Cloud adoption considerations and trends for small and medium businesses – The Times of India Blog

Indias Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have come a long way in the last few decades, having served as the backbone of our economy with 63M+ establishments providing employment to 120M+, driving half of Indias exports, and contributing close to 30% of Indias GDP. MSMEs have been among the worst sectors to have been impacted by the effects of lockdown and Covid-19 pandemic, forcing them to re-think their business models. Technology adoption driven by digital transformation, especially the choice of cloud-based solutions can be pivotal in re-energising this sector by helping them expand across customer segments and verticals while optimising costs and customising their products and services per their customers needs.

As businesses recalibrate to next normal, it is imperative for SMEs to move away from considering IT enablement as an afterthought. As part of the journey in embracing the right technology to scale business outcomes, cloud-based solutions deserve special focus. Cloud computing offers software, platforms, and infrastructure as a service with a pay-as-you-go model, thereby enabling SMEs to adopt world-class technologies at low cost of ownership.

Cloud is a catalyst to drive business agility and efficiency

SME uptake of digital technologies has improved significantly in the last 5 years (68% offline1 in 2016 to 37% non-users2 in Sept 2020). The cloud adoption landscape amongst MSMEs in India can be characterised as:

Key Growth Drivers

Widespread high-speed internet availability penetrating large swathes of India, coupled with shrinking data costs for more than five years have led many small business owners to actively consider digital adoption (e.g., digital payments/UPI, mobile wallets & internet banking). The next wave of opportunity lies in cloud computing, which typically are consumed as Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS compute, network and storage available in a rental model), or SaaS (software-as-a-service fully hosted applications available remotely over the internet).

Barriers to Scaling Adoption

The SME segment in Indias cloud market grapples with a unique combination of technical and business challenges, additionally exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. Per a NASSCOM Survey 2, hidden (and non-transparent) cloud costs (37%), vendors inability to offer custom services (33%) and employee resistance to digitization (29%) were the key barriers to scaling cloud adoption.

Adoption Accelerators for India Markets

Consistent with our experience, cloud and digital needs of SMEs are advocated and fulfilled largely via channel partners and IT resellers (60%) due to their extensive reach, with digital engagement channels also gaining mindshare. While there continues to be a need to educate the small and medium entrepreneurs on cloud strategy and hiring to address the skills gap, there is no substitute to a businesss trusted digital advisor who can handhold their journey towards cloud maturity. Channel partners help by nudging the business in exploring digital tools, SaaS while articulating their impact (tangible measures, however abstract work as great nudges).

Even though COVID-19 has disrupted SMEs, it has also opened new opportunities for them to adapt and transform through relevant digitization, of which cloud adoption has been a key ingredient. The SMEs who stay invested or dare to invest in public cloud offerings (IaaS/SaaS or bundled offers per examples above) will most certainly get to reinvent their businesses and make themselves more competitive and be future-ready.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

Follow this link:

Cloud adoption considerations and trends for small and medium businesses - The Times of India Blog