NelsonHall recently attended the ‘Infosys Cobalt World Tour’ conference in New York and, as the world begins to open up again, it was great to engage with Infosys executives face-to-face.

Infosys presented its Cobalt Cloud strategy and use cases to increase awareness of the benefits to the marketplace and highlighted that its cloud approach is focused on achieving business objectives rather than simply moving current solutions to the cloud.

To set the context, Infosys launched Infosys Cobalt in 2020, which includes services, solutions, and platforms to enable cloud-powered enterprise transformation. The Infosys Cobalt Cloud Community currently provides a catalog of 225 industry cloud-first blueprints and 35k cloud assets curated from Infosys' experience in delivering cloud programs for G2K enterprises. The Cloud Community includes Infosys experts plus partners, clients, academic institutions, start-ups, gig workers, and cloud developers.

Expediting the move to the cloud

Infosys takes a three-layered approach to the cloud through Infosys Cobalt to develop new business capabilities to meet emerging business needs and faster time to market. It also aims to reduce multi-cloud complexity through a secure cloud platform, bringing elasticity to the resource layer. The three approaches are:

• Consumption Layer (Business Services): Infosys sees a new paradigm in the consumption layer, utilizing data analytics to derive business outcomes within the organization, including industry-specific solutions
• Platform Layer (Technology Platforms): Infosys aims to move clients up the value chain, including helping them transform data lakes to the cloud, refactoring apps to be cloud-native, and using PaaS
• Resource Layer (Cloud Resources): most clients start here with IaaS and cloud for consumption, network, and storage, and establishing virtual private cloud and connection between private, public cloud, and on-premise. This approach includes accelerating migration, taking native services from hyperscalers, and building on top of the cloud platform.

Infosys enables clients to create services consumable within their enterprise utilizing multi/hybrid cloud services, with platform technology enabling leaner operations with a heavy focus on engineering. Automation and IaC enable a developer-centric model that extends from DevOps to DevSecOps to NoOps in an agile manner. Key assets utilized in cloud platform engineering include Polycloud Platform, Cloud Automation Café, and Security Reference Architecture.

Enhancing security

Infosys enables enterprises to build cyber-resilient and compliant cloud ecosystems by adopting their ‘Secure by design, ‘Secure by scale’ and ‘Secure the future’ approach. Infosys assures ‘Digital trust’ through a structured execution process of diagnose, design, deliver and defend. From a Cobalt perspective, the blueprints and assets provided to their clients have regulatory and security compliance built into its solution and technical and financial governance. The security strategy utilizes strategic partnerships and pre-negotiated contracts in a platform security stack.

Sustainability is top of the agenda

Infosys looks to enable and accelerate sustainability solutions and drive impact through a business-to-business model and unlock long-term sustainability thinking across global enterprises. It aims to deliver the following benefits to its clients:

• Making an impact on the triple-bottom-line of people, profit, and prosperity
• Attracting a new wave of sustainability-minded clients, supply chain partners, and employees
• Enhancing ESG attractiveness to investors and brand reputation
• Securing resiliency in uncertain conditions.

Cloud is providing a vehicle for achieving carbon neutrality for its operations. Infosys offers Smart Buildings and Spaces services that enable the physical workplace to become digital by installing and managing Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors. Water management, carbon monitoring and control, solid waste management, energy assessment, and greenfield building consultancy are crucial sustainability competencies.

Outlook

Enterprises are accelerating their migration to private, public, and hybrid multi-cloud environments to satisfy greater demands for flexibility, scalability, resiliency, and security. This includes migrating on-premise infrastructure to hybrid cloud, including legacy application modernization to cloud-native systems. We expect Infosys to continue to build assets and cloud-first blueprints. In addition, in support of the Polycloud platform, we expect continued investments in the smart catalog and cloud-native services. The Cobalt suite of tools and assets enables enterprises to begin their cloud journey quickly and effectively with security in mind and an eye toward carbon-neutral outcomes.