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FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs. JANUARY 2022

THE ‘GREEN MAN’ OF INDIAN DATACENTER INDUSTRY 200 INNOVATIONS IN TECHNOLOGY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY P-22

SRIDHAR PINNAPUREDDY

FOUNDER AND CEO CTRLS DATACENTERS

EDITOR’S LETTER

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2022 AND WISH TO HAVE A HEALTHY YEAR TO ALL

Hello Friends.

Year 2021 just passed with a jiffy. We could not realize when the year came and when the year ended.

We all remained under tremendous amount of fear and uncertainty. Covid phase 2 devastated the entire humanity across the globe and India became the largest victim of the impact. Millions of people died and some of the business sectors got shot down for a longer time. However, with 2022 coming in there is a silver lining. First and foremost, even though there is a third wave of the pandemic, majority of the people being vaccinated with second doze, it is not able to impact the health of the people like it happened during phase 2. Therefore, the states and central government decided not to impose complete short down and lockdown except some partial lockdown in the form of curfews that to during off days and in the nighttime. The other thing is that the people practiced covid protocol much better way than the previous occasion. So, the net impact is that the year became good for all of us at the beginning and the experts are of opinion that if there is no mutation the pandemic would be reduced to

NEXT MONTH SPECIAL

epidemic and finally go away.

The business impact is that the sectors which were completely or partially short down during the first and second phase came back to life this time.

From second half of December, people started travelling as there was less restriction this time. Even if there were covid infection but many of the people did not have to get admitted to the hospitals. They got recovered at home and the infection rate was not that high too.

So, from the business perspective, we could sense that the remote and hybrid work would remain as de facto standard. The momentum of cloud, digital, automation, cyber security, AI, BI, RPA, etc., which started from the last year would generate pace this year too. It would fly this time as the organizations have now understood the importance of these technologies.

There are new developments on the global horizon.

Along with the growing usage of AR and VR, metaverse is coming into picture, which is touted to replace internet with the 3D and holograms. It might sound very futuristic but the manner the things are developing over years and people like Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella, and companies like Facebook, Microsoft, NVidia, Qualcomm, Autodesk, Apple, etc. are supporting the vision and event Mark Zuckerberg has announced to 10,000 people in Europe to pursue the project.

S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M

COVER STORY

SUPPLEMENT

INDUSTRY 4.0

QUOTES FROM TOP CIOS

The next issue is dedicated to the Industry 4.0. We would like to take feedback from the CIOs and OEMs and create our judgment on the same.

The supplement story of the magazine would have relevant quotes from the top CIOs in India.

PLUS

Interviews and Case Studies

Catch interviews, guest articles and case studies of recent applications from the Industry stakeholders, IT/ITES Vendors and IT leaders and CIOs from the Enterprise IT World CIO Community.

Send in your inputs to sanjay@accentinfomedia.com JANUARY 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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CONTENTS VOLUME 06

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ISSUE 10

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JANUARY 2022

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FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs.

Publisher: Sanjib Mohapatra Chief Editor: Sanjay Mohapatra

W W W. E N T E R P R I S E I T W O R L D . C O M

Managing Editor: Anisha Nayar Dhawan Sub Editor: Kumari Ambika Designer: Shadab Khan Web Designer: Vijay Bakshi, Sangeet Technical Writer: Manas Ranjan Lead Visualizer: DPR Choudhary MARKETING Marketing Manager: Vaishali Shukla SALES CONTACTS Delhi 6/102, Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016 Phone: 91-11-41055458 E-mail: info@accentinfomedia.com

COVER STORY

EDITORIAL OFFICE Delhi: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, New

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Delhi-110016, Phone: 91-11-41657670 / 46151993 info@ accentinfomedia.com

iVALUE TO THE NEXT PHASE OF GROWTH FEATURE STORY: /22 200 Not Out the ‘Green Man’ of Indian Datacenter Industry 200 Innovations in Technology and Energy Efficiency

Printed, Published and Owned by Sanjib Mohapatra Place of Publication: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016

MORE INSIDE

Phone: 91-11-46151993 / 41055458

Printed at Karan Printers, F-29/2, 1st floor, Okhla Industrial Area, Phase-2, New Delhi 110020, India.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced without the prior written permission from the publisher.

Subscription: Rs.200 (12 issues) All payments favouring: Accent Info Media Pvt. Ltd.

Editorial~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 05 News~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 07

ARE PVT. LTD.

30

INTERVIEW

DC TREND 2022 VIREN WADHWA

PIYUSH SOMANI

ANTHONY SPITERI

“Post Pandemic: Cloud Adoption Needs to Be Accelerated”

“Top 10 DC Tech Predictions for 2022 by STT GDC India”

“Top Data Center Tech Predictions for 2022”

“Data Sovereignty is Obviously a big one as People Understand their Data is Critical”

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

JANUARY 2022

DC TREND 2022

54

GUEST TALK

NILESH GUPTA

6

42

40

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

ITWORLD

ROUND UP

B Y S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N FO M E D I A . C O M

Equinix Supports Pexip in Addressing Surging Video Conferencing Demand Equinix announced that Pexip, a leading provider of enterprise video conferencing and collaboration solutions for large private and public organizations around the world, has deployed in Equinix International Business ExchangeTM (IBX) data centers in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, and Washington DC, and leveraged Equinix Connect and Equinix Fabric to scale its global business.

In 2020, the company experienced an outstanding growth of 7 times its peak traffic. To support its fast-growing business, Pexip chose Platform Equinix to build a resilient digital infrastructure and interconnect with multiple ISPs and cloud service providers to deliver consistent video conferencing experience for its employees and customers in more than 190 countries.

D ATA POINT

Oystein Hem, CEO, Pexip, said “Talking to our existing and potential customers, we recognized a growing need for a solution that guarantees them control over their data without the hassle of expanding and managing servers and compute capacity.

With Equinix’s virtual network services, Pexip can enable our customers to focus on growth instead of infrastructure and compute management and support them on their cloud migration journeys. At the same time, we are able to extend Pexip’s capabilities to a larger audience and meet the requirements of more organizations in a more sustainable way.”

Having at least two upstream ISPs in each market and direct fast path connections to major content destinations, Equinix Connect enables Pexip to deliver the resiliency, low-latency, and superior performance its enterprise video conferencing customers demand.

JANUARY 2022

IT Spending to Grow 5.1% in 2022: Gartner

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NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

The Ultimate Guide to Help Beginner Entrepreneurs Grow

The start of a new business is an exciting time for any entrepreneur. There are so many ideas to try, opportunities to be had, and people to meet. But what many entrepreneurs fail to consider early on in the process is how they will handle their business once it is up and running.

Of course, running an online business comes with its own set of challenges that some traditional offline businesses don’t have to deal with – but then again, there are plenty of advantages you have over offline businesses as well!

To help you get started on your new entrepreneurial journey, Here Is Some Advice On Things Beginners Often Overlook When Starting Out. Things May Not Go According To Plan Every new business venture is risky. You might find yourself up against competitors who are more established, or perhaps the market you were hoping to tap into turns out to be not as big as you thought. How you deal with these challenges is going to have a big impact on the success of your business – if you give up too easily, for instance, then that’s exactly what will

CIO

Microsoft Future Ready: An Innovation DNA to Succeed in a Modern World

happen.

Or They Might End In Failure Alternatively, maybe things do go according to plan, but it still doesn’t work out quite as well as you had hoped. Moving from a job where you make a comfortable salary each month to running your own business can be difficult if your venture struggles financially – and it is certainly something many entrepreneurs fail to consider before starting out! In this case, it isn’t good enough just to ‘persevere’; you will want to consider how you can turn things around.

Marketing Isn’t Easy In fact, it’s probably one of the hardest aspects of running a business – but it is also something many new entrepreneurs neglect early on. For example, you might have a great product or service, but if potential customers don’t know about it, then they won’t be able to buy from you! As such, marketing should really be your number 1 focus when starting up a business – and while there are certainly other areas that require your attention (such as branding), these two often go hand in hand.

In the new digital normal, organizations are getting tech intense and leveraging technology as a key catalyst for growth. Across industries and business, growth and strategy is being re-defined with technology adding the multiplier effect.

Speaking on Day 1 of Future Ready – Microsoft’s flagship event, Dr. BS Ajai Kumar, Executive Chairman, Healthcare Global Enterprises, Bharat Puri, Managing Director, Pidilite Industries and Dr. Hasit Joshipura, Senior Vice President & Head of Corporate Centre, Larsen & Toubro Limited came together to discuss what this implies for the Indian manufacturing and healthcare sector.

Here are some key takeaways and excerpts from the session “An innovation DNA to succeed in a modern world”.  Disruptive tech-led start-ups emerge as viable business models.  “Mixed-Reality Solutions” making its mark in healthcare, to problems of safety and training in a hybrid workspace.  Data holds potential to catapult India on the global map of leaders across industries.

EVENTS

18 FEB 2022

28 FEB, 1 MAR, 2022

25 FEB 2022

11 MAR 2022

25 MAR 2022

Hybrid Work Summit and Hybrid Work Evangelist Partners Awards 2022

Gartner CIO Leadership Forum | Americas | Virtual

BFSI & Fintech Summit 2022

AI ML & RPA Summit and Awrds 2022

Cloud Computing Summit and Awards 2022

ONLINE

ONLINE

ONLINE

ONLINE

JANUARY 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

CtrlS deploys Asia’s largest Gas Insulated Substation in Mumbai

S/HE SAID IT

KHUSHRO M MISTRY

CIO, EUREKA FORBES

“Look at what would be right for the company keeping in mind the end customer. Don’t utilize technology just for the sake of it, use it for the betterment of the employees and customers.Utilize data in humane manner for the betterment of society at large.”

The state-of-art GIS facility can scale up 700 megawatts CtrlS has announced deployment of Asia’s largest Gas Insulated Substation (GIS) in Mumbai, which is uniquely poised to be a game changer in the Indian data center industry.

The state-of-the-art gas insulated substation (GIS), is currently equipped with a whopping 300MW and can scale up to 700MW and backed by three different sources and diversified paths ensuring 100% availability of power at all times, thus powering the two million square feet CtrlS Datacenter Campus spread across 10 Data Centers. The campus is currently under construction of which four rated-4 data centers are operational.

CtrlS GIS facility has very limited sensitivity to environment, humidity. It is highly corrosion resistant, seismic resistant, enjoys an operating life of greater than 50 years, with no maintenance requirement for 25 years and protected against aggressive environmental

QUICK BYTE ON

conditions. This GIS facility will now help businesses collocate their high density IT infrastructure combined with seamless scalability to address their growth requirements.

The GIS deployed by CtrlS is one of the first large scale deployment in Asia powered by 3 line configuration (N+N+1). It has 3 source substation backed by 2 or more substations.

Thus, providing highest reliability. The power is sourced from express feeds which have seamless 24/7 supply and which will never go down. CtrlS is equipped to deliver large capacities such as 100 MW of power to any customer in 15 to 18 months.

Gopalakrishnan, Managing Director, GBCI, Southeast Asia and Middle East, said, “CtrlS deploying a 300 MW gas insulated substation (GIS) is a path breaking phenomenon in the industry. This is the first of its kind deployment of power infrastructure by any data center company in the Asia Pacific region.

“Recognising an opportunity when it presents itself is critical, grabbing it with both hands and working with the team to translate it into a businessenhancing solution helped me reach where I am today.”

BENAZIR MILLER, DEPUTY GENERAL M A N A G E R - I T , S H O P P E R S S TO P

SECURITY

Comment on World Economic Forum 2022 report from Tenable “The World Economic Forum published its annual global risks report 2022 and cybersecurity failure ranks among the top-10 risks that have worsened since the start of COVID-19 and will continue to be a concern over the next two years as cybercriminals sharpen their techniques. Please find below a comment from Renaud Deraison, CTO and co-founder of Tenable. “Cybersecurity failure ranks among the top-10 risks that have worsened most since the start of the COVID-19 crisis in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2022. This is unsurprising as widespread dependency on digital systems intensified to facilitate our professional, social and recreational needs during the pandemic.

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NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

In 2021 Data traffic at DE-CIX Internet Exchanges Jumps to Over 38 Exabytes

Data Sovereignty is obviously a big one as People Understand their Data is Critical” Anthony Spiteri leads Service Provider products and partners program at Veeam. Speaking to Enterprise IT World, Spiteri talks about the product line up, the outlook of the company and the role Veeam has played in pushing Cloud adoption.

In an interview with Enterprise IT, he speaks about a range of topics- including Kasten K10 by Veeam, partner program, back up and data recovery for containers and for open-source platforms. Read on to know more the company’s initiatives…

Why do you think the migration from VMware to Red Hat environment taking place?

The evolving open source and

EXECUTIVE

cloud native world has made people cognizant about different software available in the market. Red Hat distinctively created an opportunity for themselves in this space and wielded it to their advantage. One of the major reasons for the migration from VMware is the fact that the Red Hat platform is based on KVM. Plus, they have created and developed flagship platforms like OpenShift, OpenStack and Red Hat Virtualization for the users, offering them the best capabilities available in the market. Apart from that, VMware has become too expensive and it’s difficult to justify the cost anymore.

DE-CIX measured a significant increase in its traffic in 2021. A total of more than 38 exabytes of data were exchanged at the global DE-CIX Internet Exchanges in 2021. 38 exabytes is equivalent to the storage capacity of more than 300 million smartphones, each with 128 GB of storage space, or the data volume consumed by the population of a small city if every inhabitant were to spend their entire life watching a video stream in HD quality. Compared with the previous year and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the figure has increased by around 20 percent. In 2020, the total data throughput was 32 exabytes.

“Overall, global data traffic stabilized at a high level in 2021, after the outbreak of the pandemic and the record-breaking year in 2020, and continues to grow steadily,” says Dr. Christoph Dietzel, Global Head of Products & Research at DE-CIX. “This shows that concepts such as work-from-home with video conferencing, and home entertainment with video streaming and gaming, have become established in everyday life, and this growth will only continue.”

MOVEMENT

TiE Hyderabad names Suresh Raju as President for 2022

SMB neobank startup FloBiz appoints Rabi Agrawal as Head HR

Ecom Express appoints Prashant Gazipur as Vice President – Process Excellence

ESDS Software Solution Limited’s Managing Director and Chairman Piyush Somani, elected as the President of CCICI

JANUARY 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

BOOK

SHELF

The Wealth of Nations

GLOBAL UPDATE

BY

ADAM SMITH

HFCL chooses CommAgility 5G Software to Indoor Small Cells HFCL Limited and Wireless Telecom Group Inc. announced today that telecom innovator HFCL has chosen CommAgility’s 5G new radio (NR) software for use in its 5G indoor small cells. HFCL is using CommAgility’s flexible, configurable 5G NR physical layer (PHY) and Digital Front-End (DFE) software for deployment across consumer, enterprise and industry verticals. As part of CommAgility’s implementation, the Company is providing support services to install its software with HFCL’s baseband and RF hardware.

Mr. Mahendra Nahata, Managing Director at HFCL, said “CommAgility is a key technology partner for HFCL,” “We selected CommAgility due to the flexibility, features, and performance of its PHY software, as well as its proven track record in 4G and 5G applications.

Edward Young, Senior Vice President and Managing Director at CommAgility, said “We’re delighted that HFCL have chosen our 5G NR software – we look forward to working closely with them and supporting their innovative approach towards 5G infrastructure,” “As one of India’s largest integrated telecom network providers, they have an opportunity to

shape the next generation of wireless systems.”

As part of its 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) portfolio, HFCL is investing in building a portfolio of 5G Small Cell products that include both Indoor and Outdoor as well as FR1 and FR2 frequency bands. HFCL will benefit from CommAgility PHY software that supports this range of 5G small cell products, allowing HFCL maximum design, development and deployment flexibility. As the 3GPP specifications evolve, HFCL will also benefit from the continuous innovation of CommAgility to evolve the PHY to meet new customer requirements.

PRICE

RS. 304.00 (PAPER BACK ) WHERE

AMAZON.IN

About The Book Right from examining the division of labour, the origin and use of money and the division of stock, to the rise and progress of cities and towns after the fall of the Roman Empire, the systems of political economy and the taxes on various private revenues, Adam Smith?s The Wealth of Nations provides an extensive assessment of the creation of a nation?s wealth.

About the Author A key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment era, Adam Smith was born on the 5th June 1723 in the town of Kirkaldy, Scotland. He received the rudiments of education at the grammar-school of Kirkaldy and later studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford.

STL and Robin.io Announce Strategic Collaboration to Deliver Core Technologies to Empower 5G Stacks for Enterprises and Cloud Service Providers believes in building a strong work culture and pride Mangalam Information Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has emerged as an undisputed leader in fulfilling the offshore outsourcing needs of organizations worldwide. This Ahmedabad-headquartered company has instituted some best-in-class practices such as organization-wide SOP for people and process management, emphasis on personal and process training through online resources, in-house library, and sessions with industry experts. The company also has a stringent 3-step HR testing along with a 3rd party verification to hire the best talent and provide them with growth opportunities. Mangalam 12 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

JANUARY 2022

for the organization in each employee and achieves this goal through inter-department employee engagement activities, wellness measures and an open door policy.

Madhvi Bhandari, a seasoned IT professional and entrepreneur, founded Mangalam in the year 2000 with a team of ten employees. Today, the company has established itself as a one-stop BPM solutions provider with a team of 400+ employees, comprising of 30% women, working in a hybrid working environment.

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

CoinDCX Reinforces Position as India’s Safest Crypto Exchange with Appointment of Former Wells Fargo Vice President, Divakar Prayaga as Senior Vice President & Head of Information Security CoinDCX, India’s first crypto unicorn and the nation’s safest crypto exchange, has announced the appointment of Divakar Prayaga as Senior Vice President & Head of Information Security.

Divakar will play a key role in building, scaling and sustaining CoinDCX’s industry-leading security systems, enabling customers to enjoy a seamless and safe trading experience. Divakar was formerly the Head of Cyber Defence at e-commerce giant Flipkart and the Vice President of Cybersecurity at Wells Fargo and brings his wealth of expertise from the traditional financial sector to the future of finance, forging greater trust and credibility within the wider crypto industry.

Kodak Alaris Wins BLI 2022 Scanner Line of the Year Award Keypoint Intelligence, the world’s leading independent tester of document imaging products, has honored Kodak Alaris with the Buyers Lab (BLI) 2022 Scanner Line of the Year Award. The global information capture specialist has claimed this prestigious accolade six times in the past seven years.

The BLI Line of the Year Awards recognize companies that provide a broad range of hardware or software products that consistently outperform competitors throughout Keypoint Intelligence’s rigorous lab testing. Analysts consider ease of use, features, performance, and value across an entire portfolio, and bestow the Line of the Year honor to the vendor whose product line is determined to be the best overall.

Lee Davis, Associate Director of Software/Scanners at Keypoint Intelligence, said “After another rigorous year of scanner testing, Kodak Alaris still reigns supreme, taking home their sixth BLI Scanner Line of the Year Award in the last seven years.”

Seagate’s Lyve Cloud Powers CyArk’s Digital Transformation Seagate technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, helped international non-profit organization CyArk overcome a major data management challenge with Seagate’s Lyve™ Cloud, the simple, trusted, and efficient storage-as-a-service platform that offers full control of customers’ data without vendor lock-in or egress fees. CyArk’s team also leveraged Seagate’s Lyve Mobile data transfer services to efficiently migrate their massive datasets from multiple on-prem storage devices and server to Lyve Cloud.

CyArk is dedicated to digitally recording, archiving, and sharing the world’s most significant cultural heritage sites with researchers, historians, and educators. Each project generates multiple terabytes (TB) of unstructured data. As a result of the pandemic, CyArk went to a fully remote

workforce, severely reducing access to their dedicated on-prem server that houses massive project datasets. They needed a solution that could provide their employees and stakeholders with always-on, secure, and timely access to their data regardless of location.

John Ristevski, CyArk’s CEO said “As a data-centric organization, data mobility and accessibility are essential, so we needed to rethink the way we store, manage and share our data,” “After exploring options, we found that Seagate’s Lyve Cloud could provide us the most streamlined data access, sustain our workflows without disruption, and enhance productivity.”

“Digital transformation is critical for business continuity through the pandemic,” said Jeff Fochtman, senior vice president of business and marketing at Seagate.

DIGEST DEHAAT COMPLETES ITS 3RD ACQUISITION WITH HELICROFTER, EXPANDS FOOTPRINTS IN WESTERN INDIA DeHaat, the technology-based platform offering end-to-end agricultural services to farmers in India, today announced its acquisition of Maharashtra-based B2B agri-input marketplace startup, Helicrofter.

DeHaat’s co-founder & CEO, Shashank Kumar confirms that with the integration of Helicrofter, encompassing 2000+ agri-input retailers & 30 sellers across Maharashtra, DeHaat has now added another major Indian agricultural belt to their already expansive geographical footprint.

DeHaat provides farmers with access to over 3,200 agricultural inputs, combined with AI-based customised crop advisory on pest & disease management, delivered via mobile app and call centres.

NXTGEN DATACENTER AND CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES OFFERS ENTERPRISE CLOUD SERVICES TO PEOPLESTRONG TO CATER TO ITS GROWING USER BASE NxtGen, a leading data centre and Digital Transformation services company, offers Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) to PeopleStSrong, Asia’s leading SaaS-based HR Technology company, and helped them set up their entire User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

NxtGen provided a reliable solution to absorb newer technologies to the HR Tech company to increase its scalability.

IT infrastructure plays a critical role in running the business operations of PeopleStrong as their SaaS offerings are hosted on the cloud platform. Scalability, security, high availability, and performance are some of the key parameters that PeopleStrong wanted to focus on, to be the leader in the marketplace.

Therefore, NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies assisted PeopleStrong to set up their entire UAT, which allows them to perform all the activities before going live.

6 TIPS ON HOW TO BE THE BEST KINDERGARTEN TEACHER Being a kindergarten teacher is no easy job.

It can be very hard to keep the children under any age group that you are responsible for entertained, educated, and safe all at once.

The challenge always remains in keeping the appropriate balance between these three factors because if you let one slip up, it could lead to many problems for both yourself and your students.

These tips will help you become the best kindergarten teacher by keeping your students active, learning new things each day, and having fun while doing so.

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

MANAGEMENT

MANTRA

“Don’t just go by the buzzword which is in the market”

IceWarp Expands its Operations in Middle East

Pramod Gokhle, CIO, Mankind Pharma

Vertiv Joins the RISE Partnership Program to Develop Sustainable Data Centre Technologies

Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, is pleased to announce a new partnership with RISE Research Institutes of Sweden (https://bit.ly/3tH4i53, a leading research institute and innovation partner. Vertiv is entering the partnership program for data centre systems technologies at the platinum level, joining founding partners such as Facebook, Ericsson, Vattenfall, ABB, LTU and the Norrbotten region.

The data centre research at RISE is based in Luleå, Sweden, and RISE is owned by the

Swedish state and supported by EU funds.

Collaborating with universities, industry and the public sector, RISE performs industrial research and innovation, with the overall objective to support sustainable growth by strengthening industry competitiveness and renewal.

Vertiv CTO, Stephen Liang, said “RISE demonstrates technology leadership in applied research, which makes them a perfect partner for us at Vertiv. This will help us lead the industry into the new era of sustainable large-scale cloud data centres, enterprise and edge applications.”

“RISE is playing a leading role in driving sustainability across Europe and Vertiv is ideally placed to provide it with forwardlooking engineering solutions for the data center industry and beyond,” said Giordano Albertazzi, Vertiv president, EMEA. “Data centres are a critical part of the digital infrastructure. Efficiency and sustainability are a strong focus for the industry and are becoming increasingly important. New technologies, system solutions and components need to be ideated, developed, tested and verified before hitting the market. We see our partnership with RISE being a big part of that.”

In a bid to expand its business globally IceWarp, a leader for developing email communication and collaboration solutions, has set-up a new office in Dubai. The company is now offering a solution ecosystem that transforms how teams share information online and optimizes business processes through its streamlined and seamless team collaboration tools in the UAE. At present IceWarp have offices in Czechia, USA, Germany, India and Russia.

The sudden, rapid shift to remote and hybrid working scenarios in recent years has made IceWarp’s family of applications highly sought after, owing to its smooth interface and ability to be used alongside common enterprise collaboration software.

Pramod Sharda, CEO, IceWarp India and Middle East said, “We at IceWarp are committed to providing businesses with an affordable, seamlessly integrated and easy to use communications solution that covers all aspects of business collaboration and productivity. Growing enterprises in a business hub like the UAE can benefit greatly from using our solution and we are excited to help them make the switch to a world of uncomplicated, secure, and convenient communications.

In 2021 Data traffic at DE-CIX Internet Exchanges Jumps to Over 38 Exabytes “This shows that concepts such as work-fromhome with video conferencing, and home entertainment with video streaming and gaming, have become established in everyday life, and this growth will only continue.”

DE-CIX measured a significant increase in its traffic in 2021. A total of more than 38 exabytes of data were exchanged at the global DE-CIX Internet Exchanges in 2021. 38 exabytes is equivalent to the storage capacity of more than 300 million smartphones, each with 128 GB of storage space, or the data volume consumed by the population of a small city if every inhabitant were to spend their entire life watching a video stream in HD 14 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

JANUARY 2022

quality. Compared with the previous year and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the figure has increased by around 20 percent. In 2020, the total data throughput was 32 exabytes.

“Overall, global data traffic stabilized at a high level in 2021, after the outbreak of the pandemic and the record-breaking year in 2020, and continues to grow steadily,” says Dr. Christoph Dietzel, Global Head of Products & Research at DE-CIX. “This shows that concepts such as workfrom-home with video conferencing, and home entertainment with video streaming and gaming, have become established in everyday life, and this growth will only continue.”

The data throughput of video conferences via the Internet Exchange in Frankfurt was especially high in the first months of the year, up to the end of lockdown and contact restrictions. In the summer months, with lower infection rates and vacation time, however, it was only half as much as at the beginning of the year. For video streaming via Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and others, the distribution was similar, but with smaller seasonal differences. The picture was different for gaming traffic: Here, the final months of the year saw new peaks.

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

ValueFirst Announces its Start-up Program (VFSP), Designed for New Entrepreneurs to Fast Track their Unicorn Journey

Everything You Need to Know About Starting an Online Business Starting an online business is a big decision. You’re putting your time, energy and money into something that you hope will be successful.

However, starting an online business can be a great way to make money and achieve your entrepreneurial goals with the right information and planning. In this blog post, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about starting an online business, from choosing a niche to setting up your website. We’ll also cover important topics like branding, marketing and customer service. So if you’re thinking of starting an online business, read on!

1. Choose a Niche The first step in starting an online business is to choose a niche. A niche is a specific area of interest or expertise that you focus on. When choosing a niche, it’s important to think about what you’re passionate about and what you’re good at. You’ll

also want to consider the size of the market for your niche and whether there’s potential for growth. There are many different types of online businesses, so it’s important to select one that fits your interests and skills.

Here are some common examples of online businesses: -E-commerce store: Selling products online -Service business: Providing services like consulting, design work or programming -Blog: Sharing information and opinions on a particular topic -Information product: Offering digital products like e-books, courses or templates When choosing a niche, it’s important to do your research. Online business ideas are a good example when doing your research. You don’t want to invest time and energy into a business that won’t be successful.

ValueFirst, a Twilio company and a leader in CPaaS, today announced the annual flagship ValueFirst Start-up Program (VFSP), designed to introduce latest technology platforms to startups that can drive upto 2x conversations.

Vishwadeep Bajaj, Chief Executive Officer, ValueFirst, shared “Honourable Prime Minister recently announced January 16 as National Start-up Day reiterating that even in 2022, start-ups will fuel India’s amazing growth. As new-age entrepreneurs innovate and bring Made in India solutions for local customer needs, engaging with customers meaningfully is imperative. Estimates suggest that 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. Keeping this need in mind, VFSP has been designed to help new-age entrepreneurs test and learn various technology offerings that help them establish uninterrupted flow of communication with the customers and build on seamless and smart customer relationships; thus, expediting their journeys to become unicorn!”

Garima Kaushal, Co-Founder, Sploot (P2P community-led platform, that helps you become a better pet parent), said, “Initially the appeal of ValueFirst Start-up Program was the ease of reaching out to customers in bulk via different communication tools.

Netradyne to onboard 325 niche talent by March 2022 Netradyne, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing focusing on driver and fleet safety, today announced that it would be looking at hiring over 300 specialized skilled personnel by end of Q1 in 2022.

“Our operations in India are growing at a good pace and we need to fast track hiring of our team(s) accordingly. As the skill sets needed for our line of work are niche in nature, we would be adopting various routes to bring in these specialists from leading campuses such as IISC, IITs and top local colleges such as RVCE, BMS to name a few,” says Trinette Jackson, Senior Director of HR at Netradyne.

“We are also hiring and scouting for talent with Cloud experience across India. For instance, we are expanding our footprint to Chennai to tap the cloud engineering talent available there,” she adds.

“The skill sets we require are guided by three technical and two non-technical business groups. The technical business groups are Device (Hardware, Software & Embedded), Cloud (comprising a huge team of front-end, back-end developers and Cloud management experts) and Research Analytics (Machine Learning and Data Science). The non-technical business groups comprise of Operations Support and Business Development. Together, these skill sets deepen

our differentiation as a pioneering start-up that makes cutting-edge safe driving technology in India that is used by leading companies across the world. To maintain our competitive advantage, as an Indian start up with global leadership talent and footprint, we have created a 240+ strong employee base in India that we aim to double by 2022,” says Durgadutt Nedungadi, Vice President – International Business at Netradyne.

Currently, to recruit specialist talent the company is leveraging several niche platforms such as HackerEarth for Cloud skills, Kaggle for research and analytics etc. besides using widely popular networking platforms such as LinkedIn. JANUARY 2022

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COVER STORY // iVALUE

SHRIKANT SHITOLE TO DRIVE TO THE NEXT PHASE OF GROWTH

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

I

n a bid to grow faster in this decade, iValue InfoSolutions, India’s premium technology enabler, has embarked upon a lot of out of the box thinking.

It is not only bringing in innovative products and brands around Data, Network and Applications (DNA), expanding to different geos, expanding the partners, but also strengthening the head count and bringing in senior IT leadership from the industry.

So, IT Veteran and former Vice President & Country Head - India & SAARC at FireEye, Shrikant Shitole coming onboard as its Chief Executive Officer is not a surprise. His appointment comes in as part of the strategic planning iValue InfoSolutions has designed for next 5 years. iValue, as a technology enabler is looking to extend the core business by expanding the portfolios based on relevance and investing in promising adjacent markets. iValue has planned to execute a framework consisting of three distinct phases that will unfold during the coming fiscal year which will be defending, extending, and transcending the core business. Shrikant’s expertise around Cloud Services, Cyber Security, IOT, Smart City, Data Center Services, IT Infrastructure Planning & Management, and Outsourcing services will go hand-in-hand in creating a futuristic win-win situation. iValue has been maintaining its growth at CAGR 40% YoY. iValue has been persistently investing on growth, allowing it to develop at 3X plus market growth rate in the last 10+ years. Its focus has been to address the complete needs around Data, Network and Application for Enterprise customers in a consultative way. Following the PE investment in 2019, iValue launched 3 main efforts to continue 16 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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the company’s growth trajectory: 1. Expand geography coverage: iValue expanded to South-East Asia with a Singapore office. Appointed a CEO and team for SouthEast Asia covering SAARC markets with direct presence across Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Nepal, and Bangladesh along with Singapore & Malaysia.

2. Technology investment: iValue established COE, training centres, and services connected to customer life cycle management in order to give a better customer experience and efficiency 3. Exploring acquisition: iValue has been actively pursuing inorganic growth opportunities across India, SAARC, and Southeast Asia to accelerate next phase of growth.

With Shrikant’s 25+ years of strong leadership experience iValue looks to turnaround the processes to grow at 5X times in next 5 years.

Shrikant has been known in the industry for his B2B business management leadership roles across IT, Telecom, VAS, Software, and Cyber security industries, in his energetic 30+ years of experience. Shrikant, with his management skills, will focus on differentiating iValue to capitalise on the changing Cloud adoption & Cyber-Security landscape.

Shrikant takes over from KrishnaRaj Sharma (KRS), who led iValue through a strong period of growth and raised capital from highly reputed private equity firm, Creador. KRS has steered iValue to become an enterprise company with a significant footprint in India as well as the Southeast Asian (SEA) markets. KRS moves on to overseeing iValue’s Southeast Asian markets.

Welcoming the appointment, Varun Khandelwal, Director of Creador said, “I am pleased to

iValue will continue to focus on BFSI, Government and Enterprise practices, which have always given iValue a heads-up around emerging needs at Top 100 customers.

iVALUE // COVER STORY

SHRIKANT SHITOLE CEO iVALUE

“It would be an honour to learn, work, deliver, and expand on our strategic imperatives to transform and modernise our business, remove complexity

for our partners, and become an indispensable organisation behind the numerous brands we support.”

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COVER STORY // iVALUE

SUNIL PILLAI FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR, iVALUE INFOSOLUTIONS

“I am delighted to welcome Shrikant as CEO of iValue. I have known him for a long time, and value his ability to develop, manage and grow product and solutions businesses. I look forward

to leveraging his entrepreneurial abilities to disrupt existing markets and accelerate our growth into new segments. His strategic vision, as well as operational expertise and rigor, will be pivotal in the company’s next phase of growth, and the iValue Board looks forward to working with him.”

welcome Shrikant into the role as Chief Executive.

He has brought incredible experience, vision, and pragmatism to every organization he has been associated with. With his excellent leadership and business acumen, I am confident that iValue can become even more of a force to be reckoned with in the tech industry.” Creador is a leading Southand Southeast Asia-focused private equity firm, with over USD 2bn in assets under management.

The company invested in iValue InfoSolutions in 2019.

Accepting the responsibilities that come with the leadership role at iValue, Shrikant Shitole said, “Thanks to KRS and his able leadership, iValue has grown into a remarkable organisation.

It would be an honour to learn, work, deliver, and expand on our strategic imperatives to transform and modernise our business, remove complexity for our partners, and become an indispensable organisation behind the numerous brands we support.”

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KrishnaRaj Sharma, Founder & Director of iValue InfoSolutions said, “We are excited to get Shrikant Shitole on board. I am confident that Shri, with his domain experience built throughout his career, is going to help iValue to create incredible value in the years ahead.”

With the addition of SEA market as part of iValue’s geographic expansion strategy, there has been a build-up on Consulting & Services business over the last 2 years. iValue has seen encouraging response from enterprise customers which has led iValue to continue its focus on Consulting & Services business for next few years. Apart from this, iValue will continue to focus on BFSI, Government and Enterprise practices which have always given iValue a heads-up around emerging needs at Top 100 customers. Analysing these demands will help iValue explore and on-board the best available technology OEMs to address the market needs on an on-going basis.

All of the statistics about our magnitude, diversity, and years of experience, as impressive as they are, bear little resemblance to the ultimate measure of iValue: the differentiating impact we bring on to our fraternity.

Here at iValue, we’re constantly reinventing how we work and how we approach market constraints so that we can keep delivering meaningful, sustainable, and long-term results for our clients and communities.

We strive to be the best at everything we do, from assisting customers in realizing their goals to making a positive impact on society with numerous CSR drives apart from maximizing the performance of our employees. This inspires us to come together to make an impact that matters in the world.

A market leader in smart, cutting-edge technology solutions who assists businesses in managing, optimizing, and protecting their digital assets. iValue stimulates creativity as a leading Technology Enabler by providing comprehensive services that support Data, Network, and Application (DNA) management for businesses. Our “Go to Market” consists of niche, compelling, and complementary offerings that assist businesses of all sizes and verticals with their optimization and transformation efforts by leveraging the Customer Life Cycle and Product Life Cycle Adoption framework. iValue is proud to have served for over 6000+ customers across industry verticals through 900+ Partners & direct alliances with 65+ “Best of Breed” Technology OEMs. iValue has a direct presence across 18+ locations covering South-East Asia & Africa continents with Consulting; Solutioning; Vertical & Horizontal focused teams, addressing Technology enablement, Presales, Sales & Post-sales needs of Customer for Private, Public and Hybrid cloud needs. iValue ASEAN operates with HQ in Singapore, with local entities in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka apart from Nairobi (Kenya) office for Africa foray. We continue to grow at 4+ times market growth rates, at 50%+ CAGR for the last 13+ years.

For more information, visit iValue and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter

Hybrid Cloud Management

Security Analytics

Next Gen Security

Availability & Performance Management

Services

Consolidation & Automation

iValue Infosolutions Digitally Empower and Transform Your Enterprise At iValue we help companies manage, optimize and protect their digital assets. Our capability set encompasses decisively implementing and deploying solutions that power Data, Network & Application (DNA) management for enterprises in collaboration with our trusted partners. We possess over two decades of experience as “Technology Enabler”, while our vertical expertise and practices cover BFSI, Government & Enterprises of all sizes. Our global presence spans 18+ locations across multiple continents.

Forge ahead with confidence Our competency and experience help us craft and develop seamless digital infrastructure solutions spanning the entire gamut of enterprise needs. We help organisations scrutinise and reimagine their existing IT infrastructure smartly, efficiently & effectively.

Winner of the Deloitte India technology Fast 50 award for India and Fast 500 award for AsiaPac for “The Fastest Growing companies” and Red Herring “Asia 100” finalist across two consecutive years.

Contact: www.ivalue.co.in / marketing@iValue.co.in / +91 95359 99484

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // NXTGEN

RAJESH DANGI CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER NXTGEN DATACENTER & CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES

TOP 10 TECH PREDICTIONS FOR 2022 DATA CENTRE & CLOUD FROM NXTGEN “Twenty-twenty what have you done”….I got this jingle rhyming to resonate well within my heart, the opportunities and challenges that we all have witnessed during the pandemic and stood the test of time on the tech evangelization and digital transformation are exemplary, so to say… as we start unfolding 2022, the digital world will cherish few new beginnings and few endorsements as the following tech trends will overlap and play along with unfolding possibilities.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

1. DC Migrations – Captive DC to Cloud Journeys – Cloud Strategies Gartner predicts “Global Cloud Revenue to Total $474 Billion in 2022, Up from $408 Billion in 2021” that’s a huge upside, the pandemic has really enforced a digital adoption wave leveraging cloud computing as means of transactions, communication and collaboration. The world has changed and the new normal is “The Normal” now.

The year 2022 will certainly see a major shift in digital workloads from captive datacenters to scale-out datacenters preferably into the cloud with a wave of application modernization initiatives coupled with data sovereignty and security at the helm of each technology decision.

This was not an easy talk earlier but in the recent past we witnessed many success stories around the same trend…the opportunity further unfolds to optimize the cost, leverage this change and metamorph the digital aspirations. The old and captive datacenters will become participants of the Hybrid-Cloud metaphor and will run their workloads based on case to case basis to keep improving their ROI, geographical reach and scalability; as a result, their majority workloads will migrate to the third party datacenters and public clouds.

2. More Power to Cloud – The CloudNative Apps Cloud adoption was not an easy task for many organizations since the decisions were largely dependent on their own dev/engineering team capabilities or dictated by third-party application vendors. The legacy continued till either of them decided to port their applications on cloudbased XaaS models for reasons varying from multi-tenancy, geographical spread, technology consolidation or a simple scale-out need. In 20 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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reality, it happened… the new age applications are now born in the cloud and consumed readymade dev/QA/DevOps cloud-based opensource frameworks for faster builds, easier deployments scalable by design to run on lightweight browsers or mobile applications at ease by consumers and enabled remote usage and management. The open-source upstream tools have paved the path to save cost and reskill the workforce to newer concepts and technologies for processing distributed data and business logic on microservicesbased API ecosystems by and between clouds and third-party providers such as identity services, payment engines, data archival / repositories, upstream open source binaries and transcoding/ streaming media services etc. This is a major trend that will continue to nurture in 2022…

3. Distributed Computing & Multi-Cloud Microservices and serverless functions will continue to prosper and lead the new cloudnative applications and distributed computing strategies. This trend removed the barriers of using specific public clouds and most of these cloud-neutral workloads now run on multiple public clouds across multiple regions/zones and locations. The fundamental tenet of scale-out and agile computing spanning globally across many continents simultaneously was the premise of the cloud-neutral principle, using the code that is portable, using the databases and storage that are distributed and running microservices that provide self-healing redundancy for each microservice enriching “Any device, Any cloud and Anywhere” user experience. Gartner predicts that by 2025, greater than 90% of organizations will pursue a multi-cloud strategy and this key trend will continue to drive new applications and positively impacts our digital wellbeing through-

out 2022 and beyond…

4. Edge Computing – if you are not on edge, you are wasting space!

Datacenters take time to build and operate, the digital penetration in the rural context is growing and for countries like us, where we have the largest base of mobile users, highest internet penetration and social media usage etc the need for data localization and reach latency becomes a primary barrier. This is just one example of users and applications, with the vast majority of IoT and sensors, upcoming 5G smartphones the need to keep them connected and servicing the relevant content will be a tremendous challenge for the ISPs & Telcos. While a growing number of datacenters clustering into major cities the rural digital enablement and consumption depend on the national telco’s ability to move the data by and between the remote users to central datacenters, eventually this digital divide of demand and supply may choke the internet backbone unless we implement distributed edge computing strategy, the workloads need to get evenly distributed and must run nearer to the users from the Edge Datacenters. The strategy thus hovers around Edge computing and local peering, processing and storage of the content and co-locates the basic cloud and application services on the Edge to reduce latency. Many organizations are charting out their edge strategies and looking to invest for Edge datacenter mobilization, this is becoming the need of an hour and the trend that will mark the future of distributed applications and consumption thereof.

To access the complete article log on to: www.enterpriseitworld.com

NXTGEN // TECH PREDICTION 2022

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FEATURE STORY // GREEN MAN

SRIDHAR PINNAPUREDDY

FOUNDER & CEO CTRLS DATACENTERS

“At CtrlS, we care for planet earth. It is important that we leave behind a

healthy planet for our future generations.”

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GREEN MAN // FEATURE STORY

200 NOT OUT THE

with mobile user base exceeding 1.1 billion, and smartphone base over 700 million, while social media users are estimated to be around 500 million and above.

‘GREEN MAN’ OF INDIAN DATACENTER INDUSTRY

200 INNOVATIONS IN TECHNOLOGY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY

I

t is estimated that 90% of world’s data has been generated in the last two to three years. There has been an explosion of data attributed to internet penetration in the form of broadband, wireless internet, rapid social media adoption, smartphones acting as an integrated device comprising of camera, internet access, email communication etc.

Businesses have been rapidly deploying new technologies that require enormous amounts of computing power, they include IT software, IT infrastructure, storage devices, networking components as they increasingly have customer facing applications such as internet banking, ecommerce, e-gov initiatives etc connecting customers, suppliers and other ecosystem partners through networking tools and technologies.

The introduction to newer technologies such

as internet of things (IoT) has led to billions of sensors being deployed at the edge leading to explosion of data capture across electricity meters, drainages, shops, cars. Trucks, water meters, refrigerators, air-conditioners generating data every millisecond, which need to be captured and analysed. Big data, robotic process automation, business analytics, artificial intelligence, machine/ deep learning, digital twins, augmented reality, virtual reality are all technologies leading to growth of data.

All such applications and infrastructure are hosted in data centers across the world. Datacenter are now the nerve centers of world economy.

While they power businesses, governments and economies they are reportedly consuming around anywhere between 3-5% of global energy while also contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions. India is one of the largest democracies

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitization in the country accelerating the growth of third party data centers in India. The total datacenter footprint in the country is estimated at 6.8 million equipped with approximately 700 MW of power. The players in Indian datacenter market include CtrlS Datacenters, NTT, STT, Sify among others. CtrlS led by its founder Sridhar Pinnapureddy has been set several benchmarks in the industry by introducing India’s 1st Tier-4/ Rated-4 datacenter in the country, building Asia’s largest Rated-4 datacenter in the country, launching Asia’s largest Gas Insulated Substation (GIS) in Mumbai. Sridhar has been the brain behind 200+ innovations at CtrlS of which 80 innovations were focused on energy efficiency and sustainability.

B.S.Rao, Vice President Marketing, CtrlS Datacenters says, “Sridhar is highly focused on carbon emissions. He is a 24X7 thinking mind with utmost focus on sustainability. Be it water conservation, conservation of nature, planting trees, adoption of low energy consuming computing devices, management and re-use of e-waste, elimination of plastic. He is an innovator, always thinking ahead of time.”

The energy efficiency innovations led by Sridhar has led to industry lowest PUE of 1.35.

His innovative thinking led to building India’s first and perhaps one of the world’s first datacenter being covered by solar panels on its exterior with an installed capacity of 1.3 MW generating 1.8 Million units of power per year. It helps in offsetting CO2 emission by 620 Tons/Year. The company is in the process of building a 500 acre solar plant generating solar power ranging between 300 to 500MW and plans to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and run 85% of its power requirements through renewable energy.

The company’s Bangalore data center has 30 KW solar plant operational and is playing a key role in reducing carbon footprint through renewable energy.

Sridhar encouraged his team to focus on how the computer, electrical, lighting and mechanical systems can be designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimal environmental impact by curbing greenhouse gas emissions. His team at CtrlS embarked on energy saving initiatives such

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FEATURE STORY // GREEN MAN

INDIA’S FIRST SOLAR COVERED DATA CENTER CtrlS Mumbai DC 2 Mahape, Navi Mumbai

“CtrlS Mumbai facility is the country’s largest solar covered data center with 1.3 MW installed capacity generating 1.8 million units of power per year. This helps offset CO2 emission by 620 tons/year. The company is also building captive power solar plants with a capacity of 200 MW to minimize environmental impact and move to zero-emission, zero waste and zero pollution operation.”

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as highly efficient power servers and supplies, low power consuming processors, server virtualization, best cooling practices, chiller plant manager, VFDs for all HVAC equipment variable Cooling System, CTI approved cooling towers. on-line monitoring and auto chemical dosing to avoid increase in approach of chillers , eco-mode UPS for all mechanical systems, HT dual source automation, 100% LEDs across all data centers, usage of motion sensors, hot/cold Aisle Containment, blanket panels, supplemental cooling, elimination gaps in rows, efficient airflow management for high/low density areas, seal cable cut-outs. He and

GREEN MAN // FEATURE STORY

his team further focused on storage optimization strategies such as usage of energy efficient storage devices, data de-duplication, data compression, load balancing, dynamic provisioning, reducing power density requirements, eliminating redundant data etc. Eighty such innovations today have led to low power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.35. The company has inculcated a culture of going through Ashrae audits regularly to identify glaring areas of energy inefficiency and enhance its energy efficiency processes.

One of the other initiative under Sridhar was its Noida data center facility – perhaps one of the most unique facilities in the data center industry.

The entire national capital (NCR) region is faced with challenges of air pollution. However, presence of sulphur in the air across NCR and Noida has the potential ability to cause damage to computer hardware and malfunctioning of devices, as sulphur causes corrosion in metals. To solve this critical problem and safeguard the data of its customers, Sridhar encouraged his team to explore deployment of an air filtration plant. A successful proof-of-concept led to establishment of an air filtration plant at its Noida datacenter facility which processes the contaminated air, scrubs it and then releases clean air into the data centre, thereby ensuring all the servers, storage devices, networking components and other devices located within the facility are protected from such threats. The air is not just good for the IT infrastructure but also for human lungs. The air filtration plant is equipped with air scrubbers, +ve pressurized system along with treated fresh air system.

Siddharth Jain, Managing Director, EPI India says, “CtrlS is among the best data centers in the country. It follows Rated-4 standards defined by ANSI/TIA-942 and complies with all its guidelines. It’s Noida data center is built to withstand earthquakes and contain airpollution through its air filtration plant, which is safeguards IT infrastructure from corrosion is safe for human lungs.”

The company performs regular indoor air quality assessment at all its data centers to determine the presence of contaminants in any and test for mold, pollutants, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and more.

Sridhar has been tirelessly working on building green datacenters across India. As a matter of fact, today, CtrlS runs India’s largest number of

rated-4 hyperscale green data centers certified by USGBC and has obtained LEED Platinum V4 O+M certifications reinforcing its commitment to sustainability. All of CtrlS data center buildings are constructed from blocks made from fly ash. It has been deploying eco-friendly organic chemicals with sophisticated online monitoring across its data center facilities in addition to an auto dosing system for cooling tower water treatment. Sridhar is working on how new methods, tools and processes can be introduced to reduce fossil fuels.

THE OVERALL IMPACT THROUGH ITS GREEN (SUSTAINABILITY) INITIATIVES

Gopalakrishnan, MD, GBCI – Southeast Asia & Middle East Markets added, “Sustainability is embedded in the DNA of CtrlS, a company led by Sridhar Pinnapureddy – ‘The Green Man of Indian Datacenter Industry’. The company is focused on best practices in energy management, good indoor air quality management, water conservation and efficiency management, waste management, etc. All CtrlS Rated-4 Hyperscale data centers are certified as LEED Platinum v4 O+M by GBCI, setting a benchmark for the data center industry both in India and around the world.”

CtrlS has storm water harvesting (70-90%) at all its data centers, recycling of water, setting up of STP/WTP for recycling, collaboration with community STP/ETP/WTP, Online monitoring and auto chemical dozing system at all DC’s to reduce the blow down water for HVAC systems, adoption of water consumption reduction technologies, usage of low flow plumbing fixtures, usage of dual flush WC, usage of waterless urinals.

Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder and CEO, CtrlS said, “At CtrlS, we care for planet earth. It is important that we leave behind a healthy planet for our future generations. As a responsible organization, we have embarked on 200 innovations combined with 25 green initiatives to reduce carbon footprint, reduce dependency on fossil fuels, eliminate wastage of water, become a paperless office, achieve near 100% work from home powered by automation, eliminate usage of plastic and air pollution, recycle e-waste, save trees, and maximise usage of renewable energy.”

With future looking at autonomous cars, 100 trillion sensors likely to be deployed across the globe in next decade, worldwide social media base likely to cross 3.4 billion, 4.5 billion internet users, 5.3 bn mobile phone users the need for datacenters will continue to grow rapidly.

• GOLDEN PEACOCK ECOINNOVATION AWARD • USGBC SUSTAINABLE LEADERSHIP AWARD • ENTERPRISE IT WORLD - MOST SUSTAINABLE DATA CENTER AWARD • CII – ENERGY EFFICIENT AWARD • ENTERPRISE IT WORLD - CIO SELECT AWARD – GREEN DATA CENTER

Therefore, responsible and visionary leaders such as Sridhar Pinnapureddy appear to be setting a precedent by taking the carbon emission problems by its horns and therefore it would only be fair to say a man who has steered 200+ innovations in technology and sustainability space be christened as the ‘The Green Man of Indian Datacenter Industry’. In conclusion, we must say that Sridhar is 200 not out and we are confident that his innovative mindset will continue to bring new ideas, processes, methods and tools to ensure the datacenters become greener and continue to limit and eliminate carbon footprint.

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PERSPECTIVE // TATA TELE

In 2022

NEXT-GEN TECHNOLOGIES

- IOT, CLOUD, AI, ML

WILL DRIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

2

021 was the year of exponential digital shift, where businesses pivoted to the “Agile Normal” with smart, intelligent, and flexible operating models, to ensure survival, growth, and market leadership.

Vishal Rally, Sr. Vice President Product & Marketing, Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS), said, “I feel that the real test of an organization happens when common people strive together to achieve uncommon goals. You need to have people centric policies that make them align and deliver to organizational goals.”

Looking forward to 2022: this year would see massive growth in the next-gen technologies IoT, Cloud, AI, ML AR VR, which will be catalyst in drive digital transformation to unlock operational efficiencies.

Cloud will continue to be the backbone for all the transformational technologies. Enterprisewide cloud migration strategy will take prominence, aligned with the future growth blue- prints 26 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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of the businesses. Also, Zero Trust will play a larger role in Cybersecurity. Specially, Hybrid Cloud will continue providing businesses the flexibility and efficiencies that they need to grow and meet the demands of all users as it provides the necessary infrastructure, software and platforms to meet the requirements of all manner of organisations.

Hybrid cloud can be used in many ways.

It’s a good platform for building confidence in cloud, developing a transformation programme on and carrying it out. In the same vein, it may be a deployment model that must be used for compliance, regulatory, risk, latency or data sovereignty issues. Regardless of intent, the first and potentially the most important step for any organisation are to define their cloud aspirations.

With the new variant of the pandemic – Omicron will certainly co-exist with businesses, and all have to live with this reality.

Vishal added, “We have robust digital modes of engagements across stakeholders. We are

empowering and upskilling our field resources and building digital capability across the value chain, from demand generation to service assurance and operations to make customer journeys faster, simpler and closer.”

As the regimen of pandemic may remain or linger for a longer time, physical location will increasingly become irrelevant as organizations will extend their full suite of products and services to SMBs across the country. As a Digital Catalyst, TTBS will continue to enable businesses to unleash their full potential and DO BIG. While TTBS remains focused on building digital connectivity highways as it is on building horizontal and vertical business applications across industry segments that TTBS serves.

Finally, Vishal maintained, “Every adversity brings forth with it an opportunity to grow, you need to keep calm and approach differently. This pandemic was unprecedented that triggered both demand and supply side challenges for businesses across segments.

TATA TELE // PERSPECTIVE

VISHAL RALLY

SR. VICE PRESIDENT (PRODUCT & MARKETING) TATA TELE BUSINESS SERVICES (TTBS)

“You need to have people centric policies that make them align and deliver

to organizational goals.”

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PERSPECTIVE // TATA TELE

Interview Briefly tell us about TTBS? Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS), part of the prestigious Tata Group of Companies, is the country’s leading enabler of connectivity and communication solutions for businesses. With services ranging from connectivity, collaboration, cloud, security, IoT, and marketing solutions, TTBS offers the largest portfolio of ICT services for businesses in India. With an unwavering focus on customer-centricity and innovation, TTBS continues to garner recognition from customers and peers alike.

Share some insights on Smartflo services? How Smartflo enhance customer experience?

• Smartflo, a future-ready cloud communication suite that has been innovatively designed to support today’s hybrid work culture. It allows uninterrupted connectivity between all stakeholders, internally within employees and externally with customers and vendors across platforms and touch points. Smartflo optimizes connectivity, helps build operational resilience and enables businesses to deliver better customer experiences across channels. With its comprehensive and advance feature.

• Smart grids depend on a solid foundation of communications. Although autoconfiguration, and autonomous control solutions for the communication network, there are still open problems on how to efficiently forward high priority sensitive data. This work proposes a complete architecture for autonomic management and control of communication networks for substations based on IEC 61850. The proposed solution, called Smartflo, uses OpenFlow in order to achieve granularity and flexibility in the treatment of data flows. Smartflo proactively calculates Layer 2 multicast trees to forward the high priorities GOOSE and Sampled Values messages and reconfigures all flow entries in case of network failures. Also, the proposed system monitors the network and defines the configuration of client-server flows on-demand.

What are the challenges to the widespread use of IoT? While the boons of IoT are manifold and the economy seems to be rapidly moving towards an IoT oriented environment, there are a few disadvantages to the use of IoT. 28 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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Firstly, security remains a predominant threat of the use of IoT. This is because by forging connection between multiple devices within a cloud network, control over system authentication gets diluted. Anyone can access any information from a wide network of connected devices now.

Secondly, related to security, the privacy of data is another major challenge. Within the network, a substantial amount of user data gets released and the users often lose control over their own data.

Due to the complex connectivity features, compliance to regulations is often offset. IoT can go against the norm of usage on several occasions.

Are you planning any major expansion in terms of investments, or business footprints this year?

• Cloud computing has become an increasingly prevalent topic in the recent years. However, each and every explanation of cloud computing and its terminologies don’t reach to a great number of beginners in IT sectors. Cloud computing has emerged as a disruptive innovation offering a variety of computing services and resources to individual users and corporate customers. Cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving to the use of infrastructure from multiple providers.

Many cloud computing providers such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon have been heavily investing in cloud technology and are leading various cloud services markets.

• In recent years, have enabled major advances in electronic commerce, which is growing at a very fast pace. Although business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce seems to be slowing down due to economic conditions, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce still represents the next generation of business automation. Taking advantage of new technologies, today provides an opportunity, but will be a must in the future. The use of Internet e-collaboration tools will increase in this new era. They play a role of “value creation enabler”, but at the same time they generate a wide range of new business and market “complexities” that companies have to face.

As the pandemic has disrupted the market, what major market trends do you foresee in 2022?

The pandemic has witnessed an urgency among the enterprises including the SMEs and Large

VISHAL RALLY

SR. VICE PRESIDENT (PRODUCT & MARKETING) TATA TELE BUSINESS SERVICES (TTBS)

Enterprises about the digital transformation.

Pandemic has certainly shown the need of cloud and elasticity of your resources so that you can scale up and scale down your resources at your will. Cloud will continue to be the backbone for all the transformational technologies. Enterprisewide cloud migration strategy will take prominence, aligned with the future growth blue- prints of the businesses. Cyber Security is another area where the pandemic has been the biggest victim of. Most of the companies large or small are the target of the hackers. You never know when you would be hacked. Even you may not know that you are already hacked as the sophistication is so high. Also, Zero Trust will play a larger role in Cybersecurity. So, business continuity and planning has been the priority of the organizations. BI and Analytics have been used extensively aby the organizations in order to create various personalised offerings for the customers. Use of Low Code No Code has picked up to bring products faster to the market. Digital advancements will continue at a rapid pace in 2022, the next-gen technologies IoT, Cloud, AI, ML will drive digital transformation to unlock operational efficiencies.

TATA TELE // PERSPECTIVE

Five Best Practices for Managing Distributed Contact Centers Contact centers were traditionally characterised by dedicated physical infrastructure, specialised desk equipment for agents, and ten-to-six timings.

Since the pandemic struck, contact centers could no longer be confined to these characteristics. In fact, modern contact centers share nearly nothing with traditional contact centers - except their purpose. When virtual work is the norm, contact centers too have dispersed beyond walls and desks.

With a distributed workforce connecting from anywhere, contact centers are now, by default, distributed contact centers - where well-honed tools and strategies of success don’t apply. Here are five best practices for delivering excellence through a distributed contact center.

#1 INVEST IN THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY Distributed call centers’ service customers by connecting them to agents spread across multiple locations. As a result, the contact center must bridge the agents and customers with a cloud-based solution that facilitates anywhere, anytime connectivity with minimal device and environment constraints. Moreover, such solutions should also make regular tasks such as accessing the customer’s contact history with the business, calling them, and responding to them as easy as navigating through Amazon or Facebook. Tata Tele Business Services’ Smartflo is one such solution that is built for the era of virtual work and enables agents to deliver superior service experiences with a smartphone and a laptop, even on the go.

#2 DELIVER KNOWLEDGE TO AGENTS WITH PRECISION When agents are servicing your customers from their home offices, a hostel, or even when on the move, they should be empowered with what the customer wants - instantly, in real-time. And today, customers want their agents to remember their past interactions, have answers ready at their fingertips, and deliver fixes to their woes as fast as possible. This, in turn, is possible only when your contact center solution leverages best-of-breed knowledge management paradigms built on AI, integrates to your CRM and ERP systems seamlessly, and delivers key information natively on the platform in real-time. TTBS Smartflo takes this up a notch and, in addition, analyses the sentiment of a caller and empowers the agent to take the conversation in the right direction to maximize success and your end customer’s satisfaction levels.

#3 KEEP AGENTS UP-TO-DATE WITH CONTINUOUS TRAINING The contact center landscape is evolving rapidly - be it the platforms and technology that the agents use to deliver service to the end customer, or larger forces like privacy regulations, digital security considerations, and customers’ expectations of empathetic interactions. Upskilling your contact center agents can help improve service levels, enable them to excel through their workday, and help the organisation improve talent retention rates and reduce hiring costs. Leading organisations have been connecting to their agents via Zoom and other workspace connectivity tools for delivering such training programs. Lastly, continuous training helps the agents stay up to speed with digital developments in the organisation and changes in products and service delivery terms - where previously, such changes were accessible simply by swinging the chair and asking the next co-worker at the contact center office.

#4 FACILITATE REGULAR EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT Contact center agents often undergo stressful conversations and busy schedules, which wear them down over time. When physical offices enable employees to unwind and vent with their fellow agents over a cup of tea or lunch, distributed contact centers do not provide room for such interactions. As a result, it is imperative to routinely bring the agents together over a Zoom call to keep team conversations going. Such teamwork has a positive impact on employee experience and customer experience alike. Therefore, facilitating employee engagement via fun activities over a virtual bridge is a key practice in managing distributed call centers with excellence.

#5 REORIENT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY Almost all businesses have by now understood how events like the recent pandemic can disrupt established work practices in a single turn of events. One lesson to learn from such events is the implicit value of business continuity in any portfolio. Contact centers are a key aspect of successful business across all industries. Therefore, it is imperative to pivot contact center operations on resilient digital infrastructure that empowers secure connectivity from anywhere, is bi-directionally scalable on-demand, and provides near-zero downtime.

WHAT NEXT? Contact centers will be distributed in the foreseeable future, and at the same time, customer expectations will go nowhere but upwards. To orchestrate distributed contact centers and deliver superior experiences, organisations must leverage cloud-based contact center platforms like TTBS Smartflo, enabling and empowering the agent with the right connectivity solutions, precise knowledge, and actionable insights in real-time.

In addition to boosting the end customer’s experience, such solutions will also simplify the agent experience while bringing unmatched scalability, Capex and Opex savings, and higher CX levels for the underlying business.

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GUEST ARTICLE // POST PANDEMIC

POST PANDEMIC:

CLOUD ADOPTION

NEEDS TO BE

ACCELERATED

NILESH GUPTA

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

HEAD OF CLOUDFIRST & EDGE SERVICES 3I INFOTECH

30 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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POST PANDEMIC // GUEST ARTICLE

JANUARY 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

31

GUEST ARTICLE // POST PANDEMIC

We had a lot to learn around us from last two years. We became even more close to our family and friends, celebrated new heroes outside our work environments and of course ‘WFH’ became the most used abbreviated word in English for many enterprises, the impact of Covid-19 has brought the benefits and limitations of their IT landscape into the open. Some were ready to ensure there is no impact at all, but many struggled and learnt the hard way. As companies look ahead to a post-pandemic era, many will need to consider how to meet unique needs and priorities with potentially limited resources with WFH being the new norm.

In my many discussions with various stakeholders at these companies – many are still overly reliant on legacy infrastructure and business models that still needs to be addressed to ensure any kind of acceleration to cloud journey. While it is especially important, they need to develop a proactive strategy that explores the use of cloud (hybrid or multi) and how to transition away from legacy systems towards modern technologies to embrace the digital podium, it is equally important for a partner to ensure the adoption acceleration is seamless and successful in the end.

It is important to engage with a cloud lifecycle management services partner for existing and new enterprises to transform their technology to the cloud faster and without risk. Today, industry-leading automation delivers 10x acceleration with complete ease, governance, efficiency, and fine-grained control of multi-cloud environments based on customer’s business and IT ecosystem. Efficient transformational partners use their global delivery capabilities and strong partnerships with established doyens in the space such as Oracle (OCI), Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) to deliver cloud computing services that help organizations enjoy substantial reduction in CapEx across hardware, licensing, and software. With the increased agility and flexibility offered by cloud computing services, your organization will be able to cut OpEx costs like cooling and power supply, and build affordable, tested business continuity and disaster recovery plans. A suitable service provider needs to provide a wide choice of engagement models – shared, hybrid, SLA-based, and project-

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based, that help organisations to experiment and innovate.

Broadly speaking there are three dimensions to cloud adoption journey: 1. Discover 2. Migrate 3. Manage 1. Discover the Apps & IT Infrastructure: In this phase, there is a 360O analysis of the infrastructure and application to map the dependencies and existing workload performance. We will need to ensure there is full hierarchical view of the application and its dependencies that will help ease easy migration, asset management, and any compliance needs. So, answers to some of the typical questions like below will be addressed during the deep discovery phase: n What services are you planning to move into the cloud? n What are your reasons for moving to the cloud? n Do you have a cloud strategy and how does it define your cloud plans? n Are there agreed business owners for each service and a sponsor for the migration? n What are the dependencies of application on other and how are they connected?

It is in this phase that as a partner with a single comprehensive cloud management platform will help build a roadmap for the readiness, prepare an automated discovery plan for the business environment, create a set of cloud transformation sprints, and then formulate the structured road map to address the subsequent sprints to comprehend what should be considered for cloud transformation.

2. Accelerate Cloud Migration: Typically, in cloud migration phase, it is known to be fraught with complications and tedious tasks. The objective is to facilitate a seamless migration of the existing on-prem workloads to hybrid or multi-cloud environments with an aim to provide uninterrupted services to end-users. Be it migration of monolithic applications into a hosted cloud environment or housing them in containers, the virtual resources need to be available in minutes as well as manage deployments across multiple cloud-providers such as public, private and hybrid at the same time.

It is in this phase, the transformational partner, with a 360O overview of the application, and the cloud management platform, identifies the required virtual infrastructure (OS, supporting software, servers, network) and get the target cloud environment ready.

This simple step accelerates the migration and achieves faster time-to-market and optimised cost to migrate.

3. Continuous Optimization and Management: One major concern post cloud adoption is to accommodate for high availability of the applications round the clock. What is needed is to have a full-stack visibility across the required platforms by factoring in unforeseen demands and failure scenarios. Multi-cloud application monitoring is rendered in a detailed and effective method by gathering cloud-specific insights. Artificial Intelligence for IT operations is the critical change in basic assumptions that is required to manage these digital transformation issues.

While ensuring round the clock availability of cloud environment, it is equally important to optimize cloud costs. One needs to ensure the reporting of cloud usage at the application and services level, dynamic scaling up and down of cloud resources, and intelligent rebalancing of workloads are available on real time basis. It helps you stay ahead of the cloud expenses by providing comprehensive chargeback / reports on resource consumption and enables to cut costs by making recommendations based on the actual usage. Be it public, hybrid or multi-cloud, periodic analysis of cloud usage and associated costs needs to be conducted to prevent overspending.

It is important to note that a comprehensive single cloud management platform helps customers broadly in these three dimensions and in accelerating the cloud adoption journey seamlessly.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES // TECH PREDICTION 2022

DELL TECHNOLOGIES: CLOUD SECURITY, AI, RISK MANAGEMENT WILL BE KEY TRENDS FOR DATA PROTECTION IN 2022 RIPU BAJWA DIRECTOR AND GENERAL MANAGER DATA PROTECTION SOLUTIONS DELL TECHNOLOGIES, INDIA

With the advancement in automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) across economic sectors in India — the growth of malware, ransomware, and breaches is on the rise. The recent Dell Technologies 2021 Global Data Protection Index highlights that 70% of respondents in India believe emerging technologies—such as cloud-native applications, Kubernetes containers, AI, and machine learning pose a risk to data protection, and the lack of data protection solutions for newer technologies is one of the top three data protection challenges for organizations.

Ripu Bajwa, Director and General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India says – In the coming year, we see three trends that will cement the course for the cybersecurity and data protection landscape.

Increase in cloud services and corresponding data protection threats: The necessity to adapt

to post-pandemic, remote working conditions has heightened the requirement for cloud-based services and infrastructure. According to Gartner, Indian CIOs are expected to focus their cloud investment on cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS). This segment is forecast to total $2.4 billion in 2022, up 40% from 2021. Although cloud services offer exciting opportunities for organizations, these also present new challenges for monitoring, managing and protecting cloud assets. Industry initiatives like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) can bring broader visibility to cloud infrastructure and assets, help ensure consistent configuration management and establish a baseline of best practices for compliance in the coming year.

Increase awareness around industry initiatives such as Security Orchestration, Automation and Response: Amidst the constantly evolving

cybersecurity landscape in India, businesses are looking at ways to transform how they respond to threats and cyber-attacks in real-time. The industry is pivoting from automated detection to prevention and response with a focus on applying AI and machine learning to speed remediation.

However, threat detection is only half of the equation. Businesses need automated incident response technology to address the growing volume of cyber threats, multiple tools causing IT complexity, and skill shortages. Mature businesses are adopting a single security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform, and working with security service providers to improve their security operations. This proactive approach will also help in building a successful zero trust strategy.

Need for Unified Visibility and Control: According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), with today’s hybrid workforce, as much as 70% of all breaches still originating on the endpoint, it is important for IT teams to increase both their visibility and ability to control remotely.

Therefore, in 2022, enterprises will increasingly look for unified and proactive security measures to defend their landscape of technology assets, spanning legacy endpoints, mobile, and cloud workloads without overburdening staff and in-house management resources. Indian CIOs and risk management leaders should consider the security advantages and productivity value of an XDR (Extended, Detection and Response) solution in the New Year.

Looking ahead, there is no doubt the industry has moved to a stage where it is cognizant of the emerged and emerging security concerns, but what is key is to eliminate the bias towards actioning against the same. Proactive evaluation, monitoring and counter-attack of every attack surface are necessary.

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SECURITY // KEY BUSINESS RISKS

Digitization is transforming how businesses operate. This transition is often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 because it represents the fourth manufacturing revolution. The first industrial revolution was mechanization, the second was mass production and assembly lines using electricity, and the third was the adoption of computers and automation.

Now the Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us, with the digital transformation of businesses largely consisting of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and rapid technological innovation.

Industrial processes and machines are becoming smarter and more modular, with automation and data exchange that include the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These smart, always-connected devices provide real-time contextual information with low overhead to optimize processes and improve how companies and individuals interact, work, and live.

It’s no wonder McKinsey estimated that investments in IoT technology would grow at a rate of 13.5% throughout 2022. This growth in IoT is contributing to an escalating explosion in production and industrial data. This data is being collected and analyzed to improve productivity, monitor activity, and enhance predictive maintenance. With so much business-critical data passing through IoT and IIoT devices, organizations must take measures to secure their technology.

Why is IIoT Security Important?

Digital has not gone unnoticed by cybercriminals, who seek to exploit IoT and IIoT as weak links in the data chain. The increasing volume of structured and unstructured data being generated by these devices, and their oftentimes anomalous behavior spanning across global ecosystems challenges even the best organizations. Further complicating the situation is that many of these devices are wireless (WLAN or 5G) and often have communication channels to their manufacturers for maintenance and troubleshooting purposes, which can make them a potential backdoor into the production network.

Most organizations are not well prepared for IoT and IIoT device vulnerabilities. The ubiq-

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uitous interconnectivity among devices, users, and distributed networks presents a substantial challenge for traditional siloed security solutions. Focusing defenses on a single point in the network is becoming increasingly ineffective.

The lack of single-view visibility across devices, users, and the entire network creates blind spots that cybercriminals can exploit. According to a study conducted by EY, almost half of enterprises indicate they are concerned about their inability to track security across their IoT and IIoT assets, keep them virus-free, and patch vulnerabilities.

This complexity is exacerbated by comingling

IIoT devices with wired devices on the same network segments, and can lead to uncertainty as to exactly what is connected where.

IoT and IIoT Security Risks to Be Aware Of From a security perspective, IoT and IIoT devices present a number of risks. One problem is that most of these devices were not designed with security in mind. Many of them are headless, which means they do not have a traditional operating system or even the memory or processing power required to include security or install a security client. In addition, an alarming number

KEY BUSINESS RISKS // SECURITY

KEY BUSINESS RISKS BEHIND THE INTERNET OF THINGS of devices have passwords hard-coded into their firmware.

The result is that many IoT devices cannot be patched or updated. And even when security can be installed on the device, the underlying installed software is often cobbled together from commonly available code or is untested, which means that most installed security tools can be circumvented by exploiting a wide range of known vulnerabilities. Additionally, most IIoT and IoT devices have limited or no configurability. And when devices are compromised, most IT organizations admit they are unlikely to be able to detect the event before it impacts systems and data.

How to Mitigate IoT and IIoT Security Risks Some organizations are working to address these issues by promoting authentication, key, and credential management, and other capabilities.

But these tools must be tested, integrated with the network architecture, updated, managed, and monitored. So, what is the answer? Simply sticking your head in the sand will not work. IoT and IIoT devices are a vital part of most businesses and they are here to stay. It is important to view IIoT as part of your broader security environment rather than as isolated units. Here are a few additional recommendations for securing this technology: • Segmentation of the production environment, with all IIoT and wireless devices in segments outside of the SCADA or ICS network.

In many cases micro segmentation should be

performed to further restrict communications between devices to further isolate and confine them to only authorized communications.

• Network Access Control for accurate information on what is connecting to the network and verification of each device’s security posture before allowing it to connect.

• Security must be redesigned to provide seamless visibility on what is happening across all networks and devices, from IoT to multi-cloud networks.

• Because of the minimal intelligence and security functions included in most IIoT devices, an Intrusion Protection System upstream of these devices should be used to detect attacks on known exploits and to provide “virtual patching” of devices that cannot have software updates applied.

• Security monitoring and management must be done through a single console. Enterprises must be able to see all devices, assess risk levels, segment traffic, and assign policies across the entire network in real-time. This should include both production and IT networks to reduce the risk of attacks on IT resources propagating into the production network, and vice-versa.

• Active protection solutions against unknown threats should be deployed, including sandboxing technology (to determine if files, attachments, or other code is malicious or not), and deception technology, (also known as honey pots), to attract attackers, confirm their presence in the network, and expose them to tools to block and eliminate them.

• Zero trust access can provide simple, auto-

JOE ROBERTSON DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION SECURITY AND EMEA CISO FORTINET

matic secure remote access that verifies who and what is on your network and secures application access no matter where users are located.

• Security solutions should automatically adapt to network changes, anticipate threats, interpret and implement business language commands, and interoperate in a cybersecurity mesh architecture to share threat intelligence, and proactively coordinate responses to threats across all security devices and network ecosystems.

Going Forward Unfortunately, IIoT devices are typically not designed with security in mind and finding ways to secure every device on your network is daunting. Because of this, organizations must take immediate action to protect their systems from attack.

A new generation of tools is helping organizations meet today’s ever-expanding attack surface, delivering not only visibility of the network environment, but also enforcement and dynamic policy control. Whether devices are connecting from inside or outside the network, they can automatically respond to compromised devices or anomalous activity.

Fortinet has developed products, services, and tools that directly meet the operational and regulatory requirements of industrial and manufacturing networks. The expansive Fortinet Security Fabric platform offers a cybersecurity mesh architecture approach that includes centralized management and a unified context-aware security policy that provides complete visibility and granular control over the entire organization.

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // CYBERSECURITY

RAJESH GANESAN VICE PRESIDENT MANAGEENGINE

CONTEXTUAL ANALYTICS, CYBERSECURITY MESH, AND ZEROTOUCH SERVICE MANAGEMENT TO DOMINATE IT IN 2022

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

The role of IT has expanded significantly over the last two years with organizations forced to rethink and revamp the way they work. Going forward, there will be renewed emphasis on leveraging technological advances to tackle business challenges presented by remote workforces.

“Following the pandemic, hybrid work will be an expectation if not the norm at most organizations across the world. That means cybersecurity, AI, automation, and analytics will play increasingly significant roles in organizational efforts to support this way of working,” said Rajesh Ganesan, vice president of products at ManageEngine.

Here are ManageEngine’s top five predictions in the IT management space for 2022.

1. Organizational insights will become immediately actionable with the rise of contextual analytics When insights are presented directly within a business application, the chances of an organization acting upon them are much higher than when those same insights are presented in standalone business intelligence software. For example, when insights on project efficiency are available within project management software, it’s easier for project managers to relate the findings to their daily work and implement measures to fix inefficiencies.

The way we train and deploy AI models is expected to change significantly in the coming year. With more sustainable techniques like meta learning, transfer learning, and causal AI expected to complement deep learning, AI and ML will eventually become full-fledged, embedded elements of contextual analytics workflows.

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2. The cybersecurity mesh model will offer better protection in the hybrid workforce era As employees continue to access organizational resources from different locations, traditional network-based security is becoming obsolete.

The security landscape has evolved in part due to the accelerated shift to the cloud and usage of unvetted personal devices, resulting in many organizations becoming highly susceptible to cyberthreats and insider attacks.

In this scenario, a cybersecurity mesh model, with its central principle of Zero Trust, will gain more traction. The cybersecurity mesh model is a distributed approach in which smaller, individual security perimeters are built around people or objects acting as access points, thereby offering IT teams better security control.

3. IT operating models will continue to evolve to support the hybrid workforce Organizations had to stumble their way through implementing their business continuity plans in response to the first lockdown. But with employees preferring hybrid work long term, further changes will have to be made in operating models to ensure hybrid work is streamlined and sustainable.

Despite self-service portals, the productivity of remote employees is still disrupted when an incident occurs. In the era of hybrid work, aspects like zero-touch service management that can handle machine-solvable incidents, digital experience monitoring to ensure high availability and constant improvements to end users, and increased adoption of desktop as a service and

VDIs will be more important than ever.

4. AIOps and IT automation will be critical building blocks of enterprise technology architectures The increasing pervasiveness of AI, backed by the operational improvements it leads to, means AI will continue to further cement itself as a cornerstone in the technology architecture of organizations. IT leaders will depend more on AIOps and intelligent automation, through which issues are detected using algorithms and resolved automatically before they disrupt productivity or network operations. AIOps-driven monitoring will play a significant role in forecasting, capacity planning, combating alert fatigue, and maintaining the security posture of an organization.

5. The cybersecurity skill crunch might force organizations to turn to service providers There is likely to be an imbalance in the supply and demand of skilled employees in the cybersecurity space. To address their evolving needs, organizations will increasingly use the services of MSSPs and managed detection and response providers. For instance, the increase in remote employees, cloud adoption, and the need to meet compliance regulations make IAM a tedious process for most organizations. Since many organizations lack the necessary skills and resources to implement an IAM solution, more organizations will turn to Identity as a Service providers to fill this role.

CYBERSECURITY // TECH PREDICTION 2022

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // A MODERN ERP

SHRIKANT NAVELKAR DIRECTOR, CLOVER INFOTECH

A MODERN ERP – AN IMPORTANT COG IN YOUR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY?

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Gone are the days when organizations could operate in a silo. The perimeter of an organization has extended well beyond its four walls. It is critical to now ensure seamless flow of information across its constituents which include employees, customers, vendors, suppliers etc. While this seamlessness brings about a very clear view of the organization and accelerates strategic decision making, it also brings new challenges in the form of security, access to critical information etc.

Our focus here is to understand if you have or can build a truly modern or modernized ERP without having to compromise on security or unauthorised access to business-critical information. The businesses of today demand a highly available ERP system that can positively impact the ‘go-to-market’ time and enable them to attain desired results faster.

The Modern ERP – How does it enable enterprise transformation?

One of the most important exercises in the digital transformation roadmap of an organization is modernizing its ERP. Here’s a few features that modern ERP empowers organizations with: – 1. Efficient integration across multiple constituents and systems: The modern ERP must adopt an open architecture that can create the fluidity to enable it to manage a myriad of integrations and connections. To be fully efficient, the ERP may have to connect with internal systems and vendor and customer applications to exchange information in a secure manner and 38 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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yield results faster.

2. High level of automation – The ERP teams must analyse each process and deploy automation technologies wherever possible to reduce manual dependencies on tasks that are rule-based and redundant. More importantly, it can almost eliminate human errors. The company may have to pay a heavy price for such inadvertent errors. Hence, it is better to automate such processes as it also enables to optimize the support and maintenance of resources working on the ERP at any point in time while driving higher efficiency.

3. Adherence to compliance mandates and localization across geographies: In the digital age, cybersecurity has taken centre stage. The world is increasingly concerned about misuse of personally identifiable information (PII) and hence there are a set of rules and compliance mandates while handling business and customer centric data. A modern ERP must have capabilities that can enable localization and adherence to tax computation and rules, compliance mandates, etc. It must work seamlessly across international borders so that multi-national companies can operate using the same ERP across their global offices.

4. Modernized architecture – A modern ERP must leverage new-age technological advancements such as a micro-services architecture, cloud-native features, etc. and must be offered as a SaaS rather than having to implement, maintain, and manage on-premises. It should also enable seamless integration and scalability. Most

importantly, it should maintain utmost security so that data and access are not compromised.

5. High performance with minimum maintenance – Modern ERPs can seamlessly interact and exchange information with applications.

Being on the cloud, they are regularly updated and secured, and they needn’t be migrated to the latest version periodically. They offer much better performance in terms of speed, content presentation in the form of user-friendly charts and graphs, enhanced analytics etc. enabling to make informed decisions. With maintenance and support required also being minimal, the strategic teams can leverage the modern ERP better while the IT and technology teams spend comparatively lesser time and effort to keep it running.

We live in the age of data. The information available about each aspect of the business today enables decision makers to be more confident when they take strategic decisions. A modern ERP is the first step towards creating a strategic view of information across the organization and giving a comprehensive and connected view of the information. It is a significant improvement over viewing them in their respective siloes and creating standalone reports to aid decision making. Organizations that have embarked on a modern ERP journey are reaping rich benefits in terms of enhanced decision making and accelerating business growth. Is your business being empowered with a truly modern ERP?

A MODERN ERP // TECH PREDICTION 2022

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DC TRENDS 2022

VIREN WADHWA

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS STT GDC INDIA

India has emerged as one of the fast-growing data centre markets owing to a massive and still-growing internet user base, the proliferation of data, and the creation of a conducive environment through the Government’s Digital India mission.

Even as Coronavirus pandemic continued across 2020-2021, the data centre industry exhibited its durability. The industry as a whole flourished, including new projects and development.

Colocation in a data centre has long been a popular choice for SME’s, large enterprises and hyperscalers. As the pandemic progressed, the importance of remote monitoring and artificially intelligent automation & management solutions became apparent,. With the advent of this New Year, let’s take a look at potential data centre trends for 2022 and beyond.

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1. Sustainability takes Centre Stage Some data centre operators are more forthcoming about their ecological effects than others, but many have taken a proactive approach to limit harm and “becoming green.” Indian Government is aiming for a strict renewable energy policy.

India has set a goal of reaching 500 GW of renewable energy consumption by 2030, up from the current 100 GW, at the recently concluded COP-26 Climate Change Conference. As a result, states are revising their open-access rules to encourage renewable energy generation and use. The entire ecosystem, from vendors to end-users, has placed a strong emphasis on lowering carbon footprint, which is a critical driver for the data centre business. Many state governments have enacted policies

DC TRENDS 2022

TOP 10 DC TECH PREDICTIONS FOR 2022 BY STT GDC INDIA to encourage the construction of greenfield data centres. For example, the Karnataka Government has inked an MoU with firms to supply electricity to DC facilities using green energy. India is more likely to meet or even exceed the specified targets if businesses continue to operate sustainably and in accordance with policies.

2. Increased Emphasis on Security & Compliance Data and IT security protocols have always been a major concern for many businesses, and with the migration of IT systems to cloud platforms, it is now front and centre on everyone’s IT agenda. Colocation providers have worked hard to maintain the greatest level of security and have meticulously followed industry standards for security and satisfied all compliance criteria.

Security solutions have always been a significant aspect of DC design and architecture. However, Data Centres are sophisticated ecosystems, and defending them necessitates considering the security requirements of each component separately while adhering to a centralised, holistic security strategy.

human resources that may be directed toward innovation and higher-level strategic goals, while also enhancing employee satisfaction and engagement.

ments. Thousands of new jobs are projected to be created as a result of the Bill and industry’s positive response to it, including an increase in demand for IT specialists and engineers.

5. Build to Suite – A second Wave A build to suit lease allows a customer to design and customise a data centre facility to fulfil special or unique location or design needs without incurring the substantial upfront capital costs associated with building and owning a data centre. It allows a company to choose the best geographical location while avoiding the high capital costs of new DCs. ‘Speed,’ ‘Custom design,’ flexibility,’ and ‘pricing transparency’ are just a few options provided by some developers providing a ‘build-to-suit’ revolution to businesses.

8. Increased dependency on Cloud leading to increased business for Colocation platforms Covid-19 has altered how individuals communicate with one another, and there is now a greater dependence on technology to facilitate connections. Individuals and organisations used productivity tools to stay in touch with co-workers. The cloud and cloud-based apps are being used more than ever before, increasing the data centre’s need on servers and software to run these services. The significance of the data centre’s connectivity has been reinforced as a result of this.

3. Large Enterprise data centres As businesses became more reliant on the internet, data volumes skyrocketed, with more being added via social media and a growing number of sensing devices. This is leading to the advent of large enterprise data centres, that compute and store vast amounts of data.

With the advantages of economies of scale and custom engineering, they significantly outperform traditional data centres.

6. Edge Computing While the fundamental idea of edge computing is simple, there are significant advantages of this innovative methodology to network architecture and is a little more complicated. Edge computing can help achieve flexibility, speed and agility when it comes to guaranteeing a streamlined, effective IT infrastructure, in addition to providing a direct on-ramp to a company’s preferred cloud platform.

Edge computing is a more efficient option since data is processed and analysed closer to the point of origin. Latency is considerably decreased because data does not have to travel over a network to a cloud or data centre to be processed.

Edge computing — particularly on 5G networks — provides faster and more thorough data processing, allowing for deeper insights, faster response times, and better consumer experiences.

4. Automation The lockdowns and social distancing requirements sparked a surge in interest in automating jobs, including using robots. This reduces the need for human intervention in data centre operations, which was a significant benefit during the pandemic. This pattern is expected to endure beyond the pandemic’s initial consequences.

Remote access and centralization of control are made possible through automation, which increases productivity while lowering waste and personnel expenses. It also frees up important

7. Regulatory Policies Revisions in regulatory policies with respect to data centres has cleared the way for massive expansions within the industry. This has given the data centre firms in India a strong wind in their sails. As businesses adopt local service providers, data protection and localization will provide the industry with a huge boost. Several state governments have incentivised data centres expansion, and related industries. A significant portion of the money spent on data centres will go toward infrastructure to meet the government’s require-

9. Focus on reducing the skill gap within the industry Every area of the economy is experiencing a skills shortage, particularly in technology-driven industries. Several organisations have initiated projects to give vocational training in this field in order to alleviate the demand-supply gap of entry-level trained labour in the data centre Industry. Through their social commitment, these companies have been trying to empower people from financially disadvantaged backgrounds for inclusive growth. It focuses on education, entrepreneurship, employment, electrification, and emergency preparedness to assist people better their lives through access to electricity.

10. Move towards consolidation Several smaller players will consolidate with larger players leaving fewer conglomerates that will be able to handle the growing demand of the industry along with providing a smoother functioning and business continuity.

The Indian data centre business is expanding at a breakneck pace. India has become a fastgrowing data centre hub thanks to a massive and still-growing internet user base, the explosion of data, and the creation of a favourable environment through the Government’s Digital India initiative.

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DC TRENDS 2022

PIYUSH SOMANI

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

MANAGING DIRECTOR & CHAIRMAN, ESDS SOFTWARE SOLUTION LIMITED

The onset of the pandemic is believed to have forced the CIOs across the industries to enhance their focus more on operational agility. To remain competitive in their respective business areas, it has become important for businesses to adopt Digital Transformation. CIOs and business heads may also require to focus on talent retention and improved relationships with their stakeholders.

Impact of Pandemic on Demand for Data Centers in India As per the IT spending survey, more than 65% of India’s enterprises have realized the benefits of opting for Cloud to acquire new clients, serve the existing customer base, and achieve good profitability. ~81% of corporate organizations have adopted Cloud services in the wake of the pandemic, 42 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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with the implementation of work from home culture. During the first quarter of 2020, spending of enterprises on Cloud infrastructure increased by ~35%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2019. (Source: Ken Research).

Key Trends Impacting the Data Center Industry (Source: Ken Research) Indian cloud services market has grown at a CAGR of 27.8% during 2015 to 2020 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34.7%, from INR 284.4 billion in 2020 to INR 1,261.7 billion in 2025.

The data center boom in India is likely to be driven by factors such as: • Giving companies access to technological

DC TRENDS 2022

TOP DATA CENTER TECH PREDICTIONS FOR 2022 Market Size of Indian Data Center Industry (in $ million)

With COVID - 19 Scenario

No COVID - 19 Scenario

Source: Interview with Industry Experts and Ken Research Analysis

capabilities The wave of IT adoption led by cloud computing, has allowed firms to transform the backend operations, resulting in enhanced value proposition for the customers. Cloud service gives companies of any size access to technological capabilities, which were previously accessible to large enterprises only. In India, the industry has gained momentum with more than 200 data centers and more than 10 cloud operators, targeting an industry market size of USD 3.8 billion in Fiscal 2020.

• Booming Internet Penetration The drastic fall in cost of 1 GB data from Rs. 269 in 2014 to Rs. 6.7 in 2020, coupled with improved availability infrastructure has led to increase in the internet penetration from 35% in 2016 to 45% in 2021. During 2016-20, India added ~354 million internet users totaling 696.7 million users in 2020. It is further expected to grow to ~975 million by 2025. In 2021, there were 448 million active social media users, comprising 32% of total

population.

• Opportunity to target global clients Indian IT firms hold a strong reputation for its IT and software related competencies globally. The emergence of SaaS unicorns and increased recognition on global stages has further fostered the confidence. Traditionally being considered as IT outsourcing market, India is now shifting to product developer and service provider stage. >70% of IT/BPM industry revenue has been attributed to exports, led by IT services accounting for 54% of total export value followed by software products and engineering services at 23%.

• Adoption & usage of cloud by the Government for its key projects The Government of India implemented its ambitious digital India program to address the infrastructural weaknesses that will lead to significant growth in the cloud industry in India.

These include “DigiLocker”, a digital wallet, which is a cloud-based platform for sharing and

verifying critical documents and certificates. As of 2020, the platform provides access to over 3.45 billion digital documents, “e-Gram Panchayat”, an initiative to simplify and enhance internal Government operations, Indian Railways on cloud - The Indian railway sector faced monetary losses due to poor management on the number of people carrying rail tickets. In order to avoid such loss, the Government decided to implement cloud technology for Indian railways, “Kisan Suvidha”, a digital portal to help farmers with the relevant information instantly, “e-hospital”, a cloud based healthcare project implemented by the Government to ease the process of healthcare management.

Concluding Words: The above are just some of the trends that may dominate the Data Center domain, mostly driven by challenges incurred due to the pandemic. With data constantly rising, we hope to witness more disrupting trends that will result in enhanced & secure data hosting within Data Centers. When implemented within Data Centers, Advanced Technologies are likely to boost the hosting services of Data Center providers.

Disclaimer: ESDS Software Solution Limited is proposing, subject to receipt of requisite approvals, market conditions and other considerations, an initial public offering of its equity shares (the “Equity Shares”) and has filed a draft red herring prospectus dated September 2, 2021 (the “DRHP”) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (“SEBI”), BSE Limited and the National Stock Exchange of India Limited. The DRHP is available on the website of SEBI at www.sebi.gov.in, the website of the BSE Limited at www.bseindia.com and the website of the National Stock Exchange of India Limited at www.nseindia.com and the website of the Lead Managers, Axis Capital Limited and IIFL Securities Limited, at www.axiscapital. co.in and www.iiflcap.com, respectively. Any potential investor should note that investment in Equity Shares involves a high degree of risk. For details, potential investors should refer to the red herring prospectus of the Company, including the section titled “Risk Factors”.

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // NEW ANALYTICS HERO

THE RISE OF A NEW ANALYTICS HERO IN 2022 1. The need for interactive analytics at scale is taking off Increasingly, analytics are needed to understand a situation or investigate a problem. This requires the freedom to slice and dice and interact with data live with sub-second query response at any scale. It’s a dynamic user experience that can be best created via a developer-built application.

No one wants to sit around waiting for a query to process. And while many databases will claim the checkbox for interactivity and speed, they’ll come with lots of scale constraints. They’ll rely on tricks like roll ups, aggregations, or recent data only to make queries appear faster, but that just restricts the insights you can actually get. So the operative word here is “scale”.

DAVID WANG VICE PRESIDENT PRODUCT MARKETING, IMPLY

Every year industry pundits predict data and analytics becoming more valuable the following year. But this doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict.

There’s actually something much more interesting happening that’s going to change everything in the analytics world: the rise of a new hero, the software developer.

If the past is any indication of the future, then what we are seeing is a major transformation unfolding across every industry: a changing of the guard, so to speak, of the ones who are creating value from data.

Today, the industry at large equates analytics with data warehousing and business intelligence.

It’s a traditional approach of BI experts querying historical data “once in a while” for the executive dashboards and reports that have been around for decades.

But for bleeding-edge companies like Netflix, Target, and Salesforce, their use of analytics is much more progressive – and much more impactful and real-time. Companies like these see the true game-changer for data in the hands of their software developers.

Their developers are building modern analytics applications and doing it with Apache Druid to deliver interactive data experiences for investigative, operational, and customer-facing insights.

But what’s causing the emergence of these apps and what’s it mean for developers?

Let’s break down the Top 5 reasons: 44 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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2. High concurrency is becoming a musthave for every use case The days of relying on a few BI analysts to write SQL queries are seemingly in the rear-view.

Data-driven companies today want to give everyone – from product managers to ops teams to data scientists – free access to explore. And, multi-tenancy takes user count even further. But concurrency doesn’t just come from the numbers of users. Developers are being asked to build analytics apps with dozens of visualizations with each firing off several concurrent SQL queries.

Now I’ll admit – it’ll be hard to find a modern database today that doesn’t claim high concurrency. You obviously wouldn’t want to force fit Postgres (or even Elastic) in uncomfortable positions. But what about scale-out cloud data warehouses? Doesn’t elasticity = scale = high concurrency? Of course, but elasticity without insane compute efficiency (like with Apache Druid) is going to be a really expensive app.

3. Desire to unlock the value of streaming data with analytics Businesses of all kinds are rapidly adopting eventstreaming platforms like Apache Kafka. Our friends at Confluent, the creators of Kafka, have built a data mesh that puts data ‘in motion’. With data swirling around constantly, what better use of it than to analyze it for continuous, real-time insights?

Companies like Netflix are doing this and

their developers are creating a huge competitive advantage by bringing together Apache Kafka and Druid to build an analytics app that enables a high quality, always-on, user experience.

With an eye on real-time analytics, several things have to be taken into account. Is analyzing streams alone enough – or does the use case need to compare streams against historical data? For Intercontinental Exchange, it’s the full spectrum from present to past that gives them the right security visibility. Does ingestion scalability matter – do you need to process millions of events per second? What about latency or data quality?

4. More and more companies want to give their customers analytics Analytics of the past were about making better decisions for the business. While still very relevant – and a huge opp to create more value – we are increasingly seeing companies build analytics apps to deliver insights to their customers.

Companies like Twitter, Cisco ThousandEyes, and Citrix are doing this and driving material revenue. They’re giving their customers visibility and insights – and that in turn creates big business for them.

But it can be a pretty hairy outcome to use any database to build a customer-facing analytics app. There’s way more on the line than internal use cases when you think about SLAs and the customer experience. It’s in these apps where microseconds of latency makes a difference, downtime is costly, and concurrency and $$ goes through the roof. Thankfully there’s a database for that!

5. The digitization of everything is built with analytics At this point in tech, I think we all see that every company is becoming a software company. But with everyone having easy access to the cloud, simply building cloud software and services isn’t enough to sustain an advantage. That’s why companies like Salesforce and AirBnB build analytics apps to optimize how they build their products.

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LONG-TERM INNOVATION // TECH PREDICTION 2022

PROBLEMSOLVING TO LONG-TERM INNOVATION: THE TECHNOLOGY SHIFT IN 2022 PUNEET GUPTA MANAGING DIRECTOR & VP INDIA/SAARC NETAPP

An organization’s capacity to access relevant data in a secure, actionable manner has become as important as its cash flow, balance sheet, or market share strategy, and other traditional indicators of business performance. Data is the new oil – its availability, quality, and usage offer competitive advantage for organizations.

An enterprise’s performance is increasingly defined by its ability to deliver individual and personalized experiences. The ones that do this best with a customer-first approach will see themselves thriving in the new normal. This also means that the enterprises will have to quickly reconfigure business structures and capabilities based on new technologies. In the long run, this will help them meet future customer and employee needs with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience.

With IT innovations redefining the workplace and hybrid workplaces continuing to gain momentum, we will also see organizations further experimenting with software-defined solutions such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

There will be an increased demand for infrastructure as a service and other hybrid multi-cloud

services.

As I see it, the following trends will differentiate future-ready firms from legacy organizations in 2022: n Cloud-native platforms: The cloud revolution for Indian businesses – The coming year will see large organizations move decisively away from a lift-and-shift approach to the cloud, embracing cloud-native technologies instead. Having watched the hyperscalers upend industries across verticals, enterprises will accelerate their move to cloud-scale applications to meet their competitive challenges. n Data privacy and security: The secret sauce for digital acceleration – If data is a genuine asset – analogous to human capital or infrastructure – can it be secured, insured, and graded in terms of value and/or usage? How should this asset be quantified and valued on the balance sheet?

‘Data Economics’ will be the science that will help companies define their expertise in the collection, storage, deployment and use of this data. The increasing importance of data will also make data security and reliability top priorities for both companies and consumers alike. n 5G: The game-changer for tech transformation in India – We are increasingly seeing players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge-computing environments to support AI-driven IoT. The advances it will bring – everything from selfdriving cars and smart cities, to connected healthcare and industrial IoT, will truly revolutionize

every sector and open new avenues for businesses across regions. 5G, with its machine-to-machine connectivity, will lead to an exponential increase in data. How enterprises leverage this data is what will define their future success. n The rise of sustainable technology in India (ESG) – In 2022, the demand for sustainability-related services powered by edge and IoT will grow in the areas of energy efficiency and resource management. Use cases for technologies like this will be environmental monitoring, resource management and supply chain processes. n AI driving intelligent data management: A report by Raconter shows that by 2025, users will generate about 463 exabytes of data per day. However, this data is only as good as the AI systems used to manage, regulate, and mine it for insights. The work that many organizations continued in 2021 with new use cases for AI, will continue to expand as businesses realize the power that AI can hold for solving problems better, faster, and at scale.

The pandemic brough along some drastic changes in the way businesses operate. It has had a significant impact on communication service providers both in India and globally. As Covid-19 continues to present new challenges for IT professionals across sectors with many enterprises still working from home, we can expect to see these trends continue in 2022 and well beyond, as the global economy settles into changes that may indeed become permanent – the new normal.

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GUEST ARTICLE // HYPERAUTOMATION

HYPERAUTOMATION – NEED FOR BUSINESSES First, let us put a definition of hyperautomation in place.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Hyperautomation is an enabler to help organizations with maximizing productivity, minimizing expenses, and ultimately operating with increased efficiency, to succeed in today’s economy.

Technology takes several years to develop, but it seems as if everything happened in a jiffy to bring about a digital transformation that has made lives faster, smoother, and more importantly simpler.

The concept of machines doing more work than humans themselves is now being accepted for business operations as well.

Therefore, this small write-up will throw some light on the details, prospects, and benefits of hyper-automation.

Good time to start with this long introduction, isn’t it? I will try to make it as simple as it can get. As implied by its name, it takes automation a step further. It helps prioritize eliminating the dependence of the input of human assistance.

Though conventional automation aids in the optimization of task processes, hyper-automation adds an extra layer of robotic intelligence that makes the process even faster, error-free and end-end automation. This is what makes it an inevitable trend in the race for digital transformation. Further, it can be thought of as a discipline that augments human capabilities instead of replacing them.

Why Do You Need Hyperautomation?

While one might think hyperautomation is just hype, let us tell you that the hype is real, especially if you are looking to help your organization get ahead in today’s fast-paced, extremely distributed, and limited-resource environment. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the workforce has now become highly remote, resulting in much lesser staff members in facilities. This has also resulted in a lot of industries being unable to move as fast as they desire or must.

Thus, some of the goals that are driving organizations towards hyperautomation today include: n Having to keep up with demand n Existence of outdated work processes that result in the inability to compete n Lack of resources or knowledge, making it difficult for corporate IT to keep up with the demands of the business 46 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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Having to meet regulatory compliance Trying to maintain consistency of production as well as higher quality products with lesser or no human error While these are just a few of the reasons why there has been a surge in hyperautomation adoption across industries, according to Gartner, by the year 2025 more than 20% of all products and produce will be first touched by a human only at the time of purchase. This projection shows that organizations are today realizing the kind of value that hyperautomation can add to their business processes, thus they are looking to move towards implementing automation for streamlining their business. n n

What are the Benefits of Hyperautomation?

Extending core automation and RPA with advanced technology like AI and Machine Learning, hyperautomation can help organizations in: n Accelerated digital transformation through harnessing the power of integrated automation with the faster building of automated applications n Empowering workforce to work faster, with much fewer errors, helping them direct their time and energy to more strategic tasks n Faster ROI and adoption that can help customers receive outcomes within 8-10 weeks of automation enablement via an Agile approach n Increasing agility, and more accurate decision making by giving quicker insights n Increasing the quality of products and presenting faster marketing time by leveraging higher intelligence, improvement inconsistency, and reduction in human error n Making better business decisions by identifying areas that require improvement, and enhancing consumer satisfaction by capturing higher amounts of data and gaining insights into it For organizations that have low automation levels and legacy operations, hyperautomation can be especially advantageous, as they would be able to witness real results via automation of digital processes and infrastructure. This would aid in increasing connectivity, agility as well as efficiency of business operations.

What Are Some Use Cases for Hyperautomation?

Since automation is already being used in some form or the other across industries, hyperautomation too can be used in various sectors to enhance their existing processes. Listed below are a few examples of use cases for hyperautomation: n Supply Chain: One of the biggest overarching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic was on the capacity of companies to acquire materials on time. Add to this reduced staffing, and the result was process delays and numerous challenges.

Leveraging RPA, companies can perform inventory checks round-the-clock to ensure better access to their stock levels as well as product availability. RPA can also be used for billing, pricing, system maintenance, procurement, etc. n BFSI: An industry segment that is constantly pressurized to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Apart from this, there is also a growing demand for improving personalized experiences for customers. Implementing hyperautomation in banking, financial services, and insurance empowers all banking processes.

It is significantly apt for regulatory reporting, marketing, sales & distribution, bank servicing, payment operations, lending operations, backoffice operations, and enterprise support among others. It is also able to prevent suspicious actions as intelligent automation solutions empowered

by Al algorithms can efficiently monitor the transactions and proactively identify fraudulent activities. As claims processing is the most critical process for insurance, it can considerably benefit from hyperautomation technologies. n Health Care: Another industry that can benefit greatly from hyperautomation is healthcare, as it can use this approach for providing the patients with better experiences, with access to more accurate information regarding patient health. Furthermore, hyperautomation can also be used for ensuring regulatory compliance, which is not only pivotal to viability, but also for the success of any healthcare institution.

HYPERAUTOMATION // GUEST ARTICLE

TANUJ SINGH

GLOBAL HEAD, MARKETING AND ALLIANCES JK TECH

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // INVISIBLE VECTORS OF CHANGE

SHISHIR SAXENA APAC HEAD – CLIENT STRATEGY & TRANSFORMATION ALTIMETRIK

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

THE INVISIBLE VECTORS OF CHANGE; WHAT TO WATCH FOR IN 2022 The lines between the physical and the digital have all but vanished. Businesses have discovered that blending the two delivers more than the sum of the parts. Today, that fusion is able to deliver personalization at scale without having to bust the bank, create work-from-anywhere a reality with unmatched convenience and safety and network ecosystems to make them more resilient. Underlying this are a set of technology-oriented ideas that call for a broader understanding in 2022.

The experience economy, further fueled by evolution of payments: The recent focus on removing physical contact from user journeys has magnified the value of digital products, services and operations thus scrunching the roadmap to digital transformation. While tech stack modernization is a given, it must be centered on the delivery of fresh and habit-forming experiences.

This trend will continue to have a pronounced impact in the way payments are integrated into value chains with significant advances across the dimensions of choice, security and ease-ofuse. So, how easily can a new payment process be integrated into your business? The answer depends on the Busness2Developer equation.

It calls for a developer-friendly engineering approach that makes it easy for merchants to integrate the payment platform into their ecosystem.

A holistic approach to digital security: The days of slow development have been replaced by rapid release cycles, delivered by globally distributed teams, injecting new code pieces in a collaboratively code base leading to an increased possibility of security vulnerabilities. As a result, mature and scalable DevSecOps is becoming a flywheel for organizations, calibrating their speed to value. As organizations move to build new products or modernize legacy stacks, they need to bring the urgency in their approach to a robust DevSecOps setup if they are to continue their 48 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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growth trajectory.

SRE – coming through on customer expectations: Closely linked to DevSecOps is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Today, a short 10 minute shut down of a consumer/business facing service makes international headlines. Apart from the constant vigilance needed to prevent data breaches, CXOs will increasingly find themselves in the dock if their digital offerings are not reliably delivered. But system failures in the face of largescale business pivots or even near-routine change management continue to happen. For example, large financial businesses moving into rural markets can find their existing systems are not designed to be fault tolerant in the new context.

Service unavailability could affect prospects and customers negatively. This is where SRE, a collection of engineering principles, steps in to provide the means to keep large-scale systems functioning from a user’s perspective while reducing the cost of failure.

The sense of urgency to simplify the core: Many executive leadership of leading enterprises now with private equity ownership structures, will renew their focus on building new markets, products or restructuring a business for faster returns and more competitive operational efficiency. This is driving a strong push towards simplifying the enterprise tech stack which, for many, has become rigid and limiting. These organizations understand that business volatility will not end, and neither will the need to be fast to capture new market opportunities. Organizations have to therefore, be inherently nimble and adaptable. Their ambition should not be ransom to what their current technology architecture and stack can withstand or yield but should rather be empowered by its limitless potential. This means keeping the tech backbone simplified without sacrificing modernization and ease of innovation.

After data (lots of it), what? The race, until now, was to acquire data. Now that practically every organization has got there, the challenge is to leverage the data to solve problems and build competitive advantage. This means applying a whole family of advanced technologies such as fuzzy logic to figure out customer needs, market behavior and ideal product features. Closely related to this is the growing institutionalization of data science. Data wrangling and data workbenches are becoming important—because data scientists and data engineering teams must be served up the right data for them to do their magic.

Unbundling as a strategy: Often, successful businesses thrive on their ability to bundle products and services that customers want. But at the back end, the challenge is quite the opposite: It is to smartly unbundle the value chain to build intriguing new equations and synergies, that weren’t possible earlier. This trend is especially noticeable in financial services. Banks, for example, continue to disburse loans while the loan origination is managed by last-mile partners. This is because a customer today may avail a loan from a specific bank using a third-party app simply because the customer has a prior relationship (or trust) with the third-party app. This behavior is driving organizations to think of themselves, their business models and their underlying technology stacks as ecosystems that need to be interoperable versus striving to be do-it-all behemoths. We’ll see more of this “unbundling” trend shape businesses and the enabling technology in newer ways.

The larger trends and innovations that swept 2021 are determining which enabling technologies will dominate 2022. These technologies will become the steppingstones to a better world and to more resilient businesses.

INVISIBLE VECTORS OF CHANGE // TECH PREDICTION 2022

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // HYBRID STORAGE

HYBRID STORAGE TO MAKE A COMEBACK IN 2022 GEORGE CRUMP CMO STORONE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

GEORGE IS CURRENTLY THE CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER FOR STORONE. HE HAS OVER 25 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE IN THE STORAGE INDUSTRY, HOLDING EXECUTIVE SALES AND ENGINEER POSITIONS. BEFORE JOINING STORONE, HE WAS THE FOUNDER AND LEAD ANALYST AT STORAGE SWITZERLAND.

The era of single media storage systems, like all-flash arrays, will start to come to an end in 2022. Storage system vendors will need to make sure their storage software can intelligently move data between two or more types of storage. They will also need to address the legitimate concerns of data tiering and minimize the weaknesses of each tier.

The first reason for the hybrid storage comeback is there are more media types available than ever before. We have storage class memory, NVMe flash, SAS SSDs, hard disk drives, and cloud storage. Each of these media types has a role in meeting a performance demand or a cost reality. Moving data seamlessly between these tiers, as it ages, is critical to establishing a perfect balance across all workloads.

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comeback requires vendors to address legitimate concerns around tiering. The primary challenge with tiering is inconsistent performance, either because the data is on the wrong tier or because the data-tiering activity itself impacts performance. The decreasing cost of storage class memory and flash means that IT can oversize higher-performing tiers to ensure operational data is always on these tiers. To address the potential performance impact of data-tiering, vendors need to move a percentage of the least active data to a lower tier in advance of subsequent inbound writes. This pre-warming activity will smooth out the IO spike and deliver consistent performance.

The third reason for the hybrid storage comeback is that vendors will minimize each tier’s apparent weaknesses. Using a storage-memory class front end as a shock absorber to the larger

flash tier will extend its life expectancy and enable the use of lower-cost but more write-sensitive flash. Vendors also need to invest in development efforts to take advantage of the innovations in hard disk drives. As the densities of these drives exceed 20TB, their cost advantage increases to 10X over flash media. Vendors, though, need to rethink RAID, so that drive recovery efforts don’t take weeks.

Suppose storage vendors can deliver these capabilities in 2022. In that case, hybrid storage will become the dominant storage type because it will enable IT to meet a wide range of performance needs in a single storage system while also driving down the CAPEX and OPEX cost of storage for the next decade.

COFORGE // TECH PREDICTION 2022

COFORGE: FROM A TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS PROVIDER TO BE A DIGITAL SERVICES AND SOLUTIONS PARTNER VIC GUPTA EVP DIGITAL, COFORGE

As we commence 2022, we face a similar challenge to what we faced a year back. A new variant of the coronavirus has evolved creating further pressures on healthcare infrastructure and uncertainly in businesses and economies. However, the learnings from the past, our preparedness and the widespread availability of vaccines offers some hope that 2022 might also be the year in which we start seeing the gradual ebbing away of the pandemic. Despite these challenging conditions, Coforge continues to sustain business growth providing great value to clients, interesting deployments of partner products and a great place to work. In 2022, we foresee new heights in our engagement with our three key stakeholders – our Clients, our Partners, and our Employees.

For majority of our Clients, we have moved from being a technology solutions provider to be a digital services and solutions partner. From providing seamless & liquid experiences for wealth managers at a leading wealth management company in the USA to providing connected & integrated payment processing for large digital bank and financial services company in Europe and to Web 3 apps powering next generation provenance – blockchain based counterfeit drug detection; Coforge is working on some emerging technologies projects worldwide. From

modernization of legacy systems for the largest travel technology provider to core platform transformation for world’s leading commercial & specialty group, Coforge has developed long standing client relationships and a trust partner worldwide. We do more end customer experience driven engagements than ever before be for their branding, personalization, User and Customer Experiences, etc.

We are co-developing consumer economy models for our clients through an API ecosystem.

We are driving quality and velocity in product development to evolve as a world factory for digital software products and data driven iterative enterprises. We managed the entire product development journey for one of the largest accounting firm in US and helping them to build a compliance platform. Leveraging our Architecture as a Service with one of the largest consumer companies in Australia, we are able to transform their core business processes driving efficacy and efficiency. We are leveraging the power and scalability of cloud for infrastructure, application & data to drive scale and agility to our Clients. This is a journey we started a year back with the rebranding to Coforge with the aim to forge long term alliances that have been propelled significantly due to the implications of

the pandemic.

We have evolved as a Go To Partner and Go To Market system integrator for several of our partner companies like MuleSoft, Pega, Appian, Duck Creek, ERP & CRM providers, UiPath and Automation Anywhere, cloud infrastructure providers and hyperscalers. Infact we have a huge base of engineers and developers working on these platforms and delivering business solutions for our clients. What’s more, we see an upsurge in a trend in partners engaging with us to develop new products that can be sold to their enterprise customers. Additionally, analysts & startups like FinTechs, InsureTechs engage with us as the conduit for market intelligence and to develop advance products and technologies for their end customers.

Lastly for the workforce, Coforge continues to enhance a fast-learning culture offering emotional empathy and investments in employee well-being and career advancement for the overall health of organization. Amidst all the evolving challenges in health and environment in 2022, technology will continue to provide the acceleration to reinvent new business models that are digital and insights driven, thereby providing better experiences to consumers at large.

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // DATA PRIVACY

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

DATA PRIVACY: DON’T LET THE PANDEMIC LOOSEN YOUR GUARD There’s no doubt that growing awareness of data privacy has enhanced how people take care of their personal information. But there are times when we tend to lose our guard, and mostly these are phases when we are anxious. For instance, it is common to carry vaccine certificates on smartphones for seamless access to malls, eateries, or catch a flight. While we know that carrying such sensitive information on smartphones puts them at high risk for misuse, fears of rejected access might overpower the sensible things to do. The challenge for digital users is to fight these vulnerabilities.

Vaccine certificates, as we know, contain sensitive personal information such as a person’s name, date of birth, age, and gender. Given that an individual’s date of birth is commonly regarded as personally identifiable information (PII) in many countries, it exposes a large population to risks of identity thefts and other kinds of cyber frauds. Rising cybercrime statistics prove that such unprotected data can be easily hacked into or simply accessed through a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection automatically picked up by your phones.

Secondly, flaunting of vaccination statuses to social networks is a new fad amplifying these risks. With governments aggressively rolling out immunization drives, many citizens have felt the need to declare their vaccination updates on social media feeds and help in raising awareness.

In many cases, social media timelines are flooded with digital copies of COVID vaccine certificates.

It’s imperative not to get blinded by the comforts brought in our lives with the evolution of digital technology. We must remember that our growing dependence on online products and services expose us further to security threats and privacy breaches. These risks assume greater relevance, considering the exponential rate at which personal data storage on cloud services have grown during the pandemic. In 2021, the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services grew 18.4% to a total of $304.9 billion, forecasted a Gartner report. However, have we 52 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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been able to ramp up our data-security measures at par with these changes? Perhaps not because businesses did not foresee this scale of digitalisation and hence never felt the need to shift gears.

Users across the world fell prey to cybercrime, and common trends included ransomware attacks, devices with proprietary operating systems witnessing increased vulnerabilities, android spreading malware and an increase in potentially unwanted applications. As per the 2020 state of malware report, the period between January – December 2020 saw a 565% spike in malware detections. Spyware app detections at the same time grew by 1,055%. The pandemic also created new challenges to online privacy.

Governments across the globe find themselves at crossroads. Finding a middle in their endeavour to safeguard citizen privacy and digital contact tracing of the virus is probably the greatest challenge that lies ahead. At a recent public hearing, data protection experts warned a UK parliamentary committee about the perils of exposing critical health data of large populations to private sector players.

Device vaccination is as important Patch updates or security updates periodically sent out by mobile manufacturers can shield your phones from potential breaches. Manufacturers recommend that patch updates should be set to automatic to update and protect your devices automatically. Much like how the COVID -19 vaccination does not guarantee 100% protection, device vaccination also goes only so far, but it does mean one should not attempt to safeguard their devices. Additionally, the most effective step is to be careful while using your devices and not clicking on the “OK” button or link when random pop-ups appear on the screen. Being attentive and mindful can avert most attacks and prevent one from becoming part of the chain of compromise.

Conventional thinking cyber experts advocate making physical copies of vaccine certificates or other documents that carry an individual’s PII over digital copies to minimise risks.

BARRY COOK DATA PROTECTION OFFICER VFS GLOBAL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: MR BARRY COOK IS IN CHARGE OF ENSURING THE ORGANISATION’S COMPLIANCE WITH DATA PRIVACY & PROTECTION LEGISLATION ACROSS ALL LOCATIONS OF OPERATIONS. MR COOK IS A RESULTS DRIVEN, INNOVATIVE LEADER WITH IN EXCESS OF 20 YEARS’ EXPERIENCE IN PROVIDING DATA PRIVACY, INFORMATION SECURITY AND RISK MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS TO MAJOR INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TO GOVERNMENT, PHARMACEUTICAL, PRIVATE BANKING AND RETAIL ORGANISATIONS. IN HIS CURRENT ROLE, AMONG SEVERAL RESPONSIBILITIES, MR COOK OVERSEES AND DIRECTS PRIVACY SPECIALISTS, AND COORDINATES PRIVACY AND DATA PROTECTION PROGRAMMES WITH SENIOR EXECUTIVES GLOBALLY TO ENSURE CONSISTENCY ACROSS THE ORGANISATION. HE COORDINATES WITH THE APPROPRIATE REGULATING BODIES TO ENSURE THAT PROGRAMMES, POLICIES AND PROCEDURES INVOLVING DATA PROTECTION AND PRIVACY CONSIDERATIONS ARE ADDRESSED IN AN INTEGRATED AND COMPREHENSIVE MANNER. MR COOK ALSO DEVELOPS AND COORDINATES A RISK MANAGEMENT AND COMPLIANCE FRAMEWORK FOR PRIVACY AT VFS GLOBAL. IN THE PAST, MR COOK HAS WORKED IN THE FIELDS OF AIR TRAFFIC AND DEFENCE SYSTEMS DESIGN ENGINEERING, TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT, SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, IT SECURITY AND RISK MANAGEMENT AND INFORMATION SECURITY WITH REPUTED ORGANISATIONS ACROSS THE UK AND SWITZERLAND. PRIOR TO JOINING VFS GLOBAL, HE WAS LEVERAGING HIS EXPERTISE TO PROVIDE SERVICES TO MULTINATIONAL AND NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS AS A DATA PRIVACY & CYBERSECURITY CONSULTANT. MR COOK IS A CERTIFIED INFORMATION SYSTEMS SECURITY PROFESSIONAL (CISSP), AND HAS A BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN INTEGRATED ENGINEERING WITH MANAGEMENT. HE IS ALSO AN IBM CERTIFIED AIX TECHNICAL EXPERT (ATE).

DATA PRIVACY // TECH PREDICTION 2022

JANUARY 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 53

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Q&A // DATA SOVEREIGNTY

A N T H O N Y

S P I T E R I

SENIOR GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIST, PRODUCT STRATEGY, VEEAM SOFTWARE

“We are never going to pretend to be a company that will say it can detect ransomware beforehand because that’s almost impossible.”

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DATA SOVEREIGNTY // Q&A

“DATA SOVEREIGNTY IS OBVIOUSLY A BIG ONE AS PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THEIR DATA IS CRITICAL” Anthony Spiteri leads Service Provider products and partners program at Veeam. Speaking to Enterprise IT World, Spiteri talks about the product line up, the outlook of the company and the role Veeam has played in pushing Cloud adoption. In an interview with Enterprise IT, he speaks about a range of topics- including Kasten K10 by Veeam, partner program, back up and data recovery for containers and for open-source platforms. Read on to know more the company’s initiatives…

Why do you think the migration from VMware to Red Hat environment taking place?

The evolving open source and cloud native world has made people cognizant about different software available in the market. Red Hat distinctively created an opportunity for themselves in this space and wielded it to their advantage. One of the major reasons for the migration from VMware is the fact that the Red Hat platform is based on KVM. Plus, they have created and developed flagship platforms like OpenShift, OpenStack and Red Hat Virtualization for the users, offering them the best capabilities available in the market.

Apart from that, VMware has become too expensive and it’s difficult to justify the cost anymore.

This could be another reason contributing to the migration, as Red Hat solutions are priced lower as compared to VMware.

Customers and CIOs are moving back from public to private cloud owing to hypervisors and the availability of new technologies. Is Veeam marking this lc as well?

Yes, I began to see this shift five plus years ago when I worked for a service provider. And today, the shift is primarily centered around the technology currently available on premises – if consuming services on premises provides the same experience as that of a cloud then why would customers opt for the latter option which is priced steeply. Apart from the commercial aspect, other factors such as the rise of infrastructure as code, API’s, automation, and software as a service have also driven a lot of people back to on premises – that’s where the multi cloud comes into play. Another concept that has gained traction is Data sovereignty as people have started to understand their data is critical and in certain regions regulatory or otherwise, they prefer to keep their data on premises. This has led to the whole notion of everything in cloud to disappear as people have realized they can have the benefit of both on premises and cloud-based platforms.

So, you’re of the opinion that it will be a hybrid one?

Absolutely, hybrid multi cloud. Public cloud players pushed a lot of their marketing on moving

from CapEx to OPEX but effectively today, everything is as a service—even at Veeam.

While your roadmap for 2021 includes multiple products, is Veeam Availability Suite Version 11 the primary focus for the brand?

Yes. That’s right. Everything kind of focuses on that. We wouldn’t be anything without the Veeam Availability Suite because that is central to everything that we do from a hypervisor perspective.

However, the backup for public cloud is equally important too as that’s an area that hasn’t been tapped to its full potential as yet.

The growth of Kubernetes container technologies is very evident.

Which one is important to Veeam?

The short answer is every platform. Kasten K10 is beautiful because it installs across almost every Kubernetes platform including Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud and other public cloud.

Kasten K10 is a Kubernetes deployment, so it deploys as an application inside Kubernetes with multiple containers and the product is portable.

In fact, we don’t worry about the platform, from a Veeam Backup and Replication point of view, because it is agnostic.

Purpose-built for Kubernetes, Kasten K10 provides enterprise operations teams an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for backup/restore, disaster recovery, and mobility of Kubernetes applications. It automatically and seamlessly discovers complex Kubernetes applications and all related dependencies. Essentially, we want to ensure that Veeam is central when customers start shifting to containers on mass.

Here’s a question on behalf of the CIOs. When a service provider releases new update its challenging for customers to upgrade immediately.

Customers complain VM is not supportive of the newer version. What are your thoughts?

Generally, any software that upgrades pose challenges and a lot of planning goes into new updates by a company. I would never advocate people upgrading straightaway, I rather that they go through certain testing procedure. Although this completely depends on the scale and capabilities of the company.

At Veeam, we have 1 million active Veeam Backup & Replication installations making it the most widely deployed Enterprise backup software in the world.

To access the complete article log on to: www.enterpriseitworld.com

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FUTURE OF DATA CENTRE

The Future of Data Centre Poises on the Adoption of Sustainability The hyperscalers are going to be the key and India is going to become from a 7 billion to a 14 billion market size with coverage area of a 7.5 million to 15 million square feet.

D

ata centres are the essential infrastructure that impact the success of cloud computing and digital transformation. A scalable and efficient data centre is crucial in both the construction and operation of stable economy. In recent years, the growing importance of data centre has drawn much attention to related issues including power, real estate, connectivity simplification and service stability. The existing data centres lack the necessary agility for multi-tenant demands in the cloud, creating responsiveness and scalability.

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On top of it, there are moratorium in many countries in setting up new data centres due to their power guzzling nature. In this story, we present an overview of data centre future from the stake holders and data centre operators. We provide detailed descriptions of several important aspects: the physical architecture, interconnect, automation, sustainability, energy efficiency, etc. We highlight some of the challenges and open issues that should be addressed for future data centre to improve its energy efficiency and increase its throughput while lowering its cost for

the customers.

Talking about the industry trend, Paresh Shetty, President Sales, C4C & CtrlS, said, “5G roll out is what we are looking at eagerly. That would drive different other technologies. In fact, that is the reason why IOT is making a big inroad into it.

With 4G LTE getting rolled out, IOT sensors are deployed everywhere, there is a lot of data which is being collected at the source. If you are going to collect a lot of data, you need to process it, analyse it and also make sure you take intelligent decisions. And that is where AI and ML comes

FUTURE OF DATA CENTRE

PARESH SHETTY PRESIDENT SALES C4C & CTRLS

Data centres are going in strength. Though they are power guzzlers at the same time Data centres are saving a lot of power.

What is going to happen in future is little different as this trend will continue to grow. AI ML and some of the new technologies are going to bring in a different shift altogether and things are going to happen in two for two phases. AI has to happen closer to the user - say for instance you walk into a mall and somebody will process the data quickly and say… ‘hey last time you visited this restaurant and this store, this is your profile and they will immediately give you some discount on a competitor restaurant and competitor company - maybe an apparel company or something like that. All that has to happen closer to the user that’s which what is going to fuel the growth of edge data centres. However, a big part of AI ML may not necessarily need to be closer to the user - say for instance the bank is analyzing the spend of a consumer or analyzing trends in their branch and trying to find out frauds or the government is trying to find out whether someone has bought a five core rupees worth of car and has he paid tax which is equivalent to that or not. That will need huge amount of compute which can be fifty sixty hundred milliseconds away from the user and can be delayed - need not necessarily need a data centre, which is a Tier-4 with 99.99 % up

time. That is going to fuel data centres which are little away from the city but big spaces, more cost competitive. So that is what is the trend we are going to see in the future.

“It is going to move towards the edge but before that I think what is more important is: you develop the core. So, what we are seeing right now is the development of the core. And India having longer cycles to deploy data centres, I think the core is going to be the first part. That’s going to get developed in order to support the compute needs you need the core. From that we will branch out to edge then micro-edges,” said Nikhil Rathi, Founder & CEO, Web Werks. “First part, you will have the core development – that is a two - three years cycle. Two - three years past, you’re going to see edge computing coming into limelight. You want to be closer to the audience. So that content is going to move closer and on top of that the micro- edge network will shape up. Some kind of cloud repatriation also happening and what we’re going to probably see is that these guys are also going to be at the edge using some cloud or their own deployment - depending on what they do so if it’s a map services company or logistics company they probably have a virtual machine JANUARY 2022

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BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

into picture.”

Artificial Intelligence will play a big role with so much of data being collected. With 5G, the Edge Data Centres would become more and more relevant because data will get processed at the edge and then faster decisions can be taken.

There is a huge amount of use cases which will get rolled out – be it the autonomous cars, be it the gaming industry, be it event the local content.

How faster you can see the content even on the financial institutions the trading algorithm or faster user profiles could be there at the edge and faster decision making could be done. Zero touch sales model is what the financial institutions are going to look at. So the edge computing becomes important so 5G, IOT and AI are all interrelated and a big transformation is going to happen.

All will be blended together and that’s where the 5G rollout becomes very important. Suresh added, “It is going to begin very soon with the government giving all the permissions. But the edge data centre, which we are very relevant to, becomes even more important as 5G rollout starts going on. When we look at hyperscale, we will also look at edge data centres and this business - research will show - almost five- or six-times growth will be there on the edge data centres as we start two or three years from now because of the need of the industry”.

“I will take a step back and say that what’s happening today in the industry. If you see we have around 800 - 900 million internet customers and they are downloading 15 GB every month, which is growing at 20% every year. That is the fastest growth that is anybody seeing anywhere across the world - one of the fastest not the fastest.

Today what we are seeing is around 60 to 70 % of that content is video and this video needs to be stored, processed and distributed, which needs a lot of compute and storage and that is fuelling the growth of the data centres. Because it is either being done by the OTTs and the social media companies or it’s happening at the cloud. Both of them need data centre space,” Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India, added. “Other space where things are growing is the digital transformation that enterprises are going through.”

All enterprises - whether it’s small, medium or large are going through digital transformation.

They are trying to do most of the things on digital platforms rather than on papers. That is what is feeling a big growth in a hybrid solution where they need co-location space at data centres and they need space also on the cloud. Manoj added, “Cloud is also one of the biggest customers of our data centres. Today in India around 45 % of the total co-location space is being consumed by cloud service providers in the last two years, which has been 60 70%.”

FUTURE OF DATA CENTRE

deployed somewhere in the edge of the micro edge making sure that tracking of their vehicles is happening properly. It is also sending commands back to the autonomous vehicle. I think that’s going to really shape the future and we’re going to see the core the edge and then the micro-edge.”

“What is happening today, when 4G has penetrated so deep in the country, we are seeing farmers also have started using mobile apps now.

WhatsApp has become a default app on all mobile phones more than 80 crores people in India now are connected on WhatsApp. This usage of WhatsApp has enabled other apps to come with simple features and transform all the unorganized sectors. So IOT has entered into the agriculture sector,” said, Piyush Somani, Managing Director & Chairman, ESDS Software Solution Limited.

“There are so many companies in India who have got patented technologies now. They have brought soil testing sensors. The smart metering initiative is happening right now. More than two million smart meters have already been made live and the government plans to implement 250 million smart meters.”

So IOT has started penetrating really fast into the country now and we will see that in next four to five years’ time, majority part of the farming sector would get organized. They would have a lot of technologies. It is not just going to be restricted to IOT but there would be a lot of analytics that is going to happen over there they are going to use drone-based technology also so drone will be doing farm surveys on a regular basis and then the reports would get shared with the farmers.

The reports would get shared with the government. The banks are going to consume all that information. The insurance companies are going to see all that information before approving any farm loan. So, there is a massive change that is happening and all of that is going to bring a lot of data in data centres on cloud platforms. At certain locations, let’s say for defence, when there would be drones flying very close to the border areas or that entire swarm of drones will send data to edge data centres because they cannot directly communicate with your master data centre which would be running in Mumbai or Bangalore or Delhi. They will first communicate with some edge data centre which is very close to Amritsar and from there the mobile data centre would then transmit data to the master data centre.

What Tesla is doing today is 90% of their analytics is happening on the core data centre and the balance ten % of the algorithm, which is being built, is at the edge or probably even lesser than that. “I cannot exactly say that ten % but majority of the churn of that data algorithm creation is happening at the core data centre, but you also need an edge. The Tesla vehicle is an edge.

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MANOJ PAUL MANAGING DIRECTOR EQUINIX INDIA

“We as data centre service provider need to educate the whole ecosystem around us or the social fabric around us that don’t see us enemies, don’t go out with placards that stop data centres, they are overusing the energy.”

Similarly, all the future mobile data centres, which the military is going to deploy \would have a lot of data process would be at core and then the edge would get connected,” Piyush added. “So, IOT I am very proud to tell you that in India two million smart meters have gone live so far and we have played a very crucial role over there and we hope that once the 250 million smart meters go live, government of India is going to save more than One Lakh corers rupees a year.” As on date, the losses are more than one Lakh crore rupees and in next 3-4 years’ time, it is anticipated that that can increase. So, one can see a massive transformation brought by IOT technology in the utility.

B.S Rao, Vice President, Marketing, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, said, “The data has been growing very rapidly. In fact, India today has close to a billion mobile users, and we have close to 700 million smart phone users who are consuming internet. My believe is that India’s middle class being 300-400 million and going to touch 700 million there and they will use more are more

smart phones and would use more and more social media. There would be data explosion in this country.

The question is with data explosion happening with the middle class of one hand half times of United States’ population, whether India can be seen as an emerging global data centre hub?

Piyush said that India has already started heading towards that direction because majority of that data was unorganized and physical form. It was never stored into a data centre it was not digitized at all.” Now all enterprises in India and Indian banks and government organizations -post pandemic – have realised that without digitization they are losing hundreds and lakhs of crore rupees. That we have to short out. Same is in the agriculture sector. What is the government losing?

More than than three lakh crore rupees per year the government is losing on the subsidies, which they have to give. Now we have seen that the farm laws have been repelled back, which means the government has to lose more money every year.

FUTURE OF DATA CENTRE

Imagine all that data coming into the data centres.

Just for 2 million smart meters they require some 30 racks today in a data centre. Imagine what would be the requirement for 250 million smart meters. And on top of that data you have to do analytics also and then you are trying send sensible information to the consumer that your fridge consumes so much power at this time your heater consumes so much power, etc. The government can send across advisories based on the intelligent information to the consumers tomorrow so the consumers would be benefited. AI and ML requires a humongous amount of compute power and there is a limitation. The chips cannot go below three nanometre gap between the two points in a chip. It means we will not, for at least next four or five years, see major improvement happening in the chip technology.

The AI, ML, IOT and blockchain workload will consume humongous amount of power and that all has to be there in a data centre.

Bitcoin mining is consuming 20 % power of China today. China in between suffered big time because of bitcoin mining. Suddenly they saw a power shortage because of bitcoin. Same thing is going to happen in India when blockchain may be not bitcoin mining but other blockchain workloads are going to consume a humongous amount of power. Piyush added, “I anticipate that by 2033 power consumed by Indian consumers, for everything else, and then power consumed by the data centres in India will match. So if this is 300 gigawatts that is also going to be three or four 300 gigawatts. That is the massive scale at which the data centres will grow. Probably today, we are struggling to cross one gigawatt but one to ten and then 10 to 50 and 50 to 100 will happen within no time. That is the reason so many big players are entering.”

People are committing seventy thousand crores - eighty thousand rupees for data centres.

The other question is if the Indian data centre industry be the global benchmark?

Nikhil added, “I think we have a shot at it. We can I don’t want to confirm that we will because naturally we have larger developed economies ahead of us, which is the United States and probably the whole of Europe. So, we have a lot of catch-up to do versus those guys being developed but on the global map what also adds is that the use case on the commercial side which is the government part and contribution to this but you have favourable national policy dynamics also playing over here.”

Like the data localization bill also making sure that there is a balance of data on the reverse side so we’re going to be surplus data - probably going to be throwing out data more than we’re going to pulling data and this will enhance the data

B.S RAO VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING CTRLS DATACENTERS LTD.

“As data centre companies, we are powering the economies, we are powering the lives of students, lives of patients and what not in the world so I think data centres are the great initiatives against its perception.”

centre aspect also. Because naturally enterprises are going to run their compute like - let’s say for example an enterprise wants to integrate with Mastercard, they can do it locally now and that data will happen locally and that processing will happen locally Mastercard will process it locally, the enterprise will process it locally the e-commerce and all of those transactions will also happen locally which would drive the cloud demand. So, India become a global DC hub, yes, we have a shot at it.

“I think we have a fair shot because of our population as we develop, as our pockets go deeper, as our consumers spend more and as we consume more data. We are unmatched. We have got all the submarine cables landing in either in Mumbai or Chennai. Remember our neighbours are also going to consume our data so Sri Lanka, Nepal, Middle East and Burma consume a lot of Indian data. So, we are going to actually push out data to these places. We could be another Singapore and then Singapore is actually put in a moratorium

as well so due to climate change problems they cannot deploy any more data centres. So that is also spurring on the movement that what is the next most stable location which also provides that bucket of mercury to support the data centres,” he maintained. “When I say bucket of mercury you take three buckets water, alcohol, mercury throw the ball in each one of them where it will drown, where it will stay up. So mercury will support that and that is the ecosystem of our enterprises, our companies, our consumers, which is going to drive us to make sure that the data centres grow.”

In addition that the rural population that push has been talking about LEO Sat (Low Earth Orbit Satellites) and others are reaching out to these fellows, you have the micro-edges over there, which is going to make the things burst.

Echoing Nikhil, Manoj emphasized on the power challenges in the Asia pacific countries and their own channels due to other issues. He said, “We need to look at it and a couple of perspectives. One is that India by itself is becoming a big JANUARY 2022

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FUTURE OF DATA CENTRE

market. So, the growth in the data centre is getting fuelled by the internal demand from Indian consumers and that is very necessary for any country to become a hub. Let us not talk about becoming a global hub let us start focusing on becoming a South Asia hub and I think that itself would be a big achievement for us.”

There are many changes that are happening.

Singapore has put a moratorium on any new data centres, Hong Kong is going through its own challenges along with all these power issues. And recently, the last two three months, the power tariff in Singapore, Japan and even in Hong Kong have gone through the roof so India is really well poised with our power tariffs being quite stable in the last three four years. In fact being very competitive against Singapore and Hong Kong and better than Singapore and Hong Kong and quite competitive against other countries. We see that we can be catering to at least the nearby South Asia. And whatever expansion Singapore was seeing can happen to India and in fact we have had some discussions with some large players who are now looking at Chennai as being the next extension to Singapore being pretty close proximity to that.

He added, “I keep giving this example that there’s a big social media company who is investing on has nearly completed a build of a one billion data centre in Singapore. And think of it, Singapore has a total population of 5.6 million and that company has 500 to 600 million users in India. So, naturally if we get all the things right - ease of doing business, good quality infrastructure, good power, etc., I am sure next time when they want to expand, they should be planning to expand into India catering to other markets not the other way down. So in all India’s burgeoning demand and improvement infrastructure, improvement in ease of doing business as most of the state governments have rolled out new policies to enable or help data centres, all that will go in hand in hand to enable India become the Asia Pacific hub, South Asia hub and then maybe at some point of time - maybe World Hub, because India has become an IT hub any which way.”

IT hubs in Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore caters to all over the world, which was unthinkable 20 years back so now maybe at some point of time we will be a hundred gigabit of data centre.

The other moot point is if the future data centre would be robotised? Will the robotic and intelligent processes replace the humans to make sure they’re far more efficient and far more productiveand far more oriented towards customers?

Explaining the question, Piyush said that it has already started happening. ESDS has recently launched its Bangalore data centre and the power control panels using in the DC designed in such 60 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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PIYUSH SOMANI MANAGING DIRECTOR & CHAIRMAN ESDS SOFTWARE SOLUTION LIMITED

“We actually need to come up together and put pressure on the government that looking at the 100

gigawatts of power requirement of the data centre, you should not start hating the data centre.”

a way that they do not require electrical engineers on site except the team would come once in a month and evaluate. There are bigger players in the market who would be bringing technology from offshore, and they would have started implementing much better technologies now.

In case of the software’s also, there are various software now which are available for data centre automation. IOT based sensors are installed in the data centre. The temperature is continuously sensed across all the layers of the racks, which are there in your data centre and based on that the fans are getting automatically adjusted. So, the system is actually taking care of it - where and how much cooling do I need to provide, the intelligence system is helping you to improve your Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). You do not need to unnecessarily put the entire data centre into 20 degrees Celsius and then at some places you have a hot pocket of 40 degrees and at some places, you are very efficient.

Piyush added, “We have implemented that technology so I’m pretty sure that a lot of other players are implementing similar technology and maybe in next three to four years I anticipate that

in the data centres you may not require the data centre management staff or you may not require the electrician because that part is very easy to automate and the command and control centre would sit at one place and they would just keep on monitoring this.”

With the heat generated there’s a lot of carbon footprint, it’s going to be a battle between data centres and sustainability and where the battle is going?

Nikhil said, “I think the data centres are definitely guzzlers, but we have our automation.

We are partnered with Iron Mountain and Iron Mountain is one of the first companies to sign COP26. Everybody and all our data centre friends also are moving towards the green sustainability targets that have been set globally. In terms of our automation that is all there you have web controls and systems which actually control that to protect energy but you’re also making sure that what you’re consuming has to come in not from fossil fuels but more from green. We do have our limitations in India because of the regulatory over here, which doesn’t allow you to consume more than a limit - I think the max you

FUTURE OF DATA CENTRE

can go up to I think 55 % of using green energy or renewable energy because of generally regulatory uh frameworks and because they want you to consume more coal.”

So as far as the customer is concerned, they should ask their data centre partner to let them know how the sustainability part is taken care of in terms of how the carbon footprint is neutralized. There are even talks about using hydrogen - based fuel to run the data centre. But yes, we have got solar, wind, etc., as long as the regulatory framework opens up in India, everybody will move towards that.

Equinix is also hundred % committed to the extent that it uses renewable power to the extent possible and has already set a target for the company. Manoj said, “We are the leaders in some of the markets. In India, we have some way to go but then sustainability is in two parts - one is trying to ensure that we use more and more of renewable power but at the same time try to consume less power. For that both customers and data centre service providers need to go hand in hand. The customers need to stop asking for 24 degree whereas today 27 degree standard is very much acceptable. They should start agreeing for 27 degrees. The hardware vendors need to build equipment which can sustain 27 even 28 - 29 degree.

He added, “I don’t think it’s too much of rocket science or it needs too much of extra effort to make it so durable; then each degree brings in another 10 % of efficiency. So that is one area where we all need to work together. Second is of course time to see how much energy we can get from renewable power. India from that perspective is pretty well placed. We have already around 100 gigawatt of renewable power going to 200 next few years of course the government has a target of getting 450 gigawatt of renewed power and the data centre industry is only going to need one and a half or two gigawatt by 2024. It is just a fraction of the total solar or renewable power that we have in the country.”

So India is very well placed and that goes again to say that India can become a hub only also on this point but what is also more important is the whole feeling that we are data guzzlers that we are power gas the data centres but we should be telling back to the whole society that we are enabling you to save diesels and petrol. Manoj maintained, “We as data centre service provider need to educate the whole ecosystem around us or the social fabric around us that don’t see us enemies, don’t go out with placards that stop data centres, they are overusing the energy.”

B. S Rao said, “As data centre companies, we are powering the economies, we are powering the lives of students, lives of patients and what not

NIKHIL RATHI FOUNDER & CEO WEB WERKS

“It is like a snowball effect.

Interconnection drives more lower latency, improves application, improves consumption, and increases data centres.”

in the world so I think data centres are the great initiatives against its perception. But yes, from energy perspective there is a challenge.”

Speaking about the trends in energy efficiency because there is a growing density per rack, Paresh said, “Data centres are going in strength.

Though they are power guzzlers at the same time Data centres are saving a lot of power, otherwise on-premises data centres would have done a lot.

Energy efficiency: as we say that basically energy conservation or energy efficiency becomes extremely important and we at CtrlS are putting a lot of focus towards it. Energy efficiency in data centre is measured in PUE, which is total core compute power versus the total power that we use. So, whereas the core currently is about 36% and the cooling is taking almost 50 % and the rest of things are taking another 15 - 16 %. So, how do we make sure that the PUE is coming closer to one.”

In fact, CtrlS has got almost 80 innovations on energy efficiencies. The company has brought it close to almost 1.35 which is industry’s best and thy are using energy efficient equipments, which are energy star certified. Starting from creating optimized the C racks for air conditioning to

optimizing the chiller plants by making hot and cool island containment zones, the company has invested a lot. The other one is motion sensors are being set so that the light is not being used as per requirement. All the lights are generally LED lights. So, a lot of optimizations in anywhere, which CtrlS can do is doing. The company follows around 20 - 30 things to make sure the PUE is reduced to the lowest and still work is going on. Paresh maintained, “It is a continuous process because whatever energy we save we are contributing back” Piyush said, “We need to think of the future. I have read some policies, which have come out from one of the states in India and they have started thinking of the future.

They know that the data centres will require a lot of power in the future. They are allowing data centres to enter into contracts directly with power generation companies like those who are into solar power generation, green renewed power, etc. We can go directly into a contract with them and the state would hardly charge a nominal fee for the transmission through their discoms. Most of the states in India will charge you three to four rupees for transportation of the power. That way, the data centres are not able to directly enter a JANUARY 2022

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contract with solar power generators. Same is with any other, whether it is wind power or any other source. So, we actually need to come up together and put pressure on the government that looking at the 100 gigawatts of power requirement of the data centre, you should not start hating the data centre.”

As per him there are data centres in Bangalore, which are very close to the lakes and data centres in Mumbai, which are very close to the sea or very close to the lake and the heat exchange of the data centres can happen with the water bodies. He added, “In Nasik we are doing that. We have seven lakh litres of water in our campus. We exchange the heat of the data centre with the water body.

During the daytime, the temperature of that water body will not even increase by 1 degree Celsius and during night-time, it exchanges that heat with the sky, which is at minus 22 degree Celsius.

So all the heat which the water body stores during the day time is actually given back to the space at the night time. Through that itself the data centres can achieve 20 - 25 % of efficiency in their power consumption which is required for cooling.”

There can be many other methods also. One of the places in Maharashtra what they are doing is during is in night-time, they are actually lifting water because government of India has got surplus power at the night - time and daytime they are generating power through the hydropower station. So, something similar can be done when we are surplus with solar power to lift water in the lakes.

We have a lot of cloud players and social media players consuming a lot of data. The future is all about how we can minimize latency and make sure that the data is accessed in a quick manner.

Are we moving towards hyperscale data centres, do interconnects have a role to play?

To this Nikhil said, “Yes, we are moving towards hyperscalers. We had the five Horsemen which were consuming most of the hyperscale capacity.

But what we’re seeing is even cloud repatriation happening and some of our enterprises and BFSI segment customers are also poised to become hyperscale capable customers as well. We are going to see that as a boom and because of that interconnection is the key to all of this. Data centre is built on multiple pillars which is five mains – land, building, cooling, manpower and the most important part – connectivity. If you don’t have connectivity what’s the data in the data centre doing there. So, interconnection plays an extremely important role. What we see happening is multiple IXes have come in. And these IXes have grown a lot of data peering, and other things have reduced latency. We’ve seen a few exchanges in in our facility as well and the others as well.

What is that going to do is to reduce latency to 62 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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one hop away. So the application is a hop away from the other place, which is going to be working on that application or what that data exchange is going to actually happen.”

With that idea there’s going to be hyperscale and then the hyperscale guys including enterprises who are moving towards the hyperscale as well them working with another enterprise require the lower the latency the better. Nikhil maintained, “In terms of hyper scale, the interconnection definitely does play a big role and I see interconnection basically becoming more and more pervasive. Along with the enterprises, we already have government probably connecting in, so with all of that the latency reduces.” It is like a snowball effect. Interconnection drives more lower latency, improves application, improves consumption and increases data centres. So, it is snowball after snowball effect and hyperscalers are on top of that and it is an avalanche after that.

Paresh maintained, “Absolutely, we’ve seen that in the connections and hyperscale is going to become the key moving forward and the entire acceleration started during the pandemic with all the on-premises data centre moving towards the centralized data centres. Initially the data centres were trying to be modular, trying to become few megawatts of data centres. But once you get into the hyperscalers you get the advantage of real estate, power and you bring in a lot of efficiencies, which you can pass to the customer. It is basically a wholesale versus a retail kind of a thing and the entire ecosystem is developing.”

So, the hyperscalers are going to be the key and India is going to become from a 7 billion to a 14 billion market size with coverage area of a 7.5 million to 15 million square feet. Once this kind of growth is coming in, it’s going to be the hyperscale to play a key role. This has happened in multiple countries – be it in Thailand, Vietnam, etc. We have seen they started off with small megawatts of data centres but then they grew up with the kind of demand growing in. And in India, the way government is supporting, and the way digital transformation is going to take off, the data is going to be very high and you have to have big scale to provide to the consumers of India – be it government or the enterprises.

There is some billion dollar on-premise data centres are still there in India and they’re likely to move to the hyperscale so whether the interconnects and the hyperscale data centres be the reality?

Manoj added, “Specially in Equinix we have 10,000 enterprise customers across the globe in our 233 data centres. We see the interconnect with each other and with the carriers in a big way, which is not so much happening in India but we believe it is soon going to happen. Today,

for instance the bank – the HDFC bank, they connect to maybe one or two or three carriers.

Everybody has to connect to them through those two or three carriers. Very soon you would like to see them connect to the internet exchange so that they have the redundancy but at the same time suppose you are working from home and you are connected to a cable operator, you go a single hop and connect to the HDFC server rather than going through a lot many. Similarly, businesses need to interconnect with each other. Today if you go to Flipkart and do something then it has to push you back to a bank side and the back side and push you back and if you are buying something from Zomato, Zomato has to connect to the restaurant and find out what is available then come back to you take you to a bank site.”

He concluded, “Enterprises need to connect with each other also and that is what we are seeing across the world where our 10 000 customers who are on our platform depend on the Equinix platform to interconnect with each other so that they can be more efficient more flexible and that is what is going to happen in India also.”

We have not seen the internet and the interconnection being leveraged by enterprises and the government and that is going to fuel further growth within data centres and when enterprises go to select a data centre, they’re not going to know whether you have cooling, whether you’re Tier-4, etc., they will only ask for if a data centre can connect with multiple cloud service providers at the flick of a button and if they can go on to the internet and upgrade interconnection to the cloud from one gig to ten gig in a matter of few minutes.

Finally, B.S Rao, concluded, “India is going to go to the Edge computing, all the customers would find edge data centre in Tier -2 and Tier-3 cities. Will India become the global data centre hub, perhaps in the long run yes but in the short term we will become a regional hub. Third we will get robotized and intelligent data centres bringing efficiencies to the customer. We will be nice to the planet how sustainable will we be? I think green data centres is the future. Energy efficiency is the key aspect and interconnects play a very important role to make sure customers have a good experience while they work on an application.

Hyper scale data centres is the necessity.

AKAMAI // TECH PREDICTION 2022

AKAMAI RESEARCH REVEALS EXTENSIVE GLOBAL PIRACY DEMAND, INDUSTRY AND REGIONAL TRENDS

STEVE RAGAN THREAT RESEARCH AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES

Akamai Technologies, the world’s most trusted solution for protecting and delivering digital experiences, released today new research detailing the persistence of online piracy. “Pirates in the Outfield” is Akamai’s latest State of the Internet / Security report and examines the evolving piracy landscape, which, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center, costs the U.S. economy alone $29.2 billion in lost revenue each year. The new report is a collaboration between Akamai and MUSO, which provided data on streaming and download piracy activity across several industries.

The research illustrates how online piracy continues to be prevalent across, and financially detrimental to, a variety of industries. Between January and September 2021, global piracy demand — measured by visits to websites offering access to movies and television shows, either

directly through a browser or mobile application, as well as torrent downloads — reached 3.7 billion unlicensed streams and downloads. According to the research, 61.5% of consumers who visited piracy sites accessed them directly, while 28.6% actively searched for them.

Steve Ragan, security researcher at Akamai and author of the report, said, “Piracy is an ongoing battle, and there’s no silver bullet to address each type of piracy online. As content developers get better at guarding against piracy, criminals are adapting their methods to access protected content,” “The impact of piracy goes far beyond stolen movies and other content. The real cost is behind the scenes, leading to the loss of livelihood for those who work to create the movies, films, books, and software we all consume and enjoy.”

Breaking down piracy trends

In addition to the unrelenting demand for pirated materials, the report revealed several other notable takeaways, including: l A total of 132 billion visits to piracy websites occurred between January 2021 and September 2021 l The top pirated industries were television (67 billion total visits), publishing (30 billion total visits), film (14.5 billion total visits), music (10.8 billion total visits) and software, which includes video games and modern PC software (8.9 billion total visits) l Globally, the United States (13.5 billion), followed by Russia (7.2 billion), India (6.5 billion), China (5.9 billion), and Brazil (4.5 billion), were the top five locations for piracy website visits last year James Mason, CTO of MUSO, said, “When examining piracy globally and across the film, TV, software, publishing, and music industries, the vast scale of piracy is clear. Perhaps more concerningly, in many areas, piracy is still a growing problem, with an overall 16% increase on the previous nine-month period,” “As highlighted by our partnering with Akamai on this report, working collaboratively to deeply understand the latest trends within piracy’s ever-changing ecosystem is key to forming effective anti-piracy strategies, as opposed to combating piracy in silos.”

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // EQUINIX

MILIND WAGLE CIO EQUINIX

4 DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE PREDICTIONS DEFINING THE NEXT DECADE

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

How hybrid multicloud, AI/ML, security, sustainability will impact the digital landscape Today’s CIOs—from all types of companies—are on an accelerated digital transformation journey.

They realize their ability to dynamically deploy and consume the right digital infrastructure, securely and sustainably, will be the primary basis of competitive advantage in the future. According to IDC, by 2023, digital infrastructure will be the underlying platform for all IT and business automation initiatives anywhere and everywhere.

Such a platform needs to enable the frictionless exchange of data and operations across ecosystems from edge to core.

As we collaborate with our more than 10,000 enterprise customers and partners around the globe to drive their digital infrastructure strategies, we see trends unfolding that will render the bespoke nature of deploying and consuming IT extinct within just a few years. Driven by the requirement for agile, automated, as a Service digital infrastructure that’s software-defined and self-operating, DevOps engineers will be taking the lead in delivering new on-demand IT services and applications.

Hybrid multicloud will become the predominant architecture in application modernization and infrastructure service delivery, giving rise to new complexity challenges that require more programmable infrastructure, transparent asset management and cost predictability. In the next five years, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) will increase in sophistication as enterprises demand infrastructure and applications that are operationally self-resilient. This shift will reduce the reliance on human involvement and leverage greater machine processing power that enables environments to autonomously anticipate and dynamically adapt to changing resource demands.

In this new world, security will no longer be an afterthought, as enterprises will assume that digital infrastructure services are secure by design and configurable through software. Sustainability 64 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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is now an expectation for every business. It will be a core, non-negotiable measure of business success as companies and their supply chain partners universally commit to a net-zero carbon footprint for every facility, product and service development.

Given this dynamic digital transformation landscape, our 2022 predictions dig deeper into the prevailing drivers that will accelerate and power digital infrastructure deployment and consumption over the next decade. Read on to hear from some of our leaders in regards to what businesses should consider as they set their organizations up to compete in an increasingly digital future.

Prediction #1: Overcoming hybrid multicloud complexity will dictate digital-first success By 2023, 40% of the Forbes Global 2000 will reset their cloud selection processes to focus on business outcomes rather than IT requirements. One of the biggest challenges for IT in this transition will be supporting the organization’s business strategy via hybrid multicloud, while managing increased complexity. Over the next decade, hybrid multicloud will play a prominent role in determining how organizations advance their digital-first strategies and consume IT Infrastructure as a Service. Digital leaders who overcome cloud, data and ecosystem complexity through automation, AI/ML, APIs and edge services will gain a significant competitive edge.

• Cloud automation will accelerate digital infrastructure consumption Hybrid multicloud complexity is increasing as the lines blur between private and public cloud and on-premises workloads. Cloud automation that leverages AI/ML-enabled cloud services will significantly reduce the management overhead and costs of public cloud infrastructure and operations. Cloud automation will also improve

critical functions such as DevOps for application modernization and security for risk detection across hybrid multicloud architectures—accelerating labor-intensive functions for greater optimization.

Implications: Cloud automation will simplify creating and configuring cloud computing assets and streamline complex billing and ordering systems across multiple cloud platforms. More importantly, reaction-driven automation systems will be able to detect when it’s time to allocate and deallocate dynamic resources as demand increases or decreases, eliminating the legacy processes that make this a more complex and time-consuming operation. Ultimately, emerging platforms and tools in cloud automation will significantly advance digital infrastructure development, management, consumption and security, as everything will be software-defined.

• Connected cloud ecosystems will ramp up infrastructure agility Going forward, hybrid multicloud will become a team sport. Working with an interconnected ecosystem of diverse cloud service providers will help unlock advanced use cases and new sources of business value. To keep hybrid multicloud environments functioning as a coherent whole rather than a series of disjointed pieces, enterprises will need to democratize cloud access and leverage AI/ML to move workloads between clouds dynamically. Cloud-native companies will also be switching sides as they come out of the cloud into on-premises infrastructure for greater performance and scalability, giving enterprises more hybrid cloud choice.

Implications: To hit the sweet spot of capitalizing on hybrid multicloud value while mitigating complexity and cost, enterprises will use ecosystem partnerships in new and innovative ways, driving greater cloud repatriation. The need to move workloads out of the cloud to on-premises infrastructure will drive enterprises to leverage

EQUINIX // TECH PREDICTION 2022

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TECH PREDICTION 2022 // EQUINIX

Bare Metal as a Service and Edge as a Service offerings in a cloud-adjacent architecture to improve infrastructure agility, reduce data egress costs, and increase data protection and privacy.

In a vendor-neutral ecosystem, enterprises can use public clouds as an extension of their private infrastructure and vice versa, creating the infrastructure agility to maximize the value of both.

Open source tools such as Kubernetes, containers and microservices will continue to play a critical role in these workload migrations, while APIs will help enterprises templatize and automate the deployment of migration circuits.

Prediction #2: AI/ML at the edge will power 5G and IoT Data at the edge is exploding as 5G and IoT technologies flourish, driving a global edge computing market that’s projected to reach $43.4 billion by 2027. Information from autonomous vehicles, drones, surveillance cameras and medical IoT devices will require real-time AI/ML model inferencing at the edge. Over the next decade, AI/ML will become pervasive in every aspect of human life: AI-powered robots will provide services from growing and transporting food, to delivering groceries, to cooking. Advances will be made in the arena of legal/public policies to better address the ethics of AI/ML with respect to fairness, explainability and privacy protection.

• Data control and governance needs will give rise to AI marketplaces Organizations will increasingly need to leverage external data (i.e., from public clouds, data brokers, IoT devices) to build more accurate AI/ ML models. However, data providers have been hesitant to share raw data that might get used for unauthorized purposes by the consumers.

Similarly, data consumers are concerned about the lineage of the data and models (in transfer learning scenarios) that they are getting from external sources for security, bias and quality reasons.

Implications: Enterprises will leverage AI marketplaces to trade data and algorithms between multiple parties in a safe and privacypreserving manner in order to maintain the chain of custody. AI marketplaces will be blockchain-enabled to help consumers keep track of the lineage of data and AI models. They will also provide secure enclaves at neutral locations, where raw data never leaves the enclave, helping providers to keep control over their data.

• Federated and wafer-scale AI will enable next-generation AI scalability As data generated at the edge multiplies, it becomes less cost-effective and performant to move it to a centralized location for processing. It’s also critical that data remains within an organiza66 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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tion’s/country’s security perimeter for privacy and compliance. Over the next five years, data gravity, latency and privacy will shift AI architectures from a centralized model to a distributed one, making distributed AI orchestrators and control planes the norm.

Increasingly, AI is being used to solve more complex problems that are using datasets that are 1000x larger than those from two years ago and require about 1000x more powerful computing power.

Implications: We are entering the era of federated AI/ML, where model training happens in a decentralized system of distributed computational devices at the edge, with organizations shipping algorithms to the edge instead of sending raw data to a centralized location. Models are trained at the edge and only model weights are then sent to an aggregation location to build a global AI model , thereby reducing cost and latency and preserving data privacy.

Over the next five years, more powerful AI model training hardware solutions will emerge that are much denser—hundreds of thousands of cores on a wafer to handle the training needs of these complex AI problems. This next-generation AI training hardware will consume 40KW+ of power per rack, which will require liquid cooling.

Furthermore, problem-specific ASIC/FPGAbased solutions will emerge for AI inferencing that will be more power efficient and provide better AI inference throughput.

Prediction #3: New trust models will top the cybersecurity agenda Cyberattacks are increasing sharply as the global pandemic continues, leading to a predicted cost of more than $6 trillion globally in 2021 and $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Despite the risks, companies will continue to embrace cloud services and extend traditional network boundaries to employees and partners that are essential to building digital advantage. As companies pursue their digital business models, cybercriminals continue to outpace the industry with their sophisticated attacks. Technology leaders must help their companies navigate today’s threats and balance the risks as they anticipate and stay ahead of what’s next.

• Converged security and zero trust will increase the difficulty and cost to attackers Many organizations still manage security from within siloed functions and do not share the same principles and architecture necessary to help drive greater visibility and control. Breaking down silos and establishing converged cybersecurity environments will be a top priority for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) as organizations extend their digital footprint. With cloud

and edge deployments, increased operational technology footprints, as well as a distributed workforce, CISOs will prioritize viewing their business as attackers do, a converged physical and digital threatscape.

Implications: Security will become everyone’s job; however, CISOs will lead the charge, deploying zero-trust environments that integrate IT, OT and all digital visibility and control. Expect to see businesses and cloud providers strengthen forces to design shared responsibility frameworks and implement solutions that deliver continuous compliance, trust and transparency. Given that every company is now a software company, applying DevSecOps models and secure software development life cycles (SSDLC) will ensure automated security throughout the development process.

• Governments will take a more active role in cyberattack offensive measures Governments increasingly recognize cyberattacks and ransomware demands as national threats.

Given rising attacks on infrastructure and other critical sectors, governments are increasing their involvement to help the industry combat security breaches. While increased government involvement and collaboration with businesses have the potential for good, increased regulation will make it increasingly complex for companies to operate.

Implications: Governments will impose new regulations on companies—including increased disclosure of attacks and notice of breaches—mandating more information sharing and introducing new certification requirements, like the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) in the United States. Given the complexities of evolving government regulations and cybersecurity laws, governments will require companies to include greater security expertise on their Board of Directors similar to what they have for finance expertise.

Prediction #4: Businesses worldwide will move to net-zero Green initiatives are now foundational for success in public and private organizations worldwide. In his 2021 Letter to CEOs, Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of asset management firm BlackRock, represents investors’ commitment to a sustainable future: “The world is moving to net-zero, and BlackRock believes that our clients are best served by being at the forefront of that transition.”

Sustainability is driving innovation in digital infrastructure that extends from business policies and operations to end-to-end supply chains.

To access the complete article log on to: www.enterpriseitworld.com

HPE // TECH PREDICTION 2022

HPE TECH PREDICTION 2022 TOM BLACK SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL, MANAGER, HPE STORAGE

On big lessons from 2021: “As the pandemic continues, one thing that became clear in 2021 is that we need to prepare for a partially virtual world forever. The last year and a half has been challenging for everyone – a period of rapid digital transformation accelerated by a global pandemic. However, I’ve been proud of our teams’ ability to persevere and adapt to a hybrid workplace. Moving into 2022, we’re looking to create more compelling virtual and hybrid experiences to reach our customers and engage

our employees.”

Growth sectors in 2022: “Everything is going digital, and it is all about data. The power of data and data analytics will become even more important and ubiquitous to provide customers and partners precious insights. Especially at the edge, where data is being generated faster than it can be acted upon. An intelligent IT infrastructure that can harness and manage data to gain insights is critical for businesses moving into 2022.”

GEORGE HOPE WORLDWIDE HEAD OF PARTNER SALES, HPE

Emerging business models will be hybrid: “In 2022, companies will increasingly embrace new business models, and so will our partners.

Customer outcomes will become the main business drivers. Agility

and flexibility will be the key differentiators, and partners will become business enablers. Thriving partners will act as trusted advisors to their customers enabling them to get all the benefits of the emerging XaaS model wherever they want and need their apps and data to be. It’s about choice. We are seeing an emerging trend of partners who take advantage of the opportunities presented by XaaS launching their own hybrid cloud offerings. Organizations are looking to trusted local partners to provide cloud offerings with the same advantages of agility and scale offered by hyperscalers. Locally managed clouds offer the familiar, personalised experience customers expect from channel partners, as well as compliance with security, governance and regulatory factors. As partners accelerate their own transformation, they have options, too.

Thanks to technological advances and a new approach, now also HPE Solution Provider Partners who have not developed their own managed services yet can launch hybrid cloud offerings with limited upfront investment, and scale these services according to demand. Leveraging these white-labelled cloud services and our network of service providers across the globe, all partners can offer their own branded cloud solution and retain the customer relationship end-to-end. Our partners can take advantage of collaboration opportunities with other members of our ecosystem to develop complimentary offerings and unlock better outcomes for our shared customers. In the coming years, this decentralized and hybrid approach leveraging ecosystems is likely to be a dominant trend, with data sovereignty, security and compliance as some of the key drivers.”

DR. ENG LIM GOH SR. VICE PRESIDENT AND CTO FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

“Data that is collected, processed and managed at the edge is expected to grow to more than 50% by 2023, according to Gartner. Edge-driven data helps make decisions faster, leading to better experiences and outcomes.

By sharing learnings from one organization to another, various industries can unite and further improve intelligence that can have a tremendous impact for the greater good. However, because most organizations have to meet regulatory and compliance requirements, mandating that data stay at its location, sharing insights externally can raise a challenge.

To address this, we predict that swarm learning technology, a decentralized machine learning framework that enables organizations to use distributed data to build machine learning models, will gain adoption

as it allows for only the learnings captured from edge data to be shared rather than the data itself through blockchain technology. Having this capability to learn in an equitable way, while gaining data governance, is critical to industries that handle sensitive data. For example, in hospitals, learnings derived from imaging records, CT and MRI scans, gene expression data, and more, can be shared from one hospital to another to improve diagnostics of diseases and other ailments, while protecting patient information and preventing biases to occur.

Taking a swarm learning approach can also deliver great benefits to other industries, such as the banking and financial services sector, where organizations can fight the annual credit card fraud of $35 billion by sharing fraud-related learnings privately.”

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CASE STUDY // MATRIX

HINDUJA HOSPITAL STRENGTHENS ITS SECURITY AND INCREASES EVERYDAY EFFICIENCY WITH MATRIX VIDEO SURVEILLANCE SOLUTION Company Introduction Hinduja hospital is an ultramodern, multispecialty tertiary care hospital with a Medical Research Centre (MRC) in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston, USA. The hospital has an inpatient capacity of 342 beds, inclusive of 53 critical care beds in different specialties. As a tertiary care hospital, the services offered are comprehensive, covering investigation and diagnosis to therapy, surgery and post-operative care. The inpatient services are complemented with a day centre, out-patient facilities and an exclusive centre for health check for executives.

Hinduja hospital was the first multi-disciplinary tertiary care hospital to have been awarded the prestigious ISO 9002 certification from KEMA of Netherlands for Quality Management System.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Challenges • Hinduja had been using video surveillance systems of Axis brand. They wanted to upgrade to the latest technology surveillance solution, without having to replace the existing cameras to protect their investments.

• For centrally monitoring multiple cameras from different devices, their existing system used a dedicated server.

• Managing this server was complex and hence they required a solution, which could eliminate the need of this dedicated server.

• They wanted to store camera recordings of three months as evidential proof in case of an investigation and audit. Their existing system consumed high storage costs for this.

Products and Solutions Offered No manufacturer was able to integrate Axis camera models that were being used by Hinduja.

Matrix, with the help of its intensive R&D team, successfully added all of Hinduja’s existing Axis cameras to Matrix NVRs. Cascading feature of Matrix NVRs helped them to connect all NVRs in a master-slave architecture. This gave the benefit of centrally monitoring all 73 cameras from different NVRs, without any server.

In order to address their storage requirement, Matrix provided features like Adaptive Recording and Camera-wise Recording Retention, which 68 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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helped in reducing storage requirement by 50% without compromising on video quality. With the help of this, Hinduja hospital stored camera recordings for three months without investing in additional storage drives.

Matrix authorized channel partner, Procom Solutions, provided efficient post-sales support with the help of their trained manpower.

Investments • Elimination of Dedicated Server • Ease of Centralized Management and Monitoring • Reduction in Storage Cost by 50% • Greater Security and Employee Discipline

Results • Successful Upgrade to Latest Technology Solution without Scrapping Previous

TO KNOW MORE VISIT: https://www.matrixvideosurveillance.com/ case-study/hinduja-hospital.html

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