Undeniably, cloud computing has revolutionized businesses on the journey to digital transformation for over a decade. Future-ready organizations are embracing the advantages of industry clouds to speed to value faster while enhancing flexibility, efficiency, resilience, business value, and competitiveness. The concept of industry clouds stems from a simple reality: business processes, information models and underlying technology infrastructure needs are industry-specific. Industry clouds can help deliver business outcomes faster by combining tailored sector-specific capabilities, products, tools, and data modernized natively for cloud platforms and delivered at scale.
Industry clouds are a specialized and optimized set of cloud services (PaaS), applications (SaaS), and other related cloud tools and resources that are designed to meet the specific needs of a particular industry or function. They can bring multiple aspects of technology and operating models together, offering an approach that’s designed to move the entire business forward. Industry cloud platforms turn a cloud platform into a powerful business platform, enabling technology-innovation tools to also serve as powerful business-innovation tools.
An array of could services, such as business processes, information models, metrics, data and analytical model, APIs, infrastructure, security and more, are target built for the industry and delivered at scale. Moving on an industry cloud offers a breakthrough opportunity to drive business advantage by capturing the best of two worlds, which are exploiting economies of scale via outsourced commodity functionality while preserving the system, services and processes that make your business unique and achieve measurable outcomes. Calibrating just how much vertical expertise is enough is a critical challenge for industry clouds. The key is finding the right balance between exploiting the advantages of lifting and shifting existing technical infrastructure to the cloud while accommodating the organization’s unique and proprietary needs.
Industrial sites’ challenges can be daunting, but advances in cloud computing, particularly in security and edge computing, have come a long way. Some industrial sites are already adopting standards in site data collection, such as a machine-to-machine communication protocol that allows control systems to exchange data securely and consistently. According to McKinsey’s analysis, to take advantage of these developments and maximize value from the cloud industrial companies should consider a hybrid cloud architecture which is helpful to consider at three levels. This architecture provides a baseline set of components that can be used to extract data from the site and process it in the cloud.
While many of these elements are familiar to most industrial companies’ CIOs and enterprise architects, few have implemented them. Investment in the infrastructure to bring edge computing and cloud capabilities to industrial sites can be significant, so technology leaders must make architecture decisions that position cloud services to deliver the most impact. It is critical to define those can be used by the greatest number of sites, standardize the application development stack for cloud and edge capabilities, define cost-effective data transfer standards, and development a data lake strategy that does not overwhelm developers and data scientists with the useless data.
As to cloud adoption, most companies fall into one of four states of cloud adoption: avoiders, migrators, explorer, strategic value creators, according to Bain & Co’s report. Avoiders refer to companies still avoid public cloud and operate on their own data center. This is often due to perceived regulatory requirements, concerns about the risk of using cloud, or a lack of appreciation of cloud’s potential. Migrators, which most companies fall into this category, refer to companies delegated cloud to the IT department without a comprehensive value-based cloud strategy. These companies pursue cloud from an infrastructure perspective, typically with the aim to reduce IT costs and gain flexibility. Explorers are companies trying to break the cycle as business and IT work together to get more value from the cloud. These efforts are often driven by individuals rather than robust corporate effort Discrete efforts tend to produce isolated success stories, often achieved through lengthy trial and error rather than through a repeatable engine that can drive instances of high business value across the organization. Strategic value creators are companies acquire a deep understanding of how cloud creates business value, which may include new revenue streams, new services for customers, and broad adoption of new technologies where cloud’s value is maximized.
Article by: Asst. Prof. Suwan Juntiwasarakij, Ph.D., Senior Editor & MEGA Tech
