Industry Cloud Platforms: Part Of Gartner’s Top Tech Trends For 2023

Industry clouds are vertically oriented platforms that combine a variety of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions to fit a specific industry in order to deliver valuable business outcomes for an organization. For example, cloud solutions specific for financial sector would be optimized to operate in compliance with Payment card industry (PCI) to help ensure the security of credit card transactions in the payments. Another example is HIPAA compliance in health sector to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient's consent or knowledge.

Use cases:

• Volkswagen Group uses AWS IoT, ML, and edge services to power its Industrial Cloud, connecting data from over 120 manufacturing plants to improve efficiency and uptime, production flexibility, and vehicle quality.
• Opticaster is Tesla’s intelligent energy software used to reduce energy spend, increase renewable energy consumption and deliver clean power to achieve a sustainable economy.

Business Outcomes:

• Accelerate time to value: Industry cloud allows enterprises to improve their processes without need for full-scale replacement of already existing functionality.
• Cross-Industry Innovation: The capability of benefiting from ideas, apps, and solutions from other industries
• Growth:  Allowing enterprises to rapidly respond to meet new demands in terms of size and volume. In supply chain, cloud can be used to connect and add new partners and suppliers, adapt to changing customer demands or new market conditions.

To reach their full potential, industry clouds will need to evolve into something best described as ecosystem clouds. For example, healthcare ecosystem includes recipients of healthcare, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and the government agencies that administer programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in the US. Within this ecosystem, an added value from patient’s perspective could be accurate and speed diagnosis or effective sharing of medical history across the ecosystem.