Cloud to fuel 6 key priorities for Indian firms in 2021: IBM CTO

"The next chapter of the cloud demands the power to quickly innovate and respond to changing market and client demands- build once and deploy anywhere," Natarajan told

New Delhi: While 2020 saw an acceleration in the adoption of Hybrid Cloud, allowing organisations to run workloads on-premises, in the private cloud and the public cloud, the next year will see six key technology priorities for firms of all sizes to adopt in the country, a key IBM executive said on Sunday.

In 2021, not only will organisations continue to focus on ensuring they make the right technology choices, they will adopt a holistic, hybrid multi-cloud architecture, allowing them to easily build and modernise applications and make their data ready for their journey to AI across the company, said Subram Natarajan, Chief Technology Officer, IBM India/South Asia.

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“The next chapter of the cloud demands the power to quickly innovate and respond to changing market and client demands- build once and deploy anywhere. With cloud investment being key, we will witness six major technology priorities enabled by cloud in 2021,” Natarajan told IANS.

A recent IBM study highlighted that organisations in India will increase the share of spend on Hybrid Cloud, from the current 17 per cent to about 49 per cent by 2023.

The Indian organisations are expected to be using an average of 10 clouds, however, only 29 per cent of businesses will have holistic multi-cloud management strategies in place by 2023.
As Cloud migration projects become more and more mainstream, there will be a clear drive by the customers’ IT teams, to standardise on the technology enablers.

“Particularly, container platform decisions will become the focus and customers will look for flexibility, security, openness, and agility as the main criteria for this decision,” Natarajan said.
The second priority will be to enable the journey to Cloud with industry lens, addressing the roadblocks regarding security, compliance and regulatory requirement.

“Particularly, in the case of financial services and telco which have extensive regulatory controls that are mandated, this becomes relevant,” the IBM CTO added.

Third will be edge and satellite computing.

Since the technology is about bringing compute closer to where data is being generated, this is more appealing to industrial customers who are looking to bring IT and Operational Technology (OT) closer, leveraging fast and future rich networking such as 5G while not losing sight of becoming cloud-native.

The fourth pillar will be intelligent automation to go mainstream.

“Segments like retail, banking, telco, the government will drive up the usage of intelligent automation”.

The fortification of the core security wall will be the fifth priority for enterprises.

“Leveraging cloud-based security solutions to establish a common control pane for handling threats and security across the organisation will become a reality. The need is driven more from the WFH situation and the increased surface area of attack,” Natarajan emphasised.

Also, AI adoption will see an increase in mainstream IT operations to help predict outages and facilitate the timely resolution of issues.

“The retail and government segment will stand to gain most from the rapid acceleration of AI adoption into mainstream functions,” he told IANS.