Over the last few years, cloud has been able to create a special place for itself amongst fast moving, competitive and growth-led organisations. As the technology became an imperative, it has undoubtedly created unique business opportunities and isbecoming an anchor for innovation for leading businesses globally. Studies echo the same thought and trend with Gartner predicting that the global cloud revenue will total to a significant $474 billion in 2022. As we associate numbers to the tune of hundreds of billions with the cloud market, any organisation big or small should realise that we are sailing in a ‘cloud first’ world where they must dive in to ensure business resilience above everything else.

The cloud trend is significant in India too where we are relying on a rapid digitisation path to create a self-sustaining, self-reliant and booming economy. This is substantiated by a study which finds that cloud market in India is expected to grow 26% by the end of 2022. As the numbers state, India is on a fast-paced cloud journey with the rest of the world. Many Indian businesses have already found concrete base for themselves and have even reaped significant benefits in the last few years by being the early adopters.

However, even with the massive cloud wave, there are certain organisations who are unable to leverage the benefits of cloud and are finding themselves hinged to monolithic systems which in return is hampering their growth. These critical businesses in highly regulated spaces with extremely sensitive data are being left behind in the undoubtedly prevalent cloud race. Typically, organisations in the BFSI space, governmental establishments, defence sector and related fields have to protect crucial information and maintain regulatory compliance. Any breach of data within such organisations can lead to gigantic concerns not just for them but for the nation too. While these regulations are of utmost importance, but at the same time legacy infrastructure prevents these businesses to reach their potential and would ultimately push them behind by several decades.

The direct cause of this would be roadblocks in public service delivery. The question is how then can businesses ensure data residency, data sovereignty, compliance adherence along with being cloud first? The answer simply lies with hyperscaler cloud service providers.

Such organisations must choose cloud providers who offer newer and customised cloud models to concretely catalyse their digital transformation while helping them fulfil compliance as set by the regulators. Additionally, as data residency is becoming an imperative in almost every country, businesses should carefully cherry pick the right vendor who will support them with offerings such as distributed cloud or unique hybrid cloud set-up. With such strategies, an organisation in a regulated space or any governmental business will get the privacy they require and at the same time also leverage the benefits of cloud.

Additionally, cloud providers must also aim to benefit customers with complete control as they secure highly sensitive data or even non-critical infrastructure within their servers. Such solutions are bound to cause an increase in cloud acceptance across the country as businesses and governments feel secure and create sovereign cloud dedicated to their specific needs fulfilling compliance.

At Oracle too, we understand the need of the market and offer a fully managed cloud region with hardware and software which is delivered to customer data centres. Our customers in public sector are leveraging OCI dedicated region and they host applications that require strict data residency, control and security. Customers in highly regulated environment are gaining agility, economics, and scaling of the public cloud in their own data centres which was earlier not possible for them. We also ensure to support, manage, upgrade, and even expand the region, just as we do in our own.

Additionally, we ensure to offer the same financially backed services level agreements (SLAs) for availability, manageability, and performance that we do in public OCI regions. At the same time, we are proactively responding to any changes by the regulators for example RBI has recently release a circular around guidelines for sourcing IT services where they also talk about how they can use hyperscalers. While RBI has recommended using public cloud for non-critical infrastructure, there are some conditions associated with it. We at Oracle immediately responded with a white paper adhering to all the conditions which came effortlessly to us considering, for us, security is a primary ask in cloud too. With all our efforts towards ensuring public cloud benefits for public sector, India’s largest bank is leveraging our platform to host their UPI infrastructure.

Ultimately, as India witnesses massive urbanisation, industrialisation and better civic facilities, it becomes imperative to ensure that digitisation is equally spread across sectors. Leaving behind any sector or business due to any reason would largely impact their future readiness. World is swiftly moving towards a technology first environment and businesses especially in public sector must embrace it completely.

Debapriya Nandan is Senior Director and Head - Public Sector Business Development, Oracle India.