Cloud adoption is helping companies achieve quick and outcome-focused digital transformation. With the launch of new “industry cloud” platforms, cloud service providers are gaining popularity in the digital market.
Industry cloud platforms are designed to meet the specific needs of different vertical industries. It combines software, platform, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capability to achieve the desired business outcomes. Industry solutions supported by public cloud services manage the different workloads and achieve the need of businesses, processes, data, and technology. These new solutions offer more resiliency than today’s software-as-a-service applications, more business functionalities than today’s infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service clouds, and more innovation than today’s single-industry solutions. Business leaders are leveraging composable approaches to implement industry clouds that are both modular and manageable.
Industry cloud platforms have also rapidly climbed the innovation trigger slope on Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud platform services in 2022.
Gartner predicts that enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate more than 50% of their critical business initiatives by 2027.
How do industry cloud platforms work?
Industry clouds are collections of cloud services, different tools, and applications highly optimized for important use cases in specific industries. Data models, APIs, and technical components from public cloud service providers are available to customize various capabilities.
Established companies face challenges while moving their legacy applications to public clouds as they heavily depend on in-house industry-specific infrastructure. Highly regulated industries such as healthcare, banks, insurance, govt agencies, and telco providers have placed mission-critical applications in their data centers longer than most because they wanted to have full control over it. Today, they are prioritizing cloud initiatives to accelerate digital transformation to achieve reduced costs and better performance.
Lifting and shifting applications to the cloud could drive less performance, or rewriting the application architecture could be a costly and tedious process. In this situation, Industry clouds have the potential to accelerate and minimize the risks of cloud migrations. In addition, top tech trends – serverless, Kubernetes, blockchain, and AI are also being discussed and implemented as per the business demands. These are very important, but one impactful and under discussed that should and will get more preference is the rise of industry cloud platforms.
Technical values and profile
- Industry clouds enable enterprises to increase their agility, speed up innovations and accelerate time to value by including cloud services purchased traditionally into composable industry specific solutions. It will help them to create a positive end user experience, grow business revenue and accelerate digital at the end.
- Enterprises can also use packaged business capabilities (PBCs) of industry cloud platforms as building blocks to compose unique and distinguishing digital initiatives. With the business benefits of industry cloud ecosystems, independent software vendors and system integrators uniting the cloud providers are a keyway that industry cloud platforms add value.
Key approach
- Enterprises should utilize industry cloud platforms to integrate the existing portfolio with new capabilities rather than as full-scale replacements of large infrastructure with more up-to-date technology.
- They should create enterprise-wide understanding and support by engaging business technologists and fusion teams. Set up such teams if they don’t already exist at the workplace.
- For optimization and modernization, enterprises should formulate rules and policies to deploy industry cloud platforms as a technical productive platform by replacing or improving existing processes at the right time and should include differentiating transformation and innovation initiatives.
Industry cloud platforms create value for a number of companies by offering them adaptable and relevant industry solutions. They accelerate cloud adoption by using innovative technologies such as industry-aware data fabric and pointedly enthralling to business users beyond the early users of cloud computing technologies. To reach their full potential, industry clouds need to be developed into something best called ecosystem clouds. Companies can leverage these ecosystems by partaking in shared business processes such as procurement, distribution, payment procession, and in R&D and innovation.
Reference – Gartner
