Powering Digitisation The Cloud First Way

Presenting The Cloud Enterprise, a special series led by Searce and Google Cloud, in partnership with Moneycontrol, which brings together leading voices to deliver insights on the adoption of cloud technologies and its success.

Cloud-first companies know best the power of Cloud and Cloud-enabled technology. Born in the cloud, many of these businesses have now grown to have phygital presence and omnichannel strategies that allow them to be wherever their customers are. Their first challenge, however, lies in growing their infrastructure quickly enough to keep pace with their customers. The decision between on-prem, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud is a critical one.

For mid-market and enterprise-level organizations, the strategic distribution of cloud management tasks between multiple providers can help achieve greater efficiencies, leverage economies of scale, and establish the resilient performance of infrastructure. It can also be a great solution when regulatory requirements determine where and how data can be stored.

However, what scares most businesses is the management complexity it brings. Each public cloud vendor has its own portal, its own APIs, and its own unique processes for managing its environment. Because there is no standardization across public cloud vendors, multiplying vendors means multiplying the management burden. The demand for personnel with mastery of managing specific cloud platforms or multi-cloud environments is high, but the supply is scarce. As enterprises migrate workloads from legacy platforms to the cloud or attempt to move applications or data among cloud platforms, the frustrating interoperability of platforms becomes apparent. IT teams must deal with siloed vendor tools, a lack of consolidated monitoring across cloud environments, and other interoperability challenges that multiply the administrative burden and drive-up cloud costs.

While the advantages of multi-cloud architectures far outweigh the shortcomings, businesses often hesitate. Cloud providers recognise this and are addressing these needs with products that bridge the discomfort.

Too much complexity? Application management platforms provide a consistent development and operations experience for cloud and on-premises environments.

Data sitting in pockets? Break down silos with data warehouse solutions that work across clouds.

Struggling with application delivery? Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Build a fast, scalable software delivery pipeline no matter where you run your applications.

Cloud architectures create near unlimited space for growth and expansion while adding power and performance to customer-facing applications. They also allow organizations to put their data to good use. Organizations today have access to near-infinite amounts of data, and the appetite is only growing. By leveraging big data and analytics, businesses can generate insights into every area of their business - from supply chains to customer satisfaction, in real-time. Data-backed decision-making empowers employees to generate value, improve efficiencies, save costs, and grow the business.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said during a segment on Google Cloud’s data analytics power, “We help organizations unify their data across multiple clouds and silos, combining structured and unstructured data and making data every employee‘s superpower.”

Google has partnered with Searce, a technology consulting firm, to bring the power of Cloud to all businesses who need it. Searce seeks to empower its clients to futurify their businesses through the use of Cloud, AI, and Analytics.

Searce's Google Cloud solution helped Inshorts, a news aggregator service, to free up its development team to experiment with new ideas, without worrying about backend management or costs. Google Multi-cloud products have led to not just time savings, but monetary savings as well. Inshorts has now reduced most of its DevOps burden and brought down its costs from USD 100,000 per month in data analysis to just USD 20,000 for the entire infrastructure.

The company now uses BigQuery with Google Data Studio to analyse and predict its tech expenditure. With Google Data Studio, it can easily visualize infrastructure costs and break them down by team, services, and project stakeholders. Dataflow, which enables real-time data processing, has been a major factor in allowing Inshorts to instantly recommend content to users.

Another great example is Freshworks. Freshworks is a custom software development firm that provides upwards of 11 SaaS marketing, support, and sales products to over 40,000 customers. It runs up to 4,000 marketing and advertising campaigns per year worldwide that account for about 70% of its revenue. To generate quality leads, it leveraged Google Analytics Measurement Protocol to enable the business to send the data generated by user interactions with its products and services directly to Google Analytics. Freshworks worked closely with Google to identify demand and opportunities, and then use spikes in demand to kick start campaigns for key Freshworks products. Since 2016, the business has increased by eight times its number of campaigns, driving a fivefold growth in overall leads.

The business is using Google Data Studio to visualize real-time data from Google Ads and is looking to integrate all data pipes across all channels to provide comprehensive, beautiful reports and graphs to improve decision-making. Additionally, integrating BigQuery with customer relationship management systems enables Freshworks to sharpen its focus to the right campaigns, regions, and keywords, driving a 50% increase in return on investment.

BigQuery also enables Momspresso, a digital platform that allows mothers to participate in brand marketing campaigns, to analyze the performance of campaigns run for brands and helps build deeper profiles of the mothers that participate in these campaigns. For PropertyGuru, Asia's largest online property portal, BigQuery becomes a single source of truth across the business and can generate dashboards and reports on-demand, ensuring managers and teams have the insights necessary to make timely, accurate decisions.

By leveraging the latest, best available technologies, Cloud-first companies are at the forefront of innovation, creating enormous value for investors, customers, and employees alike. According to the DBS Digital Readiness Survey, 1 in 2 corporations in India have a digital transformation strategy in place; many are in the process of developing and implementing digital strategies. Any digitisation strategy is incomplete without Cloud.

For companies based in India, the opportunities are unique and unparalleled: the Govt focused on growing capability and boosting innovation in the digital arena, and the forthcoming budget (following three successive years of the Covid pandemic) is expected to be one that fuels growth in all areas. The expectations from the Govt are three-pronged: continued skill development, continued investments in digitization and digital platforms; and investments in the prevention of cybercrime. This is the perfect time for businesses to set themselves up to capitalize on every opportunity the new budget brings.

Rise to the challenge, with Cloud.

Moneycontrol journalists were not involved in the creation of the article.