How would an economic downturn affect companies’ adoption, expansion and optimization of enterprise cloud technology?
Such efforts should continue apace, as digital transformation is increasingly seen as a mission-critical, nondiscretionary initiative. That’s according to Jaspreet Singh, Founder and CEO of cloud data protection and resiliency provider Druva.
“Turbulent markets help customers focus more on their high-priority, meaningful efforts to transform in terms of cloud,” Singh said in a recent Nasdaq TradeTalks interview. “We’ll see a lot more of that, in my opinion.”
“Irrespective of the market sentiment, digital transformation is here. People are looking at the supply chain being transformed, the delivery model being transformed, and customer buying patterns completely changing,” Singh continued. “We are seeing a lot more adoption of cloud, and these secular trends will go on for several years.”
Enterprise cloud is a computing model where firms can access IT resources such as servers, processing power and data storage from a private or public cloud provider on an as-needed basis. Advantages include scale, flexibility and agility, and cost transparency. In 2022, more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending is at stake from the shift to cloud, growing to almost $1.8 trillion in 2025, Gartner said in a February 2022 report.
As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, cloud enables firms to conserve cash by opting for short- to medium-term solutions funded by operating budgets, Singh said, as opposed to traditional IT solutions that require longer-term capital expenditure commitments.
Singh said the cloud marketplace has evolved in a way that benefits the consumer. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other large providers have diversified their offerings, and there are a multitude of independent software vendors such as Druva, which are built on top of this infrastructure, and provide specific solutions to specific problems.
Regarding cloud security, Singh noted a two-part transformation: making systems more automated and “baked in” to the service with less need for human oversight, and focusing on remediation and recovery as well as detection and prevention. Said Singh: “Someone will get in. When they get in, how do we contain the damage? How do we recover quickly? How can we get back to business as fast as possible?”
Cloud technology is superior for data protection, according to Singh. Before the SaaS model, data management “was predominantly hardware- and software-oriented, and the chances of getting it wrong were far higher,” he said.
“A SaaS vendor applies the crowdsourced learning of many years’ expertise into every single customer,” Singh added. “Plus, the power of instant scaling helps you get access to resources when you want them – for recovery, for remediation, for burst compute needs. When you have to have a disaster recovery setup, you move from a traditional model into a cloud model.”
