The cloud opportunity and challenge: Views from sectors

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Editorial Staff.

At CloudConnect, a panel of enterprise leaders from core industries, such as insurance, pharma, service, manufacturing and hospitality discussed unique challenges faced by different industry verticals during the adoption of the cloud and how can they overcome these barriers. 

The panel discussion titled, ‘The cloud opportunity and challenge: Views from sectors’ was moderated by Bharati Lele, Head – Innovation Labs & Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, L&T Infotech and the panelists included Radhakrishnan Menon, CIO, Biocon; Alok Dashora; Arvind Laddha, CEO, Vantage; H R Khona, General Manager, Larsen & Toubro; and Dhiraj Trivedi, Assistant VP of Revenue Management & Electronic Distribution, Royal Orchid Hotels…

The panel unanimously agreed on the numerous advantages of cloud computing – it helps drive down costs, increase productivity, decrease deployment time and foster innovation. But they also considered security as the major concern while adopting cloud computing, especially the public cloud model.

Khona of Larsen & Toubro discussed challenges in the adoption of cloud computing from the perspective of the manufacturing sector. He said, “The challenge in the manufacturing sector is that the company needs visibility to the vendors operations (purchase orders) in its own IT landscape. To obtain this we have a hybrid cloud that connects us to the vendors and suppliers. But I feel, it’s very important to have trusted cloud service providers.”

Giving an example of how a healthcare company can leverage cloud computing technology, Menon of Biocon informed how implementing private cloud in the company enabled them to introduce affordable medicines. “We wanted to introduce affordable medicines and hence instead of building the IT infrastructure, the company virtualized and leveraged the cloud platform,” he said. Menon further said that security of the data is a major concern for the healthcare sector and to address that challenge the company chose the private cloud model. “We wanted to secure all the IP and innovation and hence we chose private and not public cloud for the data.”

Sharing insights on how cloud computing can be used in hospitality sector, Trivedi of Royal Orchid Hotels informed that the group has CRM on the cloud, which has helped it to know customer preferences, reduce the cost and even increase the revenues. He said, “With the same number of man power, the cloud has reduced the provisioning time from two days to two hours.”

Talking about how Vantage , an insurance broking company which gets many claims per day, is benefitting from cloud computing, Laddha asserted, “With the help of the cloud our clients can directly access the tool to apply for the claim without any help from the insurance agent.”