Tech Trend 03: Empowering industries: The rising significance of industry clouds

Why industry cloud?

Industry cloud solutions prioritize deep integration and vertical alignment, catering to the specific business, operational, legal, regulatory, and security needs of an industry. Instead of aiming for broad applicability, they focus on maximizing value within well-defined industry parameters. Such parameters can range from providing infrastructure stack compliant to regulatory requirements to software with out-of-the-box business processes aligned to the value chain.

Beyond just tailored solutions, industry clouds offer a curated ecosystem of innovative tools, applications, and datasets. These elements flawlessly integrate with the full range of cloud services, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This creates a comprehensive, ready-to-deploy stack that empowers companies with superior agility in managing workloads and go-to-market. 

Since industry clouds come pre-loaded with solutions and best practices of specific industries, they streamline implementation, saving businesses time and effort. Additionally, cloud service providers (CSPs) offering industry clouds have deep expertise in industry-specific regulations, data protection, and security needs. They integrate these compliance rules directly into their cloud solutions, known as sovereign clouds, which offer businesses greater control and ownership over their data. This ensures data is stored and managed according to local regulations and laws, often including keeping data within specific countries or regions. Sovereign clouds also address industry-specific security and compliance requirements, providing both infrastructure and tools for seamless workload migration. It is a massive opportunity as the focus on sovereign clouds can empower Indian data center businesses to become leading indigenous CSPs.

Built upon technologies designed for immediate business deployment, industry clouds promote shared resources by allowing multiple organizations to utilize the same underlying infrastructure. A shared resource model promotes more efficient utilization of computing resources, resulting in lower overall costs for the organizations involved. CSPs offering industry clouds further contribute to a smoother operational environment by providing automatic software updates and conducting behind-the-scenes maintenance, significantly alleviating concerns and expenses associated with downtime.

That said, industry clouds are neither a new concept nor a new solution. But their relevance in the current times, when being digital for legacy or a modern business is an existential need, has steadily increased. As a result, major CSPs rose to the top of the cloud industry and smaller cloud providers became industry specific. Major cloud service providers now offer industry clouds as a solution for specific types of enterprises. This is a logical progression in their service portfolio as more customers subscribe to cloud services and seek to maximize the value of their investment. 

Sector adoption

Prominent early adopters of industry cloud span diverse sectors, such as telecommunications, IT services, banking, and discrete manufacturing industries. Following closely are professional services, investment, and insurance sectors. Non-traditional sectors such as media and agriculture are now embracing industry clouds. Although agriculture remains an emerging sector, its applications include curated solutions for managing crop data, predicting weather patterns, and optimizing a farm-to-fork supply chain.

Below we discuss a few advantages of industry cloud for various sectors. 

BFSI: Banking-specific solutions enable targeted upgrades of various banking systems, minimizing risk. Payment modernization solutions enhance efficiency in operations teams with real-time payment data, allowing customers to send money seamlessly. Insurance-specific cloud solutions offer advanced analytics that combine financial, actuarial, investment, and risk data to drive better decision-making across the enterprise. By linking legacy systems with modern applications, insurance-specific solutions can also reduce the need for physical property inspections during underwriting while improving accuracy through AI-powered property analysis.

Energy utilities: These solutions support the entire customer journey from lead generation to field service, offering a unified view of customers and connected products for manufacturing clients. They also enable the implementation of smart grids, enhancing the monitoring and control of energy distribution networks. By leveraging advanced analytics and connecting various technology platforms, energy utilities can gain insights into risks and operational costs, optimize assets, manage portfolios, implement proactive maintenance, and more. This ultimately leads to faster returns on IoT investments and accelerates smart factory transformation.

Healthcare: Protecting sensitive patient data is paramount for healthcare companies. Cloud solutions tailored to the healthcare sector provide a secure and patient-centric cloud-based platform that enables remote monitoring, real-time patient data collection, and innovative patient engagement techniques, improving the overall clinical experience. These solutions leverage advanced analytics for population health management, predictive analytics, and personalized medicine, all while adhering to strict healthcare regulations to ensure patient data privacy and security.

TMT (technology, media and entertainment, and telecom): Industry clouds offer specialized infrastructure services that streamline the software development lifecycle with integrated tools for coding, testing, and deployment. They also feature built-in cybersecurity capabilities for advanced threat detection, vulnerability assessments, and compliance management, helping TMT organizations protect their IT assets. For telecom companies, specific cloud solutions provide tools for optimizing network performance, managing traffic, and ensuring high availability, enabling them to deploy new services such as 5G-enabled applications.

While each industry — and the companies within them — is unique, it is crucial to identify the vertical CSP that provides solutions suited to their business needs, minimizing data risk. As the industry cloud technology is still in nascent stages, companies should thoroughly evaluate solutions before selecting a vertical cloud provider to safeguard their data and access best-in-class services.