January 6, 2021
Automobile, Banking and Finance, and Media and Entertainment are the leading sectors to digitize.
Cloud-native solutions are being demanded by large businesses and the Digital Suite by small businesses.
A trend is emerging wherein businesses are considering migrating core operations to the cloud.
Healthcare, logistics, agriculture, and retail are sectors wherein greater digitization can be taken up.
The COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdown has facilitated an increased adoption of the digital medium among Indian entities in multiple sectors. Amazon Web Services is being adopted by companies across the domains of Automobile, Banking, and Finance as well as Media and Entertainment. Puneet Chandok, President of AWS India and South Asia remarked “While enterprises and the mature SMBs are adopting cloud-native solutions, smaller companies are opting for our Digital Suite which is a business solutions package.” Digital adoption has allowed companies to embed core business functions and radically change the company-customer interphase through migration to the cloud. The move could also aid the reskilling process that is expected to be implemented across the workforce so as to help them prepare for the future of work. The proliferation of telemedicine given the restrictions of COVID-19 is expected to continue and take greater prominence with the use of cloud-based systems. The wave is expected to create close to 65mn jobs by the year 2025.
A 2020 CRISIL survey revealed that 47% of micro-enterprises and 53% of SMEs adopted digital sales technology with the Gems & Jewellery sector as well as the Textiles sector taking the lead. Zoom and WhatsApp were among the technologies used to implement effective client communications as well as internal communications. A good number of the companies that adopted the aforementioned software for business operations exhibited a 40% rise in exports according to a survey by FICCI and Dhruva Advisors. Despite these advancements, disparities in the sector-based adoption of technology still persist. McKinsey documents that sectors including Agriculture, Healthcare, Logistics as well as Retail in India could benefit greatly through digitization. Sectors like Education and Information & Communications Technology (ICT) have seen disproportionate adoption of smart technologies and the cloud. The uptake of digital technologies by Indian companies especially in the MSME space can be considerably accelerated through increased awareness and training in the requisite digital competencies en masse.