Today, it figures among the top investment priorities of enterprises in every industry, who have understood its potential to elevate their business at every level. In 2022, enterprises will turn to the cloud to grow their business by creating innovative products, exploiting new market opportunities, and serving customers with better experiences. Anant Adya, senior VP of Cloud, Infrastructure And Security (CIS) Services at Infosys, shares how and why.

Not surprisingly, Gartner includes cloud-native platforms among its top strategic technology trends for the new year. 

In 2022, enterprises will leverage cloud-enabled technologies in service of foundational goals – to build new and improved products, expand into new markets, and drive better experiences for consumers. Here are three ways in which the cloud can be leveraged. 

1. Supporting Product Innovation

A) Ensuring flexibility 

The cloud’s on-demand, almost infinite elasticity means innovators can scale capacity up or down on-demand when experimenting with new ideas. Entrusting IT hosting and provisioning to a cloud services provider gives enterprises more time to focus on core activities, including innovation. The emergence of cloud computing models, such as multi-cloud or poly-cloud, has made vendor lock-in a thing of the past to enable unprecedented flexibility and speed of provisioning, which is critical for companies with a “fail fast” approach to innovation. 

A global leader in air-conditioning and refrigeration solutions innovated a logistics network to ensure uninterrupted, temperature-controlled food and pharmaceutical products distribution. Given the complexity of the network and the size of data, there was only one way to implement this: the cloud. 2022 will see many other innovative ideas flourish out there.  

B) Providing analytical services

Data, and intelligent models for processing it, are the lifeblood of innovation. Cloud supports this by enabling enterprises to gather an unlimited quantity of structured and unstructured data and process it into insights with analytics, machine learning and AI solutions, all of which it offers as a service. 

C) Enhancing collaboration and quality control

The brightest innovators understand the power of collaboration – between employees, with partners, and even across their ecosystems. Cloud enhances collaboration experiences and outcomes by enabling information to be shared easily and securely, offering dedicated spaces where co-innovators can connect,  and hosting (the now ubiquitous) business communication and teleconferencing solutions.  Cloud also improves the often overlooked aspect of quality control. By maintaining a single repository of data and documents, which all collaborators access, the cloud minimizes data errors and inconsistencies to improve innovation outcomes.  

See More: What Is Cloud Migration? Definition, Process, Benefits and Trends

2. Helping Enterprises Expand Into New Opportunity Areas

Expanding into a new market can be a challenging experience. Cloud can ease this process considerably by crashing infrastructure timelines – which could run into years if a data center is being set up – to just a few months. Also, when an organization scores a win in a new region, customer segment, or product niche, it should waste no time replicating that success. Only the cloud has the agility, flexibility, and speed to make it happen. The pandemic is possibly the best example here – it was the cloud that enabled enterprises to get into a new way of working virtually overnight, in every office and business location.  It was also cloud that made it possible for an ecommerce giant to expand an unofficial holiday, Singles Day, into a  mega shopping festival years ago.

3. Leading To Better Experiences

From predictive analytics and chatbots to machine learning and social, businesses are leveraging various digital technologies to deliver personalized, efficient, and enjoyable experiences to customers. Cloud is a common enabler in all these scenarios. The Infosys Cloud Radar 2021 research found that for the CPG, Retail and Logistics industry, enhancing online and omnichannel customer experience is one of the top three use cases for cloud.  It also predicted that the proportion of companies with high levels of cloud adoption would more than double in 2022.  

In the new year, service agents will continue to access real-time consumer data and measurement tools on the cloud to gain visibility into different customer journeys and identify areas of improvement.  More marketers will run decision models on a cloud platform to personalize communication messages and delivery for individual customers. Other businesses will emulate the automobile industry by leveraging the cloud to make better pricing decisions, specifically cloud-based solutions for tracking competitor pricing activity and devising their responses. 

After years of being dubbed a cost-cutting tool, the cloud has attained the respect it deserves. Today, it figures among the top investment priorities of enterprises in every industry, who have understood its potential to elevate their business at every level. Cloud is indispensable to digital transformation; it is the road to profitability and competitiveness. In 2022, enterprises will turn to the cloud for all the reasons stated above and grow their businesses by creating innovative products, exploiting new market opportunities, and serving customers with better experiences. 

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