In an exclusive interview with The Hindu, Camp Chordia, Azure Business Group Lead at Microsoft India talks about the growing cloud ecosystem, the role of the pandemic in cloud adoption across various sectors, and more.
Organizations are transitioning to the cloud for a variety of reasons. For some, it played a key role in tackling the pandemic, and for some others, it is the way forward as they re-strategize workplace policies.
Microsoft is one of the leading global providers of cloud services, which has seen significant growth over the years. in an exclusive interview with Hindu, Camp Chordia, Azure Business Group Lead at Microsoft India, spoke about the growing cloud ecosystem, the role of the pandemic in cloud adoption in various regions and Microsoft’s plans to support the growth of India’s cloud environment.
What are your views on the cloud ecosystem in India and the role of the pandemic in accelerating cloud adoption in the country?
It is no secret that many organizations have shown an urgent need to move to the cloud. While organizations – from governments to enterprises to startups – were already innovating and transforming using the cloud, migrating to the cloud has now become inevitable. The pandemic has made it clear that no business is 100% resilient. However, those strengthened by digital are more agile, more resilient and more able to change when faced with a crisis.
The cloud is at the heart of accelerating digital transformation and innovation. We have more than doubled our cloud capacity in the last 20 months. We also saw organizations use the cloud in new ways to keep employees as well as customers safe.
How does India’s cloud ecosystem compare to the rest of the world?
India is one of Microsoft’s 14 global regions. India has been one of the most growing regions and is extremely strong across all product lines. India has vast quantities and scale as compared to many other countries.
So, gone are the days when one looked at a mature country and thought they would be far ahead in cloud adoption, and the reality is that India is really galloping very fast. India may be behind, but it is only a matter of years where India will be ahead in all cloud workloads. Some of the most complex projects are coming out of India. Country offers scale, complexity and population, so projects can be large.
Complexity, regulation, challenges, population offer some unique advantages, and between us and our peers, I think, we’re throwing some great projects, and the world is learning from India.
What are the different areas where cloud adoption will play an important role?
I don’t think one segment will grow faster than the other, because we are seeing this urgency. Even for small and medium-sized businesses, their urgency varies greatly across the board. Many of them are turning to the cloud for their websites as they cannot operate it themselves. So, even a small requirement like website migration is affecting the cloud.
MSMEs in India are also showing a sense of urgency on moving to the cloud, disaster recovery, virtualization, website migration, simple app migration and small HR solutions. Again, there is a very new era on startups, and this is a space that is growing dramatically. Few years back no one even considered it as a logical section. But the bootstrap segment turns out to be promising because we never know when a big startup turns into a unicorn over time. I think, across the board, whether it’s midmarket, whether it’s government, manufacturing, information technology, unicorns, we’re seeing massive uptick across the board. So, I don’t think it’s a segment-specific approach, I think it’s across the board.
How important is it for new organizations to adopt cloud-based solutions?
A startup founder is actually building on an idea. Where the cloud comes into play for them, we lighten that idea for them. And then show them how they can measure that idea as the quantity grows. For example, sitting at a PC they may not assume that they have a set of applications or solutions that can scale to a certain extent, but they can actually build it, synthesize in the cloud, and Can actually test whether it actually works or not.
Cloud can help a startup to conceptualize framework, technology, architecture and test an idea in a very short time. Once their product is launched, they can start testing for volume, performance and get feedback from users to improve their product. Because of this feedback loop of performance, scale, test, resale, cloud this can happen in less than a month in many cases. But, in the old world, they would never get a feedback loop.
So, clearly, for startups, the cloud is the way forward. It’s more cost-effective, they keep building because they keep spending, and they only spend on what they need. So, in fact, all those economics work beautifully for them too.
What are some challenges for companies adopting the cloud?
The challenge is more mindset, because at any given time a large enterprise has different stakeholders and in their mind the risk is higher, it is not real, but I would say, in their mind, it is more.
For example, a big bank will think very strongly about all the protocols and rules of RBI. Someone at the CDO event will look at the design principles, and what we are trying to integrate and build upon. Then, there are the traditional app heads and infra heads, who have been working for many years, who don’t want to let go. So, it’s essentially coming to them and saying, let’s move to the cloud and change the way we work.
It is a massive organizational shift in both their culture as well as their thinking. Now, whether the cloud solves many challenges doesn’t matter at the moment because change is a culture change. Technology can offer much more than anyone can imagine and cloud is going to be the future. But where the challenge comes, people must be really ready to change that mindset, and the organization must change the culture, because many things they are used to doing may be different, but the purpose of getting out of the cloud. It’s heavy.
Why are businesses slowly moving towards the hybrid model approach?
Businesses are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud for better agility and maximum efficiency. The hybrid cloud continues to grow from simply integrating datacenters with public clouds, becoming units of computing available at the edge, including in the world’s most remote destinations. Leading IT/ITES companies, banks, financial institutions, healthcare, media companies, e-commerce organizations, government departments and telecom providers have been early adopters of hybrid cloud.
Around the world, many Fortune 500 companies are taking a hybrid approach to the cloud and leveraging Azure hybrid capabilities to drive innovation and drive great business results.
How is Microsoft planning to support the growth of India’s cloud ecosystem?
Our support in growing the Indian cloud ecosystem essentially starts with skill development. We are working with National Skill Development Organization and Government of India. We’re building a lot of skills for people to cross-sell themselves and cross-train themselves on the cloud. We have also considered that we need to go back and skilled people on both SAP and Microsoft and this is a huge effort that is going on.
Secondly, in the past, IT was probably confined to 10-12 cities in India. What we have done is to expand our footprint to 100 cities in India from Jamshedpur to Coimbatore, where you will find work happening at an Azure community level across the board. So really what we said was let’s go ahead and create excitement for people to start looking at technology and give them the same opportunities to learn, understand and do what we do for people in big cities.
Third is what are we doing to the government. We are working a lot on a partnership model with the government, be it finance ministry, agriculture ministry, labor etc. We’ve looked at a partnership model where we can go and assist departments on what’s new in technology. , and how they can take advantage of many of these.
Fourth is, then looking at the sectoral play across industries and how we can be more relevant to a particular set of customers. And that’s the big game you’re seeing at the industry level where we’re bringing educated, efficient, capable, more meaningful solutions and it’s all ultimately going to the end user.
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