Cloud consumption cutting computing costs

With the cloud infrastructure, startups are able to de-risk their growth process and innovate at a faster pace, making them to focus their efforts on developing applications that set their business apart and enhance customer experiences

Hyderabad: By using a wide range of cloud technologies, from basic compute and storage to database and architecture options, Hyderabad-based tech startups have managed to reduce their computing costs by 25-50 per cent in the recent past. Global corporates like Microsfot Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) IBM Cloud and Google Cloud Platform are providing the cloud services to these startups.

With the cloud infrastructure, startups are able to de-risk their growth process and innovate at a faster pace, making them to focus their efforts on developing applications that set their business apart and enhance customer experiences. This also alleviates the heavy lifting of managing infrastructure, allowing them to concentrate on their core competencies.

Endiya Partners, a leading venture capital firm based in Hyderabad, invests in promising technology startups across software as a service (SaaS), healthcare, fintech, and deeptech sectors. Sateesh Andra, Managing Director at Endiya Partners says, “We recognise the pivotal role that cloud technology plays in the success of startups and growth of the startup ecosystem.”

AllCloud, a Hyderabad-based early stage fintech startup, has built a new-age lending platform, AutoCloud Enterprise. It’s a highly automated and robust multi-tenant SaaS platform that enables lenders to manage the entire lending cycle and customer journey. Built on AWS, AutoCloud is able to instantly scale its cloud usage and serve large workloads.

AllCloud has reduced computing costs by 30 per cent, without compromising on their workload efficiency and delivering a seamless experience to its customers. It also leverages AWS Quicksight and DataLake to deliver near real-time analytics services to its customers to manage lending operations. This pre-templatised delivery helped the startup to cut its time-to-market from four months to one month.

Another SaaS startup Atlan was able to scale their deployment seamlessly across 100+ customers globally by leveraging cloud infrastructure, and at the same time managed to reduce its computing costs by 50 per cent by using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on-spot instances, as compared to on-demand instances. It also has tools that can be used to self-manage its cloud consumption. OneMoney, India's first account aggregator and licensed by the Reserve Bank of India, offers a secure data sharing solution to financial institutions. By using the cloud capabilities and managed services, it has scaled to over two million customers in two years, and gained around 45 per cent market share. It has optimised their technical infrastructure and reduce cloud spend by 25 per cent.

Krishna Prasad, Founder & CEO of OneMoney, said: “Account aggregation (AA) is also called open banking, which is designed to be on the cloud and is being scaled up. So, cloud services are central and integral to the delivery of AA and related services. AWS Cloud services offer us the ideal foundation to provide secure, easily scalable and speedy reach to the large market like India.”

“We have launched not only AA, but also AA enabling and related products through the same cloud Infrastructure. This has given us the ability to focus on innovation, without worrying about building infrastructure, which is on tap from AWS. It has also offered access to their ecosystem of customers and partners to help us gain traction,” he added.

Last year, AWS announced India’s second AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, which provides customers with more options to run workloads with even greater resilience and availability, securely store data, and serve end users with even lower latency. This is estimated to support an average of more than 48,000 full-time jobs annually through a planned investment of over Rs 36,300 crore by 2030.

The construction and operation of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is also estimated to add approximately Rs 63,600 crore to India’s gross domestic product by 2030. This is likely to provide the IT firms, and other tech startups in and around the city, with greater disaster recovery and resiliency support.

Amitabh Nagpal, Head of Startup Ecosystem, AWS India, says: “AWS is deeply committed to supporting the local startup ecosystem to grow despite the challenging economic environment. It enables startups to tap into the cost effectiveness and flexibility of the cloud to experiment at a greater pace despite lean resources, fail fast with low financial impact, adapt, and recover easily.”

This creates a low risk environment that spurs curiosity, innovation, and growth. AWS supports local early-stage startups and founders by providing them access to network of over 60 ecosystem enablers in Hyderabad, including incubators, accelerators, venture capital firms, angel investors, and others. They can use a broad range of programmes, tools, and applications to achieve scale and optimise cloud costs.