Questions about cloud have gone away due to the pandemic, says Karan Bajwa at TiE Global Summit

Questions around security, total cost of ownership, and benefits of cloud technology have gone away since the last 10 months when Covid-19 lockdowns affected operations of enterprise businesses, Google Cloud India's top boss has said.

Karan Bajwa, managing director of Google Cloud India, was speaking at a virtual panel discussion themed ‘Ahead in the Cloud’ at the recently concluded TiE Global Summit 2020 that hosted sessions with speakers such as Indian Vice President Venkaiah Naidu, and Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee.

“I was speaking to the CEO of an insurance company. And she said that the company was now 100% paperless. I asked her if they would have done it 10 months ago. She said, absolutely not, they could not do it. They’ve been trying for years. There was resistance. All kinds of reasons were given. Finally, all reasons were taken away… which means, technology was not the issue,” Bajwa added.

The panel moderated by Sridhar Pinnapureddy who is the founder and CEO Hyderabad-based data centre company CtrlS Datacenters, also comprised Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary Ajay Sawhney, and Microsoft India President Anant Maheshwari.

When asked about the future of cloud computing, Bajwa said it extended to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. 

“From an user’s perspective, multi-cloud becomes a meta-platform concept, if you will, providing consistent ways to access your applications across multiple platforms through a single interface… Setting up something that is interoperable across various platforms is really non-trivial to say the least,” he said. 

Organisations such as mortar-and-brick retailers, transportation companies managing fleets, and manufacturers that use IoT-enabled equipment are in important need for edge computing with cloud, Bajwa said.

Watch: We are dialing up our investments in enterprise, says Karan Bajwa

“I see the future moving to a strong partnership with telecommunication companies, which is something that we recently announced, to help these communication providers to monetize the edge as a business services platform… Fundamentally, from a point where you could run your business more efficiently, to fundamentally transform your business -- I believe that’s the journey for the future with cloud,” Bajwa added.

TechCircle was a media partner for TiE Global Summit 2020.