Indian firms reimagining business continuity plans amid Covid-19: Oracle India

Now more than ever, organizations are realising the need for a strong digital foundation for their businesses as Covid-19 has disrupted their future plans.

"To keep their business up and running and serve customers with minimal disruption, enterprises are reimagining business resiliency and fine-tuning their business continuity plans. Just look at how the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry has responded with agility, for instance," Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India, told IANS.

Deemed "essential services", in a very short time span, most banks have successfully empowered their employees to work-from-home, minimising inconvenience to their customers.

"In fact, one of our customers, a leading mid-size bank with origins in south India, saw digital migrations increase by almost 10 per cent at an overall bank level. So organisations are increasingly looking to digital technologies like Cloud for ensuring business continuity," said Kumar.

Traditional enterprises now aim to reduce their CAPEX model of managing data centres on their own, and instead switch to an OPEX model which Cloud provides in terms of price and performance advantages.

"Most IT leaders also agree that some Public Clouds are far more secure than their traditional on-premise IT setups," Kumar added.

Manappuram is among leading NBFCs that has leveraged modern technology, especially Cloud, to drive business growth and deliver innovative solutions to its customers.

"Mannapuram Group will be moving databases and applications of its 17 group companies to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in a phased manner. The move to Cloud also allows them to modernise and consolidate their IT infrastructure via an OPEX model," informed Kumar.

The company did evaluate a few other Public Cloud offerings before choosing Oracle Gen 2 Cloud.

According to Nandakumar VP, MD and CEO, Manappuram Finance Limited, their primary need to have a secure, enterprise-grade cloud to power Manappuram's future business growth made then choose Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud.

"To put this into perspective, by moving to Oracle Cloud, we anticipate 3X performance improvement vis-a-vis our existing IT setup, and nearly 35 per cent cost savings, over the next five years. This will help Manappuram focus more on its core business and increase customer satisfaction quotient", said Nandakumar.

Buoyed by rising demand for high performance, enterprise-grade, secure cloud services in the country, Oracle is set to announce its second Gen 2 Cloud region before the end of this year in the country.

"As more and more organisations look to optimise IT investments and improve their business efficiencies, there's bound to be a switch to an OPEX model, leading to increased usage of cloud based services. To help customers manage this shift to the cloud seamlessly, we're on track to announce our second Gen 2 Cloud region in India very soon," Kumar told IANS.

Oracle is currently helping its customers in the country adapt to the new normal, by providing free access to online learning content and certifications for a broad array of users for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database, as well as content related to topics such as data science, machine learning, and multi-cloud environments such as integration with Microsoft Azure.

The Cloud giant is also providing free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure credits for startups part of our ‘Oracle for Startups' programme and free HR tool to help customers keep their employees safe.