4 Ways Startups and Tech Giants Can Collaborate to Leverage Cloud Trends

By Ravi Chhabria, managing director, NetApp India.

Within the startup space, the power of collaboration is one of the greatest there can ever be. During a startup’s formative years, it is important to network, build connections, and learn from experts within the domain. At this juncture, it makes good business sense for startups to work with tech giants, to gain valuable insights from their industry knowledge and market connect. However, the question still remains - how can the Davids and Goliaths of the business world collaborate to deliver this outcome?

Let’s look at a few reasons why the next normal will be shaped by enterprises and budding entrepreneurs growing their comradeship.

1. Hybrid Multicloud at the epicentre of growth

End users are demanding access to the best-in-class microservices with new clouds, new services, and new opportunities. Hybrid cloud is evolving from being only the integration of a datacentre with the public cloud to becoming units of computing available at the edge, including even the world’s most remote destinations.

The hybrid multicloud experience brings together the best of public cloud and private cloud for a consistent user experience, allowing businesses to increase productivity, maintain simplicity, and deliver more services at scale.

Many enterprises are working with B2B startups to apply industry-leading expertise in data management across the hybrid cloud environment. Corporate accelerators are an effective innovation tool for the ecosystem. These give startups access to technology and business experience in hybrid cloud data management. They also get mentorship from experts, helping them gain insights into customer needs and yielding exciting results.

2. Data Privacy will define the way forward

Across the startup ecosystem, harnessing data is crucial to their success. What was once a by-product of business has become a core element in operations. Data is the source of a competitive edge, and vast amounts of telemetry, AI, ML, analytics, and businesses are being built on this very premise. At the same time, enterprises must also be mindful of the risks involved. Apart from traditional threats, ransomware, denial of service (DoS), and intellectual property theft are some of the new-age dangers engaged at various stages of the data journey.

At this juncture, data protection and privacy are core for businesses. At every stage of the security journey, organizations must be aware of where their data is, how to extract it, and understand how it interoperates across environments. As data privacy regulations grow increasingly complex, startups can consider working with specialised enterprises that offer solutions that simplify encryption, map, and classify data.

3. Data democratisation driving organisational growth

Data is the new gold today and can be leveraged in multiple ways across the business ecosystem. At every touch point in the consumer journey, massive volumes of data are being generated, which can be analysed to drive innovation. For most legacy business owners this can be particularly challenging, which is where collaborations with new-age tech-driven startups operating in this space can help. By working with teams of data scientists and engineers, they can help legacy companies democratise their data, so that it can be effectively placed in the hands of the teams. This helps them make informed decisions quicker and explore business opportunities.

At the same time, for startups working with specialised enterprises in this space, the former stands to benefit from data fabrics that optimise storage of files, objects, and blocks. Specialised data management companies for instance, deploy their solutions to ensure data is where it needs to be, and when it needs to be there, as well as deliver secure data management and cloud insights. Through such collaborations, startups can leverage the full potential of data to meet their business demands, channel growth through data, and gain a competitive edge over their peers.

4. Deep tech disrupting industry verticals

By making optimum use of the cloud, enterprises can merge standalone products that bring together AI modules to drive efficient performance across functions. AI and ML thus form the backbone of digital acceleration efforts, a fact evident from a recent IDC report which predicts that worldwide AI spending will reach $98 billion by 2023, more than two and a half times the spend in 2019.

Health-tech startups for example, are seeing a massive spurt in demand post the pandemic. Using AI, they have made tremendous progress through automation, personalised digital patient experience, and reduced workload in research. Going a step further, AI and ML are also making significant inroads with respect to mental healthcare systems as they allow mapping of the brain’s responses to various stimuli and help in predicting disorders.
 

Survival or growth – The next normal

Everyone everywhere is adopting a cloud-first strategy. As we emerge into a post COVID-19 world, digital transformation powered by hybrid cloud will form the crux of business strategies. The flexibility and level of insight that you get from having data reside securely and adjacent on the cloud near your applications is incomparable.

Technologies like cloud, AI, the industrial internet of things (IIoT), and digital twin, aid collaboration of enterprises and startups in helping deliver better products, optimise operations and costs, protect against cloud infrastructure vulnerabilities, and create breakthrough customer experiences.

The next normal, thus, will be founded on technology prowess, along with resiliency in business and human connections to bring us together.