San francisco California. Mexico is increasingly digital. The economy, interactions, work and even crime are as present in the online world as in the offline world. Because of this, it becomes more and more imperative to become digitally intelligent and adopt the necessary tools to improve and protect the business. One of the main ones is the cloud.
that, between 2020 and 2021 alone, investment in cloud computing infrastructure in Mexico increased 30% and it is expected that this year it will have an increase of up to 35%.
Mexican companies using the cloud
Companies that have invested in cloud services have had extremely positive results.
Grupo Bimbo is a company that has opted for . For example, to manage their data and improve their internal processes and, thanks to them, they managed to reduce call abandonments by 75%, improving their customer service.
“The real-time indicators of agents on calls, service levels and abandonment have allowed us to define an operation forecast that has given us multiple benefits,” shared Mónica Abriz, digital transformation manager from Grupo Bimbo to AWS.
In the wake of the pandemic, schools and universities were forced to go digital in order to continue with online education., a consortium of 20 upper secondary schools in Mexico that provides education to more than 100,000 students in Mexico, migrated to various cloud services, reducing infrastructure costs by up to 80%, representing savings of $210,000.
On the other hand, it faced challenges with its evaluation instruments, as they required them to be done in a 100% digital environment with the minimum internet connection and speed to guarantee connection for all applicants. This was a problem that they managed to fix through AWS services.
And among other institutions that implemented multi-cloud services is the Escuela Bancaria y Comercial, which achieved by contracting services such as SaaS (Software as a service) and internal applications to AWS, which allowed it to build robust information systems to support your increased enrollment.
Other Mexican companies that use cloud services are,, , , , and.
And governments… do they use cloud services?
“It is a very rigid sector (…) and one of the main reasons why the government does not migrate to these solutions is because many of these technologies are consumed as a service and change the financial system,” shares Tomás Valles, director of engineering for VMware Mexico.
Government clouds are different from public or private clouds, as they require higher levels of security. But some states have made efforts to migrate to these technologies, even to use some tools.
For example, the Government of the State of Guanajuato was able to scale the transactions of the Ministry of Finance for a lower cost, without sacrificing security by . Through this service, it was also able to implement a video-based higher education platform.
On the other hand, the Government of the State of Puebla functioned as it had for decades: meetings held in person, processes processed on paper, and employees wasting time sending documents over and over again. All this became efficient when .
On the other hand, Querétaro is becoming the hub of the clouds. In this entity, Oracle has already opened its first data center; an investment of 1.1 billion dollars to launch its cloud, Azure, in the region; is already present in the state; and Google announced a project to create a cloud region in Mexico, this being the third in Latin America, after Chile and Brazil.
The main challenges of cloud adoption in Mexico
“People said that the cloud was a fad. But now they realize that it is a priority”, shared Tomás Valles. In an exclusive interview with Expansión, he mentioned that the main challenge in Mexico is not infrastructure, but the change of mindset (mentality).
“To date, there are still organizations that are wondering if they should return to the traditional work scheme or if they should maintain remote work and make decisions about what to do. There are a few companies that understood the benefit of adapting and it is the ones that are doing better,” he said.
According to data from VMware, 40% of traditional companies already have a cloud service, while new companies already have 100% of their infrastructure in the cloud.
This represents a problem for late adopters. Valles exemplified it in the following way: if as users we are accustomed to the technology and immediacy that the cell phone offers us, as consumers we are not going to accept that a company does not offer us such efficient services.
“You run the risk of being slow and having less satisfied customers.” An example is banking applications. Many banks did not know how to adapt their services to apps and, therefore, lost many customers because the competition offered a more efficient service and customer service from the phone.
