As enterprises work towards attaining the full benefits of the cloud, they are beginning to realize that cloud migrations involve multiple complexities and that leveraging cloud capabilities can be difficult. Therefore, some businesses are now looking at the industry-specific cloud to help them shortcut the transition and achieve cloud success.
Despite the pandemic accelerating the transition to cloud shift and Gartner predicting the public cloud market to reach US$ 651 billion in 2024, enterprises have hardly scratched the surface of public cloud adoption.
Public cloud works as a blank slate where businesses can connect the many on-demand capabilities needed to achieve necessary business and industry needs. Industry cloud on the other hand provides preconfigured and predefined cloud infrastructure built to meet the distinct requirements of specific industries. It involves meeting compliance and performance requirements, and certain applications to deliver industry services.
The biggest advantage of the industry cloud is that it can save businesses a lot of time and energy when it comes to designing their cloud environments and their transition process. Moreover, they address the biggest concern that businesses have with any cloud project – security. The industry cloud also provides standardized configurations for secure access at the level needed by the industry.
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Industry clouds are highly attractive because of their potential to create value for both public cloud providers and customers. Companies that feel the heat of the competition from cloud-native disrupters prefer industry-specific cloud. For them, shifting their core business applications to general public clouds is challenging since they usually rely on industry-specific software or legacy applications designed for on-premise data centers. These companies face a difficult choice. Just lifting and shifting applications to the cloud results in substandard performance. And, optimizing them for the cloud can cost a lot of time and money. Therefore, businesses are increasingly choosing industry clouds as they have the accelerate their cloud migrations and take the risk out of it.
Since industry cloud is a fairly new idea, the biggest downside is that there may be a lack of availability. Businesses that like the notion of a preconfigured environment may end up waiting a long time for suitable offerings to be developed and in the meantime, they may miss out on other cloud benefits.
Another issue with the industry cloud is that companies may not be able to do unlimited customizations. Even though the industry cloud delivers the required industry-standard capabilities, the unique processes of enterprises are what sets them apart from their adversaries. Moreover, the capabilities of new industry clouds may even be more limited than general cloud environments.
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Also, there is the question of vendor lock-in. Although all clouds have that risk, it may be bigger in the case of an industry-specific cloud as the dependency is not only for infrastructure but a completely new way of addressing operational requirements.
Designing a cloud infrastructure or choosing a cloud provider depends on individual business requirements. Even though industry clouds can help enterprises with an easier transition to the cloud, but they should do a full assessment of their cloud strategy before choosing one.
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Prangya Pandab is an Associate Editor with OnDot Media. She is a seasoned journalist with almost seven years of experience in the business news sector. Before joining ODM, she was a journalist with CNBC-TV18 for four years. She also had a brief stint with an infrastructure finance company working for their communications and branding vertical.
