Business outcomes should ride the cloud strategy, not the other way round: Mint DIS

The shift to cloud is inevitable for businesses, driven by the need for creating agile and nimble organisations. However, business optimisation should drive the cloud strategy for companies making a transition to cloud-native model, said panellists at the Mint Digital Innovation Summit. 

“If you are solving for agility, to be nimble, to support your business and reduce time-to-market – there is a need to drive cloud strategy, not the other way round,” Saruabh Ganeriwala, group chief information and digital officer at Jindal Steel & Power Ltd, said during the discussion. 

While new age companies are cloud-native at birth, the transition for existing companies can be challenging and needs to be broken down into phases.  

“Brownfield organisations can start with building cloud-ready workloads and assets on cloud. The core which is usually a legacy system and resides on-premise can be a challenge,” Pankaj Gupta, chief technology officer at Bharti AXA Life Insurance, said.

He further added that the move to cloud was not about lift and shift and hybrid systems can make it complex for organisations transitioning to cloud.  

While moving infrastructure to cloud has benefitted companies, the key is to ensure flexibility in servicing by the Cloud Provider. 

“Segmenting and containerising services plays a critical role,” Raman Pillai, director of information technology at Ather Energy, said during the discussion.

He added, “With this, we can scale specific services without impacting the cost. There is a need to be platform agnostic and adopt multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud approach so that there is no lock-in.” 

With the adoption of cloud-native operating model, businesses can achieve the desired KPI on profits, concluded the panellists.