Industry Cloud Platforms Explained: Benefits and Use Cases

Companies adopt industry clouds to help manage every aspect of their businesses more effectively, including inventory management in retail, clinical care in healthcare, project management in construction, and anti–money laundering in banking. This article will define what industry clouds are, how they work, and the benefits and challenges of using them.

What Is an Industry Cloud?

Industry clouds generally refer to a collection of integrated IT assets tailored for specific industries and embedded with data analytics, AI, and other emerging technologies. They comprise industry-specific cloud application suites built on standards-based cloud infrastructure, integrated with finance, supply chain, HR, and other horizontal applications.

Key Takeaways

• Industry clouds include applications that businesses need to compete in their respective sectors, running on cloud infrastructure with embedded AI, analytics, and other capabilities.
• Businesses rely on industry clouds to help them address data residency and other regulations governing industries worldwide.
• Industry clouds can help make it easier for organizations to make decisions based on real-time data by uniting data analytics and vertical and horizontal business applications on a single platform.
• Because these applications can all run on the same infrastructure, they usually work better together and are easier to secure and scale.

Industry Clouds Explained

Industry clouds let organizations run both industry-specific and horizontal business applications on a single platform. Data generated by one application on the platform can be easily shared with data on other applications for analytic purposes.

For example, patient data in a hospital management application can be shared with a supply chain application to help ensure that the hospital is properly stocked with enough face masks, alcohol swabs, and syringes. Relevant data can be exposed to various applications as needed while maintaining appropriate security controls, including those mandated by government regulations and industry standards.

Why Are Industry Clouds Important?

Industry clouds represent an important evolution of the cloud computing model because they let businesses run critical enterprise applications, including those developed by different vendors, more efficiently than if they had to run them on separate clouds. These applications run the gamut from general-purpose finance, supply chain, HR, marketing, and customer services to core banking, healthcare, retail, construction, and other industry-specific applications as well as point solutions and bespoke software developed in-house.

Because they’re on a single platform, they inherit the security practices and other tooling (such as AI capabilities) of that platform, and the applications can work more cohesively together, removing from the equation the need to manage the extraction, cleansing, and refactoring of data that’s necessary when applications run in different environments.

How Do Industry Clouds Work?

Industry cloud platforms are an amalgam of cloud applications that have been developed to address the needs and pain points of a specific industry. They also include general-purpose applications and custom-built applications, all on a scalable cloud infrastructure that can embed a range of AI, data analytics, and other capabilities as well as advanced security controls. The integration of those applications and the data they generate lets user organizations run basic analytics or more sophisticated AI programs more easily than if the applications or databases were on disparate clouds. Industry clouds can accommodate applications from multiple vendors.

Understanding the Business Value of Industry Clouds

Businesses can use industry clouds (or industry suites, as some vendors refer to them) to assemble the applications and analytic capabilities they need to compete in their industries while also addressing the regulatory and security requirements specific to their industries. Industry clouds also include tooling such as analytics, AI, and other emerging technology capabilities embedded within the cloud infrastructure, which helps business leaders make decisions in real time, as opposed to after the fact.

Top 10 Benefits of Industry Clouds

Organizations rely on industry clouds to compete effectively in their markets. In contrast to all-purpose cloud infrastructure and applications, industry cloud suites are built to reflect the competitive and regulatory contexts specific to a given industry while helping reduce complexity and costs and improving security and regulatory compliance. What follows are more details on the main potential benefits of industry clouds.

1. Industry-tailored features: Industry cloud suites are preassembled suites of applications and other components, running on cloud infrastructure, engineered to address the needs of a specific industry. Administrators of healthcare organizations, for instance, can use a healthcare industry cloud that includes applications built with industry compliance in mind that are fully integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), supply chain management (SCM), and other horizontal business applications to help organizations manage their most important processes. This approach obviates the need for them to assemble, maintain, and troubleshoot an amalgam of applications themselves.
2. Compliance support: Applications included in industry cloud suites typically address national, regional, global, and industry standards, such as GDPR (governing the personal data of European citizens) and HL7 (governing the transfer of clinical and administrative health data between applications).
3. Enhanced security: Because, by definition, industry clouds are cloud services, they benefit from the sophisticated data protections and security controls only cloud vendors (with rare exceptions) can apply to their applications and infrastructure.
4. Scalability: Likewise, industry cloud applications and infrastructure are more scalable than their on-premises counterparts, letting customers increase or decrease the number of seats and the underlying compute and data storage capacity as needed, on demand. For example, financial services companies can boost capacity on an industry cloud suite when they suddenly need to add tens of thousands of seats in the aftermath of a major acquisition.
5. Faster deployment: Businesses using industry clouds can benefit from the industry best-practice features built into those suites, including compliance features as well as the vendors’ industry expertise. Such cloud-based suites are often ready to use “out of the box,” requiring no drawn-out implementations, no customizations, and no steep learning curve.
6. Improved collaboration: Because industry clouds integrate vertical and horizontal business applications on standards-based cloud infrastructure, they make it easier for users in different departments (finance, supply chain, HR, operations, risk management, and so forth) to share data and collaborate with one another. The finance team at a big box retailer, for example, can easily get views of what the company’s buyers are projecting for the next selling season, allowing the team to get an accurate view of future accounts receivable without having to ask the buyers to produce a report.
7. Cost efficiency: Comprehensive industry clouds are designed with their specific industries in mind, reducing and in many cases eliminating the need for costly integrations, feature enhancements, or customizations. Energy companies, for instance, can improve billing accuracy and transparency using an industry cloud suite without having to create bespoke billing applications. This reduces the cost of running and maintaining these apps while allowing those companies to meet regulatory requirements using the most up-to-date applications and infrastructure.
8. Data insights: The best industry cloud suites build in AI and advanced analytic capabilities, helping business leaders and managers in different departments improve their forecasting and derive other deep business insights they can act upon, sometimes in real time.
9. Innovation engine: Industry cloud suites provide businesses with a faster on-ramp to emerging technologies, such as AI, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things. Construction companies, for instance, can help ensure workers stay away from danger zones by using AI and augmented reality technology embedded in the infrastructure of the construction industry cloud suite. Image recognition can be used to identify uneven surfaces at a construction site, and information about the site can be overlaid on workers’ AR-enabled protective goggles. Because cloud vendors compete on their ability to quickly update features and functionality, their customers benefit from those regular innovations, helping them innovate themselves.
10. Operational efficiency: Industry clouds help organizations automate many of their core activities. In financial services, for example, banks can make use of automated identity monitoring to help address global know-your-client regulations, letting bank personnel focus on other activities, such as offering customers higher-margin services.

Industry Cloud Applications/Use Cases

Industry clouds give businesses access to applications that are tailored for their respective industries as well as analytic tools and others embedded within the cloud infrastructure that can help them make more timely and efficient use of data. Check out some examples below.

• Retail: Bluemercury uses retail inventory management tools to help allocate merchandise across its stores, while also integrating with ERP applications to help it manage accounts payable and other financial operations. The ability to pull data easily from one system to another lets Bluemercury and other retailers reduce latency and improve data quality, which in turn helps them make more informed decisions.
• Healthcare: Hospitals and other healthcare organizations can host electronic patient records on the same cloud infrastructure they use to run applications that manage their highly regulated facilities and operations. This lets them simplify their IT shop and makes it easier to analyze data extracted from patient records, such as hospital readmission rates, and correlate that with data extracted from other systems, such as the hospital’s ERP system (which, of course, runs on the same cloud infrastructure).
• Financial services: Industry clouds can be very useful for financial services companies seeking highly secure, low-latency platforms for analytics and decision support. Lloyds Banking Group, for instance, uses industry-specific data modeling and embedded AI, together with its ERP applications, to operate more efficiently across its regions and brands.
• Energy: Energy companies can use an industry cloud to run disparate operational systems, such as power distribution and customer billing, while also accessing generative AI systems that can help them consolidate, report, and summarize data for regulatory and other requirements. Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District, for instance, runs enterprise performance management software for financial planning and budgeting on the same cloud platform as some 50 other industry-specific applications that it uses to deliver services to residents of the community it serves.
• Construction: Construction companies can use an industry cloud to manage complex project workflows and maintain audit trails across multiple locations to address regulatory compliance, while benefiting from AI, virtual reality, and other emerging technologies embedded in the cloud infrastructure. They can also tie individual projects back to companywide applications for accurate views of financials and use generative AI capabilities to review requests for proposals, draft responses to RFPs, and start building preliminary schedules for pending projects.

Select benefits of industry cloud solutions

• Retail: Provide customer service agents the next best offer in real time and integrate data with ERP applications.
• Healthcare: Compare readmission rates against industry peers.
• Energy: Provide customers with usage reports and monitor systems for cyberattacks.
• Construction: Pay contractors and monitor work conditions for health hazards.
• Financial services. Address KYC regulations and analyze huge volumes of transaction data with minimal latency.

Industry Cloud Challenges

Industry clouds create a single set of applications and scalable infrastructure that’s tailored for each company’s industry and helps them address regulatory and other governance strictures. By the same token, industry clouds can represent a single point of failure if they aren’t properly configured or if the vendor is inexperienced in a given industry. Businesses should consider the following challenges when selecting an industry cloud vendor.

• Data privacy and security: Businesses can help improve security and data privacy practices by using industry clouds. But they should make sure their cloud providers are aware of risks, such as misconfigured APIs and interfaces that create attack vectors, or mismanaged or misapplied identity services. They should also check to make sure their vendors apply best practices, such as data encryption by default. Other best practices include customer isolation, stringent identity and access management policies, security zone policies, fault-independent data centers, and support for third-party software for protecting customer data. Cloud providers can publish their security practices using the Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire, an industry standard assessment defined by the Cloud Security Alliance.
• Data latency and performance: One of the advantages of certain industry clouds is that businesses can run various applications across multiple clouds. However, it’s vitally important when running applications across clouds to confirm that the providers have multiple cloud regions of different sizes and capabilities worldwide in order to reduce latency and maintain strong security across their “unwalled gardens.” Latency and security are of particular importance to the healthcare and financial services industries.
• Regulatory compliance: Industry clouds must conform to national and regional data residency and privacy regulations as well as industry-specific security standards.
• Suitability of industry applications: Beware of vendors that tout their general-purpose applications as industry-specific by applying a bit of lipstick. Businesses need to confirm that either the cloud vendor can provide appropriately specific cloud applications for their industry and niche or that they’re integrating third-party vertical applications with open APIs.
• Integration issues: Related to the above, businesses need to confirm that any cloud vendor they select can connect legacy systems and third-party applications to their platforms in a secure and reliable manner.
• Scalability and flexibility: Businesses should verify that they’ll be able to easily scale up their industry cloud as demand increases—and, crucially, be able to downscale their usage without financial penalties.
• Vendor lock-in: In an ideal world, businesses should be able to pick a single cloud vendor and call it a day. But the reality is they may find third-party applications with innovative capabilities their existing industry cloud vendor doesn’t offer. Businesses should confirm that their industry cloud provider is open to working with other providers, both in principle and in practice, by using standards-based open interfaces and showing examples of where they’ve done this with other customers.
• Limited interoperability: Businesses engaging with an industry cloud vendor need to make their vendor aware of the legacy custom-built and third-party applications they still use to confirm they’re either interoperable with the vendor’s platform or their data and functionality can be migrated to the vendor’s platform.

Future of Industry Clouds

We expect that industry clouds will increasingly embed within their architectures capabilities made possible by emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, and, yes, AI. For example, construction companies will use generative AI to automate their responses to the many questions in RFPs, and they’ll use a combination of GenAI and VR to produce—in hours, not days or weeks—written proposals and visual plans for new projects. In healthcare, organizations will be able to use the analytic capabilities of embedded AI to comb through reams of patient records to better understand the underlying causes of hospital readmissions and address issues holistically rather than whacking mole after mole. In the financial sector, AI embedded in industry cloud services will help salespeople identify prospects for their investment products, ones who might otherwise go unnoticed using conventional demographic analysis. Such “pervasive AI” also frees organizations from having to design their own large language models and recruit expert staff.

Build, Run, and Grow Your Business with Oracle’s Industry Suite

Oracle industry suites go beyond conventional industry clouds, combining applications tailored for more than a dozen industries; built-in AI; integration with finance, HR, supply chain, marketing, and other general-purpose applications; and running on secure, scalable, and highly performant cloud infrastructure. One industry’s breakthrough can become the new standard for all other industries. With Oracle industry suites, Oracle brings those breakthroughs to every industry it serves, raising the bar on what’s possible.

Industry Cloud FAQs

What’s the difference between cloud computing and industry cloud?

Cloud computing is a shared resource that lets businesses benefit from economies of scale generated by using the same set of computing infrastructure and applications, for which they pay fees in proportion to their usage. Industry cloud refers to cloud infrastructure and applications designed for a given industry, such as anti–money laundering capabilities in banking or electronic health record capabilities in healthcare.

What’s industry cloud strategy?

Industry cloud strategy seeks to maximize the benefits of cloud computing as applied to a given industry, letting businesses take advantage of industry best practices while benefiting from the built-in security and economies of scale created by using shared computing resources.