Leading in a changing world with Hybrid Cloud and AI, underpinned by security – Times of India

We live in a time of Digital Darwinism, where technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can adapt, and those who are digitally fit will survive and thrive. The pandemic has taught us that technology is undoubtedly the sutradhar- a unifying force of the digital economy and will continue to propel Indias digital mission. Technology is ingrained in every aspect of our lives, including how we work, live, build, connect, and transact. Exponential technologies like hybrid cloud and AI have taken center stage in the contactless world and are all set to scale through this techade. Harnessing the power of technology evolution hybrid cloud, AI, and game-changing quantum computing will be crucial for India to lead the world through this digital revolution.

Hybrid cloud and AI are inherently dynamic and can expose organisations to cyber-attacks if data security isnt taken seriously. The Cost of Data Breach Report shows that Indias data breach costs increased to $176 million in 2022, a 25% increase from 2020. Businesses must note that a constantly evolving and increasingly complex tech ecosystem that is not resilient to evolving threats will compromise the integrity and trust in next-generation technologies. For India to grow in the techade, it is critical to understand the dynamics of digitisation and its opportunities and challenges. This is particularly true for growing cybersecurity risk; it is the need of the hour for businesses to strengthen and continuously improve their security posture by establishing a zero-trust cyber security environment.

Hybrid Cloud a critical strategy for our times

In a fast-evolving digital world, every enterprises de facto infrastructure has become hybrid. The pandemic significantly accelerated digital transformation in all businesses and cloud adoption helped in this journey. This urgent need for action prompted organisations to tactically assemble their current cloud estates quickly through a mix of public, private, and on-premises assetsthat may or may not work together efficiently. In fact, the average enterprise is expected to have 10 clouds by 2023, up from 8 in 2020. SaaS applications have also exploded, moving many standard business processes to the cloud. Without architectural guard rails, implementation pressures lead to corner-cutting, making the IT landscape more complex and costly, less secure, and less likely to deliver operational agility and better business outcomes.71% of executives cited data integration across the cloud estate as an enterprise problem.

Hybrid Cloud is a mix of cloud environments that includes public, private, as well as on-premises infrastructure. This mix of environments often falls short of financial and operational expectations without a level of integration across them with seamless interoperability and portability of applications and data across environments. Done right, a Hybrid Cloud Platform open by design and without vendor lock-in provides a fabric for orchestration, management, and application/data portability across these environments. This platform is increasingly relevant in a world where enterprises are building edge computing capabilities to monetize the opportunities available through the launch of 5G and 6G technology.

AI and Automation are foundational

With over two quintillion bytes created daily and much of it being unstructured data that our computers have not been able to interpret before Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to gain relevance by augmenting human capabilities with analytics and insights to make informed decisions.

In India, data is generated everywhere. A village compounder, without Internet access, generates data when he requests the next batch of polio vaccine, even in a remote village. Likewise, the subsidy for medical procedures generates data about patients and their pre-existing conditions. Automation powered by AI will also help mitigate supply chain disruptions by making business processes and workflows more agile and efficient.

Through multi-lingual support, an NLP chatbot or conversational AI can bridge the language gap between Indias English-speaking and non-English-speaking populations. By using artificial intelligence to recognise handwriting across different languages in India, we can simplify data entry and create a clean data lake. From crop planning to precision farming, AI has the potential to empower farmers to deploy tailored interventions, whereas in the social sphere, AI will improve the quality of life for citizens, including hyper-personalisation in financial services and retail.

Evolution to Quantum

Advances in traditional classical computing, plus advances in AI, are driving the most important revolution in computing the emergence of Quantum computing. Enterprises will evolve from analysing data to discovering new ways to solve problems. When combined with open integration, AI, and hyper-automation, this will ultimately lead to new business models. As we have seen with the pandemic, disruption and uncertainties will make business models more sensitive to and dependent on new technologies. Quantum computing offers the potential to expand the scope and complexity of business problems we can solve. Quantum computing in combination with existing advanced technologies will dramatically impact how science and business evolve by accelerating the discovery of solutions to big global challenges. The integration of quantum computing, AI, and classical computing into hybrid multicloud workflows will drive the most significant computing revolution in 60 years.

Quantum computing will not replace classical computing it will extend and complement it by affording enterprises the opportunity to solve complex problems that test the limits of classical computing. Example of use cases that enterprises have started to experiment with include untangling operational disruption for airlines (IROPS), enhancing contextual personalised services for customers, optimising airline network/shipping logistics planning globally, and healthcare solutions related to genomics, single-cell transcriptomics, and population health.

Cyber Security the next strategic imperative

As next-generation technologies such as Hybrid Cloud, AI, IoT and Blockchain continue to evolve and become pervasive in a hyper-digitised world, cyber security becomes very critical and is fast becoming a Board level issues in all enterprises, irrespective of size.

Cyber security is now a strategic imperative for all enterprises they must strengthen their digital defence by establishing a zero-trust cyber security environment, one that must be continuously and frequently evaluated, particularly as bad actors continue to get smarter and bolder with technology evolution. In addition, enterprises and governments need the capability to detect and respond to threats at scale. With explosion of data and devices from digital economy there is an exponential increase in the number of devices connecting to the internet and the volume of data that is getting generated. With the evolution of 5G, the attack surface will increase due to increased volume of devices that will get onto the network.

With the emergence of advanced technologies, cyber threats will be more severe. For example, when quantum computers are scalable enough, they will be able to break the major cybersecurity protocols used today. Bad actors are looking to steal data today for breaking into it in the future. Enterprises must consider upgrading their systems to quantum safe cryptography on priority to avoid and protect against these attacks.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Leading in a changing world with Hybrid Cloud and AI, underpinned by security - Times of India