How autonomous cloud can help Indian businesses change growth orbits

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With Industry 4.0 gaining pace, traditional business models are making way for more modern, sustainable ways of doing business. The race to transform into digital-first enterprises will intensify further, with chief information officers (CIOs) banking on new technology to unlock new growth avenues. As part of the digital push, enterprises are starting to embrace areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), recognising their power to help them innovate faster, drive change and operate more efficiently and securely.

However, the incredible pace of technological change can be impossible to keep up with. With AI/ML being in the nascent stage, companies may not always have the skills to harness its full potential. How can they then go about creating a digital-first mindset?

Indian businesses have often proved to be more versatile than some of their Asia-Pacific (APAC) peers, especially when it comes to early adoption of modern technology. Take cloud adoption for instance. According to a recent survey, 43 percent of Indian businesses already have successful cloud strategies, which is more than many other country in the APAC.

A number of progressive Indian businesses are also looking to capitalise on the advantages brought by the next generation of computing: ‘autonomous cloud’.

Demystifying ‘autonomous cloud’
Autonomous cloud represents a new category of cloud services. This new style cloud platform powered by AI and ML has the potential to help businesses across the globe reduce risk, lower costs, do more with less and get more value from their most important business asset, their data.

In the longer run, the resulting ‘autonomous organisation’ will reach an ideal state where it does not need the touch of humans to run its day-to-day operations and maintain its core IT systems. Instead, AI and automation, working together in harmony, will manage everything from database to application development, to providing predictive insight around business processes, all without human input. This will free up resources from the burden of managing complex IT systems, which can be focused on tasks that provide higher value to the business: innovation, through the creation of new applications and better ways to serve customers, employees and partners.

An autonomous cloud is underpinned by three basic concepts— it is self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing. Through self-driving, the service automatically backs itself up, fixes issues on its own, recovers quickly, and automatically tunes itself, all while the service is up and running. This improves efficiency, reduces cost, and eliminates human labor and human error.

Being self-securing, the system automatically applies patches with no downtime, helping protect itself from malicious external attacks. According to Forbes, 85 percent of breaches exploited system vulnerabilities where a patch had been available for 12 months.

Finally, imagine your organisation’s main server fails. Most often, in the case of a main server failure, the chances of recovering data are minimal. For organisations that have implemented autonomous cloud services, thanks to its third aspect -- self-repairing, they are provided with automated protection from all planned and unplanned downtime, so even if a server goes down because of some disaster, the service will backup and recover without any disruption to the end user.

Autonomous: Helping businesses generate more value from IT
Internally, most organisations face huge challenges with managing legacy, complex IT platforms where 80 percent of their resources are spent running ‘business as usual’ activities. They are being tested by the current explosion of data and rising cyber attacks and data breaches—both of which are spiraling out of control and becoming harder to manage.

Additionally, many face new competition from new startups that now have the ability to continuously innovate and scale their businesses into exciting ventures, thanks to the global cloud capabilities on offer from traditional cloud services. This means there’s barely any time left to innovate and modernise.

Fortunately, with the rise of new innovative technologies, like autonomous cloud, there has never been more opportunity for progressive business leaders to take control. By leveraging autonomous cloud services, IT organisations and hence businesses can deliver new capabilities and more business value much faster than they would have ever dreamed possible before.

The benefits aren’t only for large organisations – autonomous services also offer a blessing for small businesses. With autonomous, businesses without their own database administrators or hardware will suddenly gain access to new technologies like data warehousing solutions for the very first time enabling them to better compete.

Automation is table stakes, autonomous is the future; and it’s here now
For those that reach out and grasp the opportunity, there is huge potential. By the end of 2018, Gartner forecasts that global business value derived from AI will total $1.2 trillion, an increase of 70 percent from 2017 – a figure that is anticipated to grow to $3.9 trillion in 2022. In the area of decision automation there is also significant acceleration expected – currently it accounts for just 2 percent of the global AI-derived business value in 2018, but it will grow to 16 percent by 2022.

That is why we expect that more than 50 percent of all enterprise data will be managed autonomously in the cloud by 2020 and 90 percent of all enterprise applications to include a customer AI-based capability.

While this is the next level of cloud innovation and we are just at the start of the journey, we’re already starting to see many Indian businesses reap significant business benefits. It won’t be long before autonomous cloud services bring simplicity, self-service with integrated security into all areas of the business, providing new fuel for innovation.

Are you ready to leapfrog your peers and embrace the next cloud revolution - the autonomous cloud?

Manish Verma is the Co-founder & CEO of Codeinks and Sheela Nambiar is the Sr Director at Oracle Digital.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.