Top highlights
- Data is at the core of organizations’ long-term revival plans
- Technology leaders are working on innovative AI/ML models to address some specific challenges in leveraging data
- Integrating and consolidating data across multiple cloud becomes a key priority
Technology today powers business transformation and growth in unprecedented ways. In their efforts to build future-ready, digital enterprises, IT leaders have been leveraging data in several ways, using AI/ML, analytics and cloud technologies.
The latest edition of “Digital Leaders Club” – an exclusive virtual gathering of technology leaders, curated by CORE Media and Google Cloud India, focused on how enterprises are coming up with long-term plans that impact the way they use and adopt technology. The participants in the discussion exchanged views on how their organisations are leveraging Cloud and how managing data is their main focus.
“IT leaders are relooking at their digital strategies and roadmap as there’s so much digital activity happening today. Even the most traditional companies have started looking at not only leveraging the Cloud but even the technologies that Cloud brings with it,” said Anoop Mathur, Founder & President, CORE Media, who moderated the discussion attended by well-known IT leaders in the industry and Google experts.
According to Kamolika Peres, Director, Google Cloud India, “Some of the changes that we witnessed in the last one year are not going to be transient; but will likely have a longer-term impact on the way technology is being adopted. As a result, we see CIOs changing their technology strategies and exploring further as to how they can bring more value out of data and cloud.”
“Pandemic has been an eye-opener of sorts for everybody. In many cases, the customers forced us to rethink everything in terms of how we were even imagining what the deliveries will be. We started looking at innovative solutions and for companies that could offer the same. It also pushed me to think about what digital architecture should be for us in the long term,” said a CIO of a financial services firm.
Another CIO said that the decision-making in his organisation is today completely driven by the data and the analytics which is coming out of it. “Cloud has been very helpful, and we are going in the right direction considering the present situation,” he added.
Technology leaders in the panel underscored the fact that organisations must not only constantly innovate but also create that opportunity for their customers to leverage the technologies that they are bringing to the table.
Another CIO of an ITeS company, which has been one of the early adopters of Cloud, said, ”Previously, we used to see that the data has to move where the ML models get built. What we are seeing now is our ability to build models and then transfer some of the models to where the data resides. Moving the data back and forth, in and out of the cloud had otherwise been a challenge. We have been able to address that by taking the AI models to where the data resides, and we call that Federated Learning. Many of our customers have loved that.”
While Data is the focal focus point in many organisations , consolidation is the key as everything is working in isolation.
CIOs on the panel also highlighted some key challenges around multi-cloud data consolidation and how data moves across different clouds. Some of the advanced releases from Google Cloud in fact addresses these concerns more effectively by creating a platform where you can query the data across different clouds.
Another key focus area for the technology leaders has been around building data lakes to take their analytics initiatives to the next level. Google Cloud, for example, made a recent announcement on Vertex AI, a managed machine learning (ML) platform that allows companies to accelerate the deployment and maintenance of artificial intelligence (AI) models.
