CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Monojit Mazumdar, Partner, Cloud and Systems Engineering Leader, Deloitte India
How is the job market in the cloud industry evolving in India? What are the changing skill requirements and career opportunities?
Response: Post pandemic, large Indian enterprises have embarked in the cloud journey. Financial services organizations are being mandated to move to cloud for transparency. With scale and complexity of current computing landscape, Deloitte expects the cloud talent demands to grow at a brisk space and at a varying degree for different skills groups
In cloud strategy space, demand for Cloud financial management (a.k.a. Cloud FinOps) will be significant. Core engineering skills and expertise in migration of application to cloud platforms will be significantly higher. While generic application development (in open source and Microsoft technology platforms) will be moderate, modern application development skills like low code platforms and automation skills demand will peak shortly
All of these presents unique opportunities to those who can learn and unlearn faster
How have cloud-based initiatives implemented by the Indian Government during the COVID-19 pandemic leveraged cloud computing to address challenges and provide effective solutions?
Response: India stack (as Government of India technology solution to handle large scale challenges is commonly referred) is a story of building scalable solutions in a cost-effective way. A few examples are
- CoWin portal (as an effective way of tracking and managing a large-scale program)
- DigiLocker (secure repository of citizen information) and
- DigiYatra (biometric driven authentication of airline passengers across multiple applications)
These are all examples of cloud enabled solution that are built on robust architecture principles
Most of these applications have leveraged cloud for scale and have following common features:
- Authentication and securing the application through a single point of entry (mostly Aadhar based authentication)
- Use of common and open-source application development framework ensuring consistency
Following on these principles should ensure far more pervasive leverage of the framework for even more complex and scaled opportunities nationally and internationally
What are the key benefits and challenges associated with the Indian Government’s adoption of cloud technology in initiatives like GI Cloud (MeghRaj), National and State Service Delivery Gateways, and AI platform AIRAWAT?
Response: Most commonly referred benefits are significant reduction in capital infrastructure rapid development and enhancement of applications (e.g., CoWin application has been enhanced continuously since inception in introduce newer features and cater to scalability challenges.
India Government cloud enabled digital blueprint has been designed meticulously with a set of common functionalities and interfaces ensuring a relatively smoother exchange of information
Biggest challenge the stack may come with growing complexity that future will demand. A few complex problems like
- Growing pressure on urban infrastructure
- Climate change and its impounding impact on agriculture
- Bigger manufacturing demand and its impact industrial infrastructure
All these complex problems that will require more computing power, agility, and speed. Development of infrastructure and corresponding applications on cloud enabled infrastructure need to scale up appropriately
How do these initiatives drive the digital transformation of government services?
Response: Citizen centric applications operate on a principle of uniform application delivery experience. Adoption of these frameworks have enabled this principle with striking consistency. eParivahan suite of applications is a good example. Serving as vehicle and drivers registration database with uniform interface eases out the inter-state registration process. With rapid scaling of road infrastructure, this repository of information is expected to form the backbone of digitization of supply chain and movement of goods strongly
All citizen centric applications with a strong message driven infrastructure (e.g., notifying the citizens that a service is due) will ensure smoother generation of revenue and an accountable mechanism of expenditure
With the size and complexity of India, pervasive digital transformation will remain a daunting proposition. Cloud, mobile, strong infrastructure can ensure speed and precision
In what ways has cloud computing empowered individuals and contributed to the talent pool in India? Can you share examples of how cloud technology has enhanced employability and fostered the development of digital skills?
Response: Cloud technology skills may be categorized in three major areas
- Cloud Strategy and Architecture
- Setting up Cloud Infrastructure and running Cloud operations
- Development of cloud native applications
With the advent of cloud, following trends will:
- Cloud applications operate on a standard set of tools and platforms. With the scaled requirements from India talent pool, time required to gain expertise in these platforms have been significantly reduced, resulting in quicker readiness of professionals to pick up certain tasks
- Newer programming tools aided by new techniques of application developments (though generative AI prompts or low/no code platforms ensured rapid adoption of digital technologies
Both these developments will generate short term spurt in demand and employability. In long term, how these technologies and development play out to automate a set of tasks that are usually driven manually now will be a good problem to watch for
What do you envision for the future of cloud computing in India? What potential opportunities and advancements do you anticipate in terms of speed, innovation, cost reduction, and the development of digital skills?
Response: Indian computing infrastructure is relatively new. There is not a whole of lot application migration needed. From a growth and adoption perspective, India is in a unique spot to reap the benefits of building direct applications on cloud:
Quick to build, deploy and change: With cloud enabled infrastructure, applications for a specific business challenge can be built literally in days in scaled way
Leverage of a larger ecosystem: Cloud infrastructure will enable our government and enterprises to leverage a large ecosystem of players (start-ups and large organizations included) for ideation and building
Innovation: Innovation thrives with multiple ideas and quick testing of the same. Cloud provides an ideal case in point to enable this
Talent growth: With lower entry barrier to a skill and faster changing world of technologies, Indian engineers will have a clear head start with their clear flexibility and sharp ability to learn
