Industry-Specific Cloud Computing Solutions Deliver Cost Savings 

Cloud platforms designed for specific industries are reportedly gaining ground in the marketplace.

These solutions solve industry-specific problems while also delivering cost savings by enabling users to optimize their operations and pay for only the part of the cloud infrastructure that they need, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (Dec. 20).

While general-purpose cloud systems must be tailored to each user’s needs, industry-specific ones can deliver the regulatory compliance needed by financial services firms, the secure sharing of information needed by healthcare firms and the ability to manage curbside pickup for retailers, according to the report.

This customization also delivers cost savings as they more efficiently dovetail with the data collection, workflows and interactions with partners that already exist within an industry. That is especially important as firms brace themselves for an uncertain macroeconomic environment, the report said.

For these and other reasons, Gartner projects that the share of companies using industry-specific clouds will leap from less than 10% in 2021 to more than half within the next four years, according to the report.

Cloud vendors are catering to this demand and finding that it gives them a new way to bolster their sale of cloud solutions, the report said.

For example, Oracle offers clouds focused on the healthcare, retail, financial services, hospitality, and food and beverage industries. Microsoft provides cloud solutions specifically for the retail, financial services, manufacturing, sustainability and nonprofit sectors. IBM, too, offers a financial services cloud, according to the report.

As PYMNTS reported in July, earnings reports from the likes of Alphabet’s Google and Amazon — and hypergrowth in their respective cloud operations — show that the digital way of life is on an inexorable rise.

During a July earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said corporates and agencies are embracing cloud solutions like Google Cloud because “we unify data lakes, data warehouses, data governance and advanced machine learning into a single platform that can analyze data across any cloud,” which in turn helps clients optimize operations.

Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said during a July 28 earnings call that Amazon’s cloud operation Amazon Web Services (AWS) was seeing continued growth amid macro headwinds and a slowdown in corporate spending because corporate clients see it as a way to cut costs.

“As you hit a potential rough patch in the economy … when [an enterprise is] trying to launch a new product or service and you have to face with building your own data center and getting capital for a data center … or moving to the cloud and essentially buying incremental infrastructure capacity, cloud computing really shows its value,” Olsavsky said at the time.