Cloud Impact

While the emergence of SMAC had wide-reaching consequences collectively, cloud computing perhaps had the single most transformative impact on enterprises. The shift from investing in on-premises IT infrastructure, which required accurate business and requirement forecasting and massive capital expenses upfront, to an operational expenditure model where companies could opt for a pay-as-you-use model gave businesses the ability to scale their IT infrastructure up or down as per their demand without having to plan too far ahead. It also opened up access to enterprise-grade IT resources for small and medium businesses as it democratised access to infrastructure. Outsourcing their IT infrastructure management allowed companies to focus on their core business rather than managing servers and their networking needs.

Further, it fundamentally transformed business models in several industries. Some of the biggest companies to emerge during this time were Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify and Uber. All of them could rapidly scale globally by leveraging cloud infrastructure and not having to invest in their own data centres. They combined this with the direct consumer reach they had through social media and mobile phones and the use of analytics to give consumers exactly what they wanted and when and how they wanted it, turning them into some of the biggest success stories of that decade.19 In other industries, too, the intersection of data analytics coupled with cloud computing resulted in far-reaching innovations and changes. Banks and financial institutions started using data analytics to help with risk management and fraud detection. They also invested in mobile banking applications, bringing a massive change in how people banked and accessed their banking information. Within the healthcare space, it opened up new avenues like telemedicine as well as AI-enabled diagnostics, leading to an improvement in the quality of treatment and diagnosis available.

This, in turn, led to the emergence of several new business models, which would have a transformative impact on how companies and industries evolved. As cloud adoption grew, technology companies switched from selling software stacks to offering everything ‘as a service’. The first off the block were software companies with SaaS providers emerging as a whole new wave of companies.20 The availability of cloud-based software applications did away with the need for on-premises software installations and made high-end software stacks accessible to larger groups of companies. The same shift happened with infrastructure and platform providers, with terms like ‘infrastructure as a service’ (IaaS) and ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) entering the business vocabulary.