When companies evaluate the business opportunities that deep technologies open up, they should take into account the scope of the changes they bring about. This will be determined by the complexity of a technology and the business’ ability to scale solutions based on it.
Deep tech like AI, blockchain and cloud computing are rapidly moving from early research to market applications. In a sense, it’s a new industrial revolution, where new platform technologies and infrastructures can transform the way we live and work.
In his keynote address during TechSparks 2022, Bruno Goveas, Enterprise Security, Sales Director, Akamai India spoke about how technology can be leveraged and architected in a resourceful manner. Bruno put forth four key principles, which can enable you to achieve it:
Compute
In today’s world, cloud providers are so ubiquitous; they have a variety of offerings that customers can deploy based on their use case. Citing an example of a fintech company that was Akamai’s client, Bruno said, “When the fintech startup started scaling, they realised they had a particular use case where they needed power, storage, compute and processing capability. It made no sense to go to their core providers. It didn’t make sense from a latency standpoint. And that was a perfect fit.”
Similarly, there are a lot of gaming customers that do not need this type of computing. So, the key insight that you need to take away is when you architect for multi-cloud, you need to make sure there is a mix of cloud providers that enables you to deploy compute at different levels. “Cloud providers have matured; there are multiple options, make sure when you’re designing your applications from the ground up, you’re deploying it in a manner where it makes sense for you to scale,” he said.
Delivery
While startups can build a lot of use cases and offer great services, if the consumer cannot consume it, they will definitely go to competition. Bruno pointed out that there lies a great opportunity in Bharat, which encompasses the tier II and tier III cities of India. “Make sure just as you are focusing on your compute, your applications can be delivered closer to where your micro-market is. You have to choose a platform that has a delivery capability, where your services are one-hop away from a tier II or a small town,” he said.
Portability
Gone are the days when customers were loyal to one cloud provider. Also, one cloud alone cannot support all workloads or use cases. “So, for your idea and for the use cases, for the feedback that your customers are providing, you may need to have portability, so that someday, if things don’t make sense or the market has changed, it needs to deploy it somewhere else,” Bruno suggested.
Decouple security
Security is a shared responsibility. If security is put on one cloud, when you want to move it, what happens to your security? You need to move that too. This brings forth Bruno’s third insight – when you’re deploying for scale, decouple your security. “Platforms have evolved to a point where you can apply a single security policy, get the visibility right from the compute stack to the user stack API, and stack the entire nine yards on a unified platform across your workloads. It doesn’t matter where you need to move it. You need to architect for security, by decoupling it from your core platforms,” he concludes.
