Industry Cloud Solutions: Revolutionizing Businesses

In a rapidly changing and highly competitive world, where stagnation is extremely detrimental to businesses, innovation is the key for companies to adapt, grow, and evolve. This scenario has made it an imperative for organizations across various domains to look for innovative solutions to streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and increase growth. 

Industry clouds are among the innovative solutions that are transforming businesses and making them stay relevant today. They are the composable building blocks that are built for strategic use cases in specific industries. To support businesses within a specific vertical, these solutions provide industry-specific functionality, data models, workflows, and integrations. 

This blog post would discuss the importance of industry cloud solutions and explore the ways in which they are revolutionizing businesses across different domains. Gartner predicts that by 2027, enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate more than 50% of their critical business initiatives.

The following are some of the key advantages of using industry cloud solutions:

• Increased Efficiency and Improved Operations: The functionalities provided by industry clouds are developed based on best practices, regulations, and standards of each industry. The tailored solutions that address the specific challenges and requirements of these industries will lead to increased efficiency and improved operations.
• Better Data Protection, Security, and Compliance: Industry cloud solutions are implementing industry-specific security protocols, data protection measures, and regulatory compliances, to ensure that sensitive data and information are properly safeguarded, and that the regulations and standards will be met.
• Shorter Time-To-Market: The use of pre-configured templates, tools, and processes that industry cloud solutions have developed, allows enterprises to quickly and seamlessly take their products and services to market.

Using industry cloud solutions, Volkswagen has built a new Digital Production Platform (DPP) that all suppliers and service providers can connect to. Productivity gain of 30% is being targeted by 2025. The suppliers get full visibility on customer demands and this will help in synchronizing operations to meet supply and demand in real time. The platform uses cloud service provider’s data encryption and it is hosted locally to ensure better security and compliance.

Along with the advantages, there are also certain challenges that need to be dealt with when organizations opt for industrial cloud solutions. A few are as follows: 

• Diverse Requirements for Different Companies: Since different industries have various types of users, levels of security, customer details, and financial data, the security, privacy, compliance, and regulatory requirements will also end up being diverse across each of them. Complying with all the above, while also managing solutions in the cloud will be very complex, thus the solutions should be able to cater to multiple levels of scalability and performance requirements. 
• Selection of the Right Provider: Unlike a few years ago, the current cloud market has a large number of industry cloud platform vendors. These vendors need to be properly assessed so that the right provider is selected. A multi-cloud strategy or assessment will make this decision easy as it will have all the service providers compared based on their service offerings, cost efficiency, innovative technology, security, and reliability. Cost is also an important factor to be considered, because these platforms involve subscription fees, data transfer costs, infrastructure scaling expenses, and maintenance costs.

As per the 2022 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey, enterprises are facing shortage of cloud skills, and it’s driving the creation of cloud platform teams and investment in automation in many organizations. Automation will help make the hard-to-find cloud talent more productive. Innovations like industry cloud solutions are a step in that direction as they provide domain-specific requirements as pre-built features on the platform.

At Reflections, we are successfully driving our customers’ business growth through digital transformation. Our extensive cloud experience combined with our industry cloud vision, cloud expertise, and partnership ecosystem are the key to driving the transformation of our customers’ businesses by facilitating the rapid adaptation of their industry-specific processes using the cloud platforms.