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Cloud Industry Platforms – An overview from Zühlke in 2024
Cloud Industry Platforms bundle essential services, speeding up application development and easing regulatory compliance. With Gartner predicting a surge in adoption by 2027, we explore the role of platform providers and hyperscalers in this evolving landscape. Is Gartner’s forecast too optimistic?
07.10.2024
This post was previously published on Linkedin.com.
Cloud computing has revolutionised the way businesses operate, offering scalability, efficiency and flexibility. But business processes, data models, security and regulation requirements are industry specific and complex to put in place.
Cloud Industry Platforms (CIP) address this challenge by bundling together several commonly required services for a particular industry vertical to both speed up the creation of applications within that industry and to reduce common concerns such as regulatory compliance. Tailored cloud platforms are currently especially available for the following industries:
- Healthcare
- Financial Services
- Manufacturing
- Retail
Gartner expects that by 2027, more than 70% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms, up from less than 15% in 2023. We believe this might be somewhat optimistic, but let’s come back to that in the conclusion when we’ve taken a good look at the whole topic.
Resources
- What Are Industry Cloud Platforms?, Gartner
First, we will take a closer look at two Cloud Industry Platforms that Zühlke has had specific experience with: Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform and the Thoughtmachine platform for digital banking in the Cloud. Then we will take a look at the Hyperscalers, that are investing heavily in these platforms across all industries.
Healthcare - Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform
Philips HealthSuite digital platform (HSDP) provides components to enable the development of cloud-based regulations compliant consumer and healthcare solutions. It eases the burdens of risk, cost and compliance.
Essentially HSDP provides wrappers around (currently) AWS services that ensure and enforce regulatory requirements like audit logging and incident management. Furthermore, the platform provides many out-of-the-box features relevant to the Healthcare sector such as native support for standard patient data interchange formats such as HL7 and FHIR.
The platform comes with an extensive set of external compliance certifications and attestations to provide objective evidence of compliance to security and privacy regulations such as ISO 27001/18, SOC2, and HITRUST.
The platform provides 7 categories of services:
- Host – Managed infrastructure to deploy and monitor application health.
- Store – Secure storage and archiving of application data.
- Authorize – Security identify and log all system uses, authorize consent and ensure data privacy.
- Connect – Managed, secure collection of data from IoT services.
- Analyze – Predictive analysis, decision support and machine learning.
- Orchestrate – Workflow optimisation, management of rules, task automation and communications coordination.
- Share – Standards-based interoperability between apps, devices and third-party systems per FHIR, HL7, IHE and other standards.
Zühlke has successfully deployed the HSDP platform with a large international pharma company for whom we created a machine learning based application that takes data from a spirometer and is able to differentiate if a patient is suffering from asthma or cigarette smoking related lung complications.
According to Philips, HSPD today supports several million patients across various deployments and has archived over a billion images – petabytes of data handled.
Resources
Financial Services – Thoughtmachine Banking Platform
Thoughtmachine vault banking platform provides components to build financial products using smart contracts and to perform payments processing. It facilitates product configuration and operability.
The platform provides containerized headless services, that integrates with customer facing and back-office applications. It includes a catalogue of pre-configured functionals products such as buy-now-pay-later offerings. Furthermore, the platform provides many out-of-the-box features relevant to the financial industry such as the simulation of the performance of a financial product, support for real-time payments and ISO 20022.
The platform can be used as a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering or be deployed in public (Azure, AWS, GCP, IBM), private or hybrid cloud environment.
The platform provides 2 services:
- Vault Core – Build financial products by using smart contracts and real-time Ledger.
- Vault Payments – Payment processing, account routing, card issuing and processing.
Zühlke has successfully integrated the Vault banking platform with an innovative virtual bank for whom we created a digital app using modern cloud-native technologies that offers ease of use, an intuitive interface and high security awarded with a digital banking license.
Resources
- Thoughtmachine Banking Platform, Thoughtmachine
A look at what the Hyperscalers are doing
Let’s take a brief look at how the Hyperscalers are responding to this trend as well.
AWS – Comprehensive Health Platform
Amazon AWS has for some years already made focused moves into the Healthcare sector including the launch of their own direct to patient healthcare service, Amazon Clinic. In the healthcare platform space AWS provides a broad set of services and solutions.
Services:
- AWS HealtScribe (clinical notes automation)
- AWS HealthLake (patient and population health data)
- AWS HealthImaging (Petabyte scale medical image storage)
- AWS HealthOmic (Genomics)
Healthcare solutions:
- Clinical systems (health records, medical imaging, clinical genomics)
- Analytics & AI / ML (Quality metrics, Op. Optimisation, Health & Disease predictions, Population Health, Health Datasets)
- Patient and clinician experience (Virtual care & patient engagement, clinician experience)
- Medical Research
- Finance and operations (ERP, Revenue and claims management)
- Core health IT (Security, Regulatory, Interop., Cloud migration & virtualisation)
- Life Sciences Solutions:
- R&D (Research data mgmt., Modelling & Screening)
- Clinical development (Clinical trials, Regulatory Submissions)
- Manufacturing & supply chain (Optimisation, Resiliency)
- Commercial & medical affairs (Adverse event detection, digital therapeutics, Real-world evidence)
- Compliance (GxP on AWS)
Genomics Solutions:
- Data transfer & Storage (Transfer & Migration, Secure collab., Data sharing)
- Secondary analysis (Workflow automation)
- Data aggregation & governance (Multi-modal & Multi-omics, Pop. Genomics, Security & compliance)
- Tertiary analysis & ML (Pharmacogenomics)
- Clinical genomics
In some of the cases above, AWS acts as an umbrella for 3rd party SaaS solutions.
With AWS apparently investing this heavily in the Healthcare space one is left wondering if smaller players have any opportunity to compete?
Resources
Microsoft (Azure) – Product led industry packages
Microsoft Cloud for Industry offers a range of tailored solutions that combines Microsoft services and partner offerings:
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
- Deliver differentiated customer experiences and empower employees
- Combat financial crime
- Compliance, privacy, and security
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
- Enhance patient engagement
- Empower health team collaboration
- Improve clinical and operational insights
Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing
- Unlock innovation and introduce new products
- Enable intelligent factories
- Create resilient manufacturing supply chain
- Modernize manufacturing customer experience.
Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit
- Know donors and supporters
- Deliver effective programming
- Accelerate mission outcomes
Microsoft Cloud for Retail
- Maximize the value of data
- Elevate the shopping experience
- Build a real-time, retail supply chain
- Empower the store associate
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
- Unify data intelligence
- Build a sustainable IT infrastructure
- Reduce environmental impact of operations
- Create sustainable value chains
The solutions combine Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Power Platform offerings and are made up of the following layers:
- Microsoft Azure, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) option.
- Developer and AI tools and Power Platform
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365
- Microsoft Cloud industry solutions, which are constructed using industry-specific components built on the underlying technologies.
With these building blocks Microsoft combines the vertical, industry specific SaaS solutions (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics 365) with the horizontal Azure platform offering and can be further enhanced by partners using a marketplace.
Microsoft is well positioned in terms of cloud industry platforms by bundling its own services, offers a wide range and depth of services from a single source.
Resources
- Microsoft Cloud for Industry, Microsoft
Google Cloud Platform – a generalist approach
Google Cloud also has a comprehensive set of Industry Solutions covering:
- Retail
- Consumer packaged goods
- Manufacturing
- Automotive
- Supply chain and logistics
- Energy
- Healthcare and life sciences
- Media and entertainment
- Games
- Telecommunications
- Financial services
- Capital markets
- Banking
- Insurance
- Payments
While it’s not immediately obvious that there would be a specific focus area with Industry Platforms on Google Cloud we would assume that data-heavy applications would find a good home there per the strong and popular Big Data services on Google Cloud like BigQuery, Bigtable and Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio).
Resources
- Google Cloud Industry Solutions, Google
Conclusion
In researching this topic, we tended to find more people writing about Cloud Industry Platforms conceptually / as a trend rather than finding actual Cloud Industry Platforms (irony not lost on the authors of this article).
We do find Gartner’s prediction (+70% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms by 2027) rather optimistic now. However, by supporting industry-specific capabilities out-of-the box, and the opportunity to concentrate on core competencies, increased adoption is bound to occur.
With the Hyperscalers investing heavily in this space it might indeed be challenging for smaller players to enter the market, and the lack of competition can keep the costs high.
These platforms aren’t a one-size-fits-all-solution. The business requirements must be carefully evaluated with the industry-specific capabilities of the platform, operational aspects, and it may well be the case that if your requirements are modest then going with a platform might bring unnecessary complexity.
Authors
Peter Bäck is a Principal Cloud Consultant at Zühlke Group. I help our clients with their journey to the cloud.
Lukas Akermann is a Lead Cloud Architect at Zühlke Group. I bring technical vision and strategy, leading engineering teams to move product, processes, and architecture forward.