In Interview with Dr Christopher Richard, MD & Chief Cloud Architect, G7CR Technologies

Q1. How has G7CR Technologies helped drive cloud transformation among various big and small organizations amidst COVID-19?

While we have always been working with businesses both big and small to move their IT infra to the cloud, the COVID-19 situation saw changes in need and drove a huge demand for all enterprises to quickly get their users to be able to work from home in order to continue operating. While most businesses lost the security of having resources work within the confinement of the four walls of their organization, as COVID-19 struck, they had to move quickly to get people to work beyond those boundaries and needed to ensure that data security, availability and cost of the solution were not compromised. G7CR has been instrumental in getting over 12,000 employees of various organizations to work from home during these past 3 months. Based on the situation, we ensured that  our services where absolutely free, and we committed 70% of our work force to getting businesses to implement continuity  and ensure operations are continued to run from homes of the employees, with security that matched or exceeded what existed when they worked from office. 

Q2. During uncertain economic situations such as this, has cloud services played any role in the optimization of your resources?

As COVID-19 started to become a reality, the first reaction of most organizations was to focus on short term continuity and not the economics. But as time went by, organizations realized that this situation is not short term anymore and the world is going to be permanently changed in terms of the way we work, think and run businesses. In addition to this realization, the deteriorating economic situation also ensured enterprises quickly move their focus to cost optimization. Cloud not only brings down cost of IT infra, but also ensures that you can scale based on the market dynamics and consume or use and pay based on your business conditions and needs. Cloud will definitely play a huge role in reducing spending, improving productivity and most enterprises have already realized that when it comes to IT infra, cloud is the economic saviour.

 

Q3. Were you able to take faster measures in reacting to the market changes for your existing clients or new clients since the lockdown started? What were the challenges and how do you see this as an opportunity for cloud to grow in the Indian market? 

 

I would say for us it was about one simple principle, for us to survive as a business, our customers i.e. other businesses need to survive. With this as the focus, it was rarely relevant if the need was from existing customers or new customers, we sprung to action on demand, worked with no service costs, no paper work, no collaterals, we just worked to keep every business who reached us operational. The primary challenge we had during the past few months has been that, with the surging demand and criticality of speedy implementation, we had to turn down customers who were still not sure of what they wanted to do and we were just not able to have the bandwidth to work with them and convince them on way forward. In addition to this, with the huge surge in demand, it was not only a shortage of competent people to move customers to the cloud, it also brought in the challenges of most cloud providers data centre’s running out of capacity. For the Indian market, the COVID-19 crisis has brought about a forced change from traditional thinking. Businesses now are not only ready to move critical IT Infra out of their office perimeters, but also willing to believe that an employee can work with the same sincerity, productivity and commitment even if he/she is working from home.  For cloud, this change in thinking is a great opportunity.

 

Q4. How much of an impact has cloud computing made in enhancing data security? Has the access to sensitive data become more protected?

 

Data Security has been a priority on cloud ever since its inception. It was a simple common sense for every cloud OEM to ensure that while he set up the public cloud, keeping the data security at the top of his priority list is important if usage and adaption had to happen. With most of the top cloud providers making security a high priority, there has been heavy investments that were made to ensure that cloud comes with all the necessary tools, to protect and comply with data security and privacy needs across all business verticals.

 

Q5. How do you see cloud market upsurge in India? Any new trend that you see in this sector cos of COVID-19?

While, it is a little early to come up with precise growth numbers of cloud in the after COVID-19 era, estimates and our own experiences project a 30% to 40% upsurge in demand for cloud and related technologies. 

 

Q6. What exclusiveness are you offering to your clients that’s unique from other gigantic players in the market

 

Our exclusiveness is our technology strength. Most customers consider our engineers the Spartans on the Cloud. While moving to the cloud is beneficial in many ways, the journey needs the best tech expertise to ensure the move is comfortable. As a cloud service provider today, we bring great technology expertise and 0 cost services to our customers. You don’t pay for migrating to the cloud, you don’t pay for cloud consulting, you don’t pay for 24/7 premium cloud support, you don’t pay for getting your team trained on cloud. When a customer is on cloud with us, he only pays for the cloud consumption. Everything else is 0 cost on your cloud invoice.

Q7. What are some of the goals the company is looking to achieve in 2020?

Our goals have always been our vision i.e., to create value for our customers, partners, employees and investors and we will continue with that as the goal. It has worked for us so far and we have seen a 100%+ growth Year on year for the past 3 years. We believe our value driven services will continue to drive our growth in 2020 and we will see a 100% + growth again.