January Issue 2023

2023 - A YEAR OF DIGITAL THRUST

Hello Friends.

Happy New Year 2023 to you all. May this year bring happiness to you in terms of your achievements that you are looking for. Wish this year becomes a secure year for your organizations too. Last many years we have been talking a lot about digital, cloud, container, agile IT, SaaS, Cyber Security, etc. Is this year – 2023 somehow different from the previous years. Yes this year our objective is to look at all the technologies from an outcome point of view quite maturely where RoI is the first thing. Last many years when we were talking about all these technologies we had certain expectation and now the same thing is not expectation but given. It means all these technologies have created enough use cases and matured also. The management of the organizations have already understood that IT is now a glue to connective the entire organization – starting from production to compliance to perception to yielding market. There is not a single organization within the large organization that IT is not needed or adding positive value. With IT on the core and with it from the side are two different outcomes.

With 2023 coming, there is no abatement of geopolitical stress. Ukraine and Russia war has not ended yet. China has not been able to change the covid situation. Supply chain has not been streamlined, etc. Many of the Middle East countries are engaged in verbal skirmish. Given the situation India is not immune from the spill over. Too much focus on stress has pulled down the USA market which is directly connected with the global market growth. It has been impacted so badly that companies have seen laying off workforce to stay profitable. In January 2023 only 37549 people have been laid off, which takes 74,930 in Q4’22 only. Big names in the spree of laying off people are Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Coinbase, and Amdocs, etc.

However, India is some how immune from this as it has a huge domestic consumer market. It is not so dependent on the external economy. However, large IT companies certainly are but their contribution to the GDP is not more than 3-4 %. So, the impact on Indian economy is not going to be that great.

Having said that the thrust this time is also going to be on Cyber Security more that anything. Secondly, reskilling of people in order to adapt to agile IT environment. Cloud native and SaaS are other focus areas too in order to make the IT democratised. Along with this, CIOs focus would definitely be more on compliance this time as organizations would be falling into the groove of globalization. As our government is believing in the concept of cooperation and accountability with other countries, organizations need to fall into the frame work would also be focussing more on governance. Having said this, companies in India would certainly take up ESG goals along with companies of other countries too. Their investment on IT would surely be influenced by their ESG goal too. Once again Happy New Year 2023.

SANJAY MOHAPATRA SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

SUPPLEMENT QUOTES FROM TOP CIOS

PLUS Interviews and Case Studies

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.

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.

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ITWORLD ROUND UP

Sophos Intercept X Detects and Stops Real-World Cyberattacks and Simulated Targeted Attacks with 100% Accuracy in SE Labs Tests

Sophos has announced that Sophos’ Intercept X endpoint security detected and stopped commodity, real-world cyberattacks and simulated targeted attacks with 100% accuracy in SE Labs’ enterprise, small and medium-sized business and consumer tests. Sophos earned three AAA awards for having perfect scores in every test conducted, including blocking malicious URLs, handling exploits and correctly classifying legitimate applications and websites.

Simon Reed, senior vice president of SophosLabs, said, “SE Labs is one of the few security testers in the industry that simulates modern-day attack tools and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that cybercriminals and pentesters are actively using, and

this includes malware and targeted threats that Sophos consistently defeated early in the attack chain with 100% accuracy,” “As a result, Sophos won all three of SE Labs’ AAA awards, further solidifying its leadership position as an endpoint provider. These top award wins showcase our ability to stop complex attacks that use a variety and combination of techniques, tools and objectives.”

SE Labs also tested products, including Sophos Intercept X, for later-stage defense capabilities like behavioral, memory and anti-malware scan interface (AMSI) detections, as well as protections against “impact on objectives” behavior, such as ransomware file encryption.

Today, 61% of organizations say they are shifting more workloads to the edge because of latency and application performance needs.

Source: Gartner

Futurex, a leader in enterprise-class data security solutions, unveiled its top data security predictions for 2023 and beyond. The predictions investigate emerging trends in cryptography that lie at the heart of network protection innovations and developing issues as more devices and infrastructure connect to the web.

“The demand for data security solutions is at an all-time high. Never before has the world seen the large-scale deployment of these solutions across enterprises,” said Adam Cason, Vice President, Global and Strategic Alliances at Futurex. “With the evolving data security landscape, there is a critical need for solution providers to produce breakthrough innovations that meet the cybersecurity needs of clients and allow them to focus on their key business. This requires an understanding of what has changed, followed by a review of how to respond to that change.”

The top data security predictions for 2023 and beyond are:

● Cloud adoption to increase

An organization seeking to migrate its workloads to the cloud has to find a cloud service provider that meets their cryptographic requirements and complies with data localization policy. However, not many cloud services have met these criteria. This partially explains India’s historical rate of cloud adoption, which sees larger organizations migrate slower and less often compared with smaller organizations like fintechs. This is starting to change, however. With organizations like Futurex establishing data centers in India and providing comprehensive cryptographic services through their cloud platforms, organizations of all sizes are being presented with better options for migrating to the cloud and staying compliant.

● Remote key loading (RKL): a soughtafter use case

Point of sale (POS) solutions, such as those used by merchants to process customer payments, are secured with encryption keys.

Yotta Data Services has partnered with Melbourne-based Hardcat Pty Ltd to launch its enterprise asset management platform, Hardcat Lebosi, in India. With this partnership, Hardcat will leverage Yotta’s infrastructure platforms and service delivery capabilities to help a broad segment of enterprise and government organisations with simplified management of their complex high-value asset footprint throughout its lifecycle.

Sunil Gupta, Co-founder & CEO, Yotta Data Services, said, “Yotta is driven by its objective of taking complexities out of enterprises’ growth journey. We do this by harnessing the power of partnerships and co-creation. Enterprises with a vast and complex physical asset footprint need a digital platform that helps them effortlessly manage the entire lifecycle of their assets. With our synergies with Hardcat, a pioneer in enterprise asset management solutions, we aim to eliminate the pain points of organisations from segments that tend to be challenged with a lack of visibility, control, and lifecycle management of their high-value assets.

BY: DWTC, DUBAI

PLACE: EMIRATES TOWERS, DUBAI

BY: ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MEA

Web Werks Data Centers receives Great Place to Work Certification

Web Werks has secured a position on the list of one of the best workplaces by the internationally acclaimed “Great Place to Work institute”. This is one of the greatest recognitions that is based on work culture assessment process that combines employee feedback and an analysis on people practices.

More than 10,000 organizations from over 60 countries partner with Great Place to Work to assess, benchmark and plan their workplace culture. The institute’s rigorous and objective methodology has led it to be the “Gold Standard” for defining great workplaces across businesses and government organizations.

Nikhil Rathi, Founder & CEO, Web Werks Data Centers, India, said, “We are very delighted to receive this recognition. Web Werks has been building a high-trust and high-performance work culture in its data centers. Our carrier-neutral data centers

have been designed using global standards. Our data centers provide colocation and cloud services delivered by a skilled team of technical experts”.

Web Werks recognizes their employees as one of the greatest assets to the company. Web Werks also delivers meaningful impact to its clients along with developing policies, plans, remunerations, events thus creating a trustworthy atmosphere, learning and growth and freedom to put forward one’s innovative ideas. This certification propels the culture & brand value of Web Werks in the domestic market and helps establish a phenomenal employer persona.

Web Werks deliver wholesale, retail and hyper-scale colocation facilities via strategically planned Tier 3 data centers in Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Pune, and upcoming new data centers in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai.

BYTE ON

Use of unregistered devices by employees has increased risks around hybrid work: CISCO Survey

“As hybrid work empowers employees to work from anywhere and ensure business continuity for enterprises, the use of unregistered devices by employees to access work platforms is adding new security challenges for organizations in India, as per a new Cisco study. According to a recent Cisco survey, over nine in 10 (95%) respondents in India say their employees are using unregistered devices to log into work platforms. About 82% say their employees spend more than 10% of the day working from these unregistered devices.”

AYKUT BAL, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER OF STORYLY

QUICK

“A modern approach to metadata management will enable information about all data to be consolidated, which allows for a complete view and seamless user experience.”

S/HE SAID IT

SECURITY

MEERA VISWANATHAN LEAD PRODUCT MANAGER FIVETRAN

“An omnichannel experience is one of the best ways to improve the customer experience today.”

Neo4j Hires Twilio Veteran Alyson

Neo4j has announced that Alyson Welch has joined the company’s executive leadership team as its first Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Welch will lead Neo4j’s global field and partner operations, services, and customer success organizations, reporting directly to CEO and Co-Founder Emil Eifrem.

Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j, said, “Alyson’s track record leading sales organizations for success from $100MM to more than $1 billion in revenue comes to us at a time when graph technology is starting to reshape the database market and drive advanced analytics and AI/ ML models and pipelines for better business outcomes,” “Alyson’s expertise is a huge step forward for Neo4j as we

accelerate our customer success and market leadership. We’re so excited to welcome her to our executive team.”

Welch previously led enterprise sales across North America for Twilio, helping grow the company from $300MM to more than $3 billion in five years. Prior to Twilio, she was Global Head of Sales at Zignal Labs, where she built the company’s first revenue organization and grew earnings 3x in 18 months. Before Zignal, she spent 14 years at Akamai as Vice President of Sales, where she was integral in scaling the company from $50M to $1.2B, doubled her division’s revenue, and successfully shifted margin and risk exposure from a declining run rate to a positive (>70 percent) growth margin business.

Persistent Partners with Microsoft to Accelerate Its Growth

Persistent Systems strengthening its ITES 360 relationship with Microsoft by leveraging its cutting-edge technologies to increase agility and power the next phase of its growth. Among the fastest growing Digital Engineering firms, Persistent is investing in a modern tech stack from Microsoft that will cultivate a data-driven mindset, transform business operations, and keep pace with evolving client needs.

Persistent will utilize the Microsoft Viva platform to enhance employee experience, utilizing the advanced analytics baked into the platform. Employees are the Company’s most valuable assets and are essential to delivering best-in-class services. Given the flexible work models brought on by the pandemic, the Viva platform will transform the way Persistent understands and engages with its employees in real-time. The platform will also provide predictive insights by mapping key organizational metrics and give every employee the tools they need to be successful.

In collaboration with Microsoft, Persistent is building an organization-wide modern data fabric using market-leading Microsoft Azure cloud data lake offerings. The solution will drive reliability and speed across Persistent’s business functions and enable Machine Learning-based operational dashboards to visualize and optimize business outcomes.

Giordano Albertazzi Becomes New CEO

Don’t

SELL Make

GLOBAL UPDATE

BY DR. MUKUND

Jidoka Technologies announced Value Added Reseller Agreement with Cybernetics, a robotics-based automation company in Lithuania.

Jidoka’s QC solutions deliver complete automation of visual inspection, which is a highly subjective process. They automate the process of visual quality while increasing consistency and accuracy at high speed, by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. These include deep Learning algorithms, advanced image augmentation techniques, and edge computing for high-speed decision-making on complex problems.

The benefits delivered to manufacturers are immense as they can now digitize the inspection process and leverage the analytics to improve it. On the quality front, Jidoka’s software improves the defect detection rate by 10% to 15% while also bringing down the false positives by as much as 30% to 40%. The ability to perform inspection in real-time by eliminating inspection as

a bottleneck in the supply chain is also an added advantage.

Sekar Udayamurthy, CEO and Co founder of Jidoka Technologies, said, “We are very delighted to announce our reseller partnership with Cybernetics, the robotics-based automation solution provider in Lithuania. We believe they have a precise understanding of the Quality Inspection challenges of manufacturers and can address them. Together, we look forward to delivering customized solutions to maximize value creation on the shop floor while at the same time establishing a strong presence in Europe.”

Giedrė Greblikaitė, Director and CEO of Cybernetics, said, “We have witnessed Jidoka Technologies exhibiting remarkable performance in the automated cognitive inspection space which is of critical relevance to all manufacturing companies.

About The Book

A must-read for all those looking to be successful in selling and negotiating. Selling is a skill. Salespeople must learn to be flexible and focus on skill development rather than making sales a step-by-step process or a tool. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the task, and rigid and scripted interactions are likely to put off the customer.

About the Author

R. Mukund has over 40 years of experience in the areas of production, design, application engineering, sales, product management, business management, and training. Presently, he is director and CEO at Sabre Learning and Skilling Systems (www. sabre-skilling.com).

Tata Elxsi, extends its heartiest congratulations to Tata Motors Limited on crossing a significant milestone of on boarding 500,000 vehicles onto the Connected Vehicle Platform (CVP) that caters to its entire range of Commercial, Passenger and Electric Vehicles.

In early 2019, Tata Motors collaborated with Tata Elxsi to adopt and adapt the TETHER Connected Vehicle Platform (CVP) towards a common standard technology stack to deliver scalability, differentiated features, high performance and expandable to Industry 4.0 to

transform their internal operations.

Tata Motors deployed the TETHER CVP under the brands of Fleet Edge for CV, iRA for PV & Zconnect for EV, which offer features like track and trace, geo-fencing and alerts, driver behaviour monitoring, and fuel efficiency monitoring. In addition, they enable secure and selective access to the platform and relevant data with its wider partner ecosystem, including dealers, and suppliers, to enrich customer experience.

TETHER CVP was built as a modular platform, which can be scaled up to offer a wide range

of solutions with third-party applications through APIs. In addition, it is a 5G-ready platform with capabilities to handle hype scalar traffic, massive FOTA, and digital twin capabilities catering to the SDV roadmap of the OEM.

Fortinet has been named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls, marking the thirteenth time Fortinet has been recognized in this Magic Quadrant. Fortinet placed highest in Ability to Execute and is recognized for its Completeness of Vision in the Magic Quadrant.

Fortinet believes that its placement as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls is a result of its ability to deliver:

● Protection against advanced threats with AI/ML-powered security and accelerated performance with purpose-built ASICS: FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) deliver multiple AI/ML-powered security services, empowering IT to combat advanced cybersecurity threats and avoid business disruptions. Thanks to a unique, purpose-built ASIC architecture, FortiGate NGFWs are engineered to deliver the industry’s best ROI and price-toperformance across essential security services, such as IPS, antivirus, DNS and URL filtering, application control, and more.

DIGEST

GOVERNMENT THREAT LANDSCAPE: INDIAN, CHINESE GOVERNMENTS TOP TARGETS FOR THREAT ACTORS

Data gathered by CloudSEK’s contextual AI digital risk platform XVigil show that the number of attacks targeting the government sector has increased by 95%* in the second half of 2022, as compared to the same period in 2021.

India, USA, Indonesia, and China continued to be the most targeted countries in the past two years. Together these four countries accounted for ~40% of the total reported incidents in the government sector. There are three interesting findings observed in the variations in the number of attacks from 2021 to 2022.

NATIONAL INTERNET EXCHANGE OF INDIA (NIXI) WINS THE PRESTIGIOUS SAFA AWARDS

Dell Technologies has emerged as the leader in India’s x86 mainstream server market as per IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker 2022 Q3. With businesses continuing to adopt a digital-first mindset, India has proven to be one of the key markets contributing to Dell Technologies’ growth in the server category.

“The recognition as a market leader is a testament to our unwavering hold on the pulse of the industry. We are constantly working closely with our customers to understand their business challenges. We believe our customer first approach is one of the reasons why we are seeing a consistent growth path for our server business in India. Businesses are increasingly adopting technologies like cloud computing, virtualization, and big data to cater to their digital transformation journey. To be able to run multiple workloads from the edge to the core to the cloud, they need to deploy advanced servers which can optimize AI/ML and IoT processes for them seamlessly.

Dell Technologies’ portfolio is well positioned to cater to that need,” said Mr. Manish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies India.

The National Internet Exchange of India, a not-for-profit (Section 8) Company, under Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India has been awarded by the South Asian Federation of Accountants (SAFA) as the recipient of ‘Certificate of Merit’ in ‘Communication & Information Technology Sector’. The SAFA BPA Award is considered as the most prestigious accolade for financial reporting in the entire South Asian region.

As announced by the South Asian Federation of Accountants (SAFA), which had 118 nominations from 7 countries, awarded NIXI for the best-presented annual report. This honour was presented in recognition of excellence in presentation and disclosure of high quality, relevant, reliable and objective financial statements in accordance with the establish international framework.

YES BANK has partnered with Microsoft to bring forth a next generation mobile application (app) with a view to provide customers with a personalised banking experience.

YES BANK will leverage Microsoft’s Azure platform to create the app which will offer customers – a host of services such as online payments, shopping, rewards, offers, as well as customized dashboards, in addition to traditional banking functions.

Using a cloud-native approach, the all-new app will run on Microsoft’s enterprise-grade cloud platform, and will support YES BANK in scaling up various services by bringing merchants and ecosystem partners on to a common platform. This will empower the Bank to cater to diverse financial needs of

customers across loans, payments, deposits, investments, cards and more.

Mr. Prashant Kumar, MD & CEO, YES BANK said “We, at YES BANK, have always been in the forefront of leveraging technology to bring forth solutions that provide a differentiated banking experience. Our partnership with Microsoft is a testament to this effort, as we look forward to co-creating a proposition that will offer customers with the benefit of transacting, as well as undertaking a host of other activities on a common platform. We believe, the proposition will bring in the right mix of convenience and flexibility while being within the realms of a highly secured network of both YES BANK and Microsoft.”

EXZOD TO EXPAND WITH NEW MANUFACTURING PLANT IN HYDERABAD

EXZOD India will set up a manufacturing plant in Hyderabad with a vision to serve its clients in Southern India. EXZOD has three other manufacturing units in Punjab, Maharashtra and Haryana equipped with state-of-the-art automatic pallet manufacturing machines.

“We are really proud of this key milestone and are geared up for our fourth company owned pallet manufacturing facility, which would literally make us serve the clients spread across India. With this new plant we would be able to meet the increased demand from the South and our value chain for supplying pallets is complete.

This would make us a dependable company for buying pallets for both large brands and 4PL warehousing players in the country.

Dell Technologies leads the Indian x86 mainstream server market for the fifth consecutive quarter with 43.7% revenue share in Q3 2022

Fortinet Named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls

YES BANK partners with Microsoft to transform mobile banking experience

Four Reasons to Outsource IT

somebody who can manage it. This means knowing that you have an expert who can manage omnichannel IT. Also seniority may not have been something that you’ve considered before, but we’ve got some of the reasons you should go for it below.

2022 Ransomware Attacks and Evolution of Data Exfiltration

Business owners are often swamped with focusing on the core competencies of their business that they often let go of a few balls. The ball of marketing gets dropped, the IT ball gets dropped, and even the ball that comes with managing people gets dropped from time to time. The problem is that while a business leader can put in all of the time and effort, how can they continue to devote themselves to the challenges that face them when they don’t have the time?

One of the best options is to outsource. Outsourcing isn’t for every business owner, but for those who need a helping hand from time to time but they don’t have the budget for a full staff, outsourcing can be a godsend. If the responsibility is too much, then they need to pass it on to

▪ You get a chance to really focus on your business. Most business owners cite their number one goal as their desire to spend much more time focusing on the business rather than focusing on the business. There is a lot of cladding that comes in a business, and a lot of paperwork, and this can all be put by the wayside. Having somebody else manage it for you is a good way to utilize external resources. When these resources are utilized properly, people can focus better on their businesses and where they want their businesses to go.

▪ You save a lot of money. If you don’t have the budget for a full staff, outsourcing is an excellent option. You can reduce your overheads of full-time hiring and training, and you also cut down the money you would normally have spent on benefits that are associated with a bigger head count. You may still require at least one on site person, but having remote options with an outsourced business is actually a better option for you as that can be managed around the clock.

IceWarp inaugurates a new office in Mumbai

IceWarp has further solidified its presence in India with the inauguration of a new office in Mumbai to accommodate its growing team on Friday, 23rd December 2022. The 100-member strong India team of IceWarp intends to double its numbers by end of 2023.

Plans to enhance operations in the city were initiated a few months ago by the increased traction seen in sales and operations verticals, warranting for a substantial rise in Marketing, CRM, IT, and other complimentary functions, to support the rapid development. The new office will be IceWarp India’s second workplace in The

Summit Business Bay, Andheri (E). The larger office setup will allow the IceWarp India team to accommodate new resources from all departments, planned to hire in order to address the growing business requirements.

Ransomware is one of the most sophisticated and feared attacks in the modern threat landscape. A specialized form of malware, ransomware is designed to forcibly encrypt a victim’s files. The attacker then demands a payment from the victim in exchange for the decryption key to restore access to the data upon payment. Costs can range from a few hundred dollars to millions, in addition to the disruption suffered while data remained inaccessible. And even if the ransom is paid, there’s no guarantee that the promised key will be provided. The ability of a ransomware attack to render its victim’s data inaccessible makes it a far greater threat than simple data theft—making ransomware protection a top cyber defense priority for every organization.

Notable ransomware attacks of 2022:

In May 2022 President Rodrigo Chaves of Costa Rica declared a national emergency due to Conti ransomware attacking numerous government institutions including the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Science, and the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS).

Pramod Sharda, CEO, IceWarp India, and Middle East said, “It is a tremendously thrilling moment for us at IceWarp as we take another step towards realizing our goals of expanding the company’s footprint in India. We are also grateful to all our local customers and partners who have contributed towards this growth and continue to support us in our ambitious endeavors. Our local,

as well as global teams, are bullish on the expected growth from IceWarp’s operations in the Indian sub-continent and we look forward to serving more and more organizations for enterprise-email collaboration solutions and work-from-anywhere setups. We believe that our office’s expansion in Mumbai will reinforce our commitment towards the region as we look forward to providing seamlessly collaborated Enterprise Email and Collaboration solutions to organizations of all sizes.”

“CIOs are positioned to take charge and lead the way.”

Kevin T. Hart, CEO at Segra and former executive vice president, chief product and technology officer for Cox Communications

Matrix to Present its World Class Security and Telecom Solutions at Intersec, Dubai

Matrix is all set to participate in the 24th Edition of Intersec, happening in Dubai. At this prestigious event, Matrix will put forth its comprehensive range of security products and solutions from the domains of IP Video Surveillance, Access Control, and Time-Attendance. In the domain of Telecom, Matrix will bring forth its business-class communication products and solutions. Matrix invests in technological advancements to resolve customer concerns and prioritize their satisfaction. And, to this end, it deploys assets and resources intensively to research, design, and manufacture world-class solutions. With 30+ years of industrial experience, Matrix boasts of holding 60+ products in its comprehensive range of security and telecom solutions with 1 Million+ customers

globally in 50+ countries.

With proactive video surveillance taking priority for organizational safety and security, Matrix will showcase its superior cameras at this event. With lens resolutions ranging from 2MP/ 5MP/ 8MP, its bullet, dome, turret, and PTZ cameras boast highquality images in low-light operating conditions. With UL Certification, a global standard for safety, and NEMA Certification for protection against environmental hazards, Matrix cameras provide proactive security for organizations with global standards.

Matrix will also showcase its Server-Based NVRs that provide powerful video recording solutions for organizations with massive storage capacities of up to 144 TB. This ensures corporations receive 24x7x365 surveillance.

Pre-Budget Quote – Business World

The Union Budget for 2023-24 is being proposed at a critical moment marked by geopolitical uncertainty, rising inflation, and plummeting global economic development. At this point, targeted actions to boost domestic sources of growth are critical to maintaining the stable economic growth track.

In a continuous pursuit of widening the tax base, the government has introduced a wide gamut of withholding tax provisions over the years, with varied rates and thresholds and overlaps in scope. Thus, there is an urgent need to simplify the withholding tax structure. Further

Redington collaborates with Jakson Group to accelerate adoption of solar solutions and green energy products in South India

Redington Limited announced its partnership with Jakson Group, a leading energy solutions company, to distribute solar panels and green energy products in South India markets of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala. As a part of the partnership, Redington will enable the seamless distribution of Jakson’s high-quality products such as new high-efficiency solar panels and other technologically advanced products in the solar ecosystem.

The partnership also entails a potential of expanding Jakson’s reach to other markets in India, and strengthen Redington’s current portfolio of solar products. The partnership between Redington and Jakson will help to accelerate the mainstream adoption of solar power by businesses as well as consumers.

Pradeep Srikanthan, Business Head of Redington Solar, said, “We at Redington are very excited to join hands with the Jakson Group to fuel wider adoption of solar technologies and green energy products in India. Renewable sources of energy are not only crucial but an absolute necessity for the ecosystem and the environment at large.

simplification, rationalisation, ease of paying taxes, and reducing tax litigation should be key priorities.

Currently, people across industries are working from home. Employees are likely to incur additional “work from home”-related expenses, such as internet charges, rent, power, furniture, and so on, and companies will need to give allowances to cover these costs. Employees who work from home should be granted exemptions under “work from home” allowance.

Given that the Indian economy has begun to recover from the fiscal consequences of

the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the present administration is expected to focus on measures to accelerate job creation and broaden the tax base by rationalising GST and personal income tax slabs to boost consumption.

The external environment is expected to remain unfavourable for some time. As a result, we must broaden our home economy by developing new growth sectors and pushing job creation in order to enhance domestic demand, inclusion, and growth.

FIVETRAN

AUTOMATION, INTEGRATION AND VISIBILITY – THE THREE PILLARS OF MODERN METADATA MANAGEMENT

true. A glance at the numbers highlights why data is worth its weight in gold. India’s online population is expected to increase to 900 million in 2025, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Official figures say that between 2017-2018 to 20212022, the amount of wireless data used by the average consumer in India went from 1.2 gigabytes to 14.1 gigabytes.

Meanwhile, an Ericsson report finds that monthly data consumption is also expected to climb up to 50 gigabytes per smartphone by 2027.

These numbers signal the dynamism of today’s business landscape, and metadata is now critical for organizations to be data-driven. The ability to collect, catalogue, describe, govern access to, and support data discoverability cannot be overstated. However, many businesses lack the tools and an effective strategy to deal with increasing data requests from across the organisation.

While data teams grow and scale infrastructure to respond to these rapidly increasing requests, understanding, controlling and securing what data is entering the system and how that data is being handled can be a challenge.

ing root cause analysis, impact analysis and data audits..

The volume of requests for access to data needed for business critical decisions is massive in data-driven organizations. Due to manual processes in enforcing policy and the lack of visibility into the data’s journey upstream of the warehouse or data lake, businesses find they are incapable of providing timely access to data at scale. Data consumers then turn to “rogue” data sources which potentially compromises the quality of business decision – for example, ensuring finance teams are tracking business health using the *right* revenue number!

BY

MEERA VISWANATHAN LEAD PRODUCT MANAGER, FIVETRAN

“Data is the lifeblood of the organisation” is a phrase often repeated when discussing the realities facing businesses in recent years. While one may groan at the triteness of this statement, it makes it no less

Decision-makers will quickly find that legacy solutions relying on manual management fall short of this task. Even if at first glance it may appear manageable, the need for continuous manual intervention at every stage of the data’s journey will emphatically prove that the traditional approach is unsustainable.

Empowering access via visibility

Instead of highly inefficient manual maintenance, which can’t deal with surging data volumes and complexity, businesses need automated solutions that help understand the data journey from source to consumption for critical business use cases includ-

Remedying this requires enterprise data teams to have full visibility over the data entering their systems (from source to consumption) to ensure access to high quality and trusted data. Data pipelines responsible for moving this data can provide insight into where data came from, who accessed it and what changes have occurred in the pipeline. With this added visibility and context, businesses can also integrate with governance and observability tools, which support data teams – enabling them to understand the context of the data they are accessing and allowing the core data platform team to enforce control over who has access to what data.

Metadata management for modern architectures

For businesses to leverage data governance, they need to enforce policy and take action on governance issues before they cause problems. A manual approach is feasible in smaller organizations. However, as piplines multiply into the thousands, an automated approach that captures data as it moves from source to destination can ensure businesses are equipped to scale access while ensuring compliance without the overhead of manual process.

“For businesses to leverage data governance, they need to enforce policy and take action on governance issues before they cause problem.”

A modern approach to metadata management will enable information about all data to be consolidated, which allows for a complete view and seamless user experience

6D TECHNOLOGIES

THE OUTCOME

FOR ALL CTIO OR CIO IS TO MEET THE DIGITALISATION JOURNEY FOR ALL OUR CUSTOMER

In the year 2022, IT leaders and CIOs have gone through a very though time. If IT leaders thought they might have a year of consolidation and a chance to get a breather, especially after the accelerated digital transformations they led through the worst of the pandemic, then may not be fully correct

2022 proved to a period when they had to do even more to steer their organisations towards effective digital transformation. Boardroom expectations of IT have been reset by the experiences of the previous two years. Gone are the days of forging three-year programs. Today’s IT leaders – whether chief information officers (CIO), chief technology officers (CTO) or chief digital officers (CDO) –have to pursue a cloud-first strategy, supporting hybrid working culture, and catering to the needs of demanding digital-savvy customers who cannot be satisfied with nothing less than the very best online experience.

6D Technologies is one such organization, which has deep expertise in deliver innovative solutions for telecom, fintech, and enterprises. The company follows the vision of delivering smart ideas for a transformational experience with the advantage of future-driven technologies like IoT, AI/ML Ops, Big Data Analytics, 5G, Cloud, and more.

We spoke to Nikhil Paul, CIO, 6D Technologies to understand how was the year 2022 for his company.

What do you see as CIO’s top Priority for 2023?

This year we see the transformation of Telcos from traditional CSP to Digital Service Provider

service delivery platforms, Sales & distribution, and 5G, IoT, and M2M

bar for our team’s continued work on developing disruptive ideas across all the business categories.”

(DSP). As a CTIO the top priority is to lead my team and to continue this transformation journey. It’s also important for us to move from Cloudification of our platforms in Telcos to more of Cloud Rationalisations and cost and usage optimisations. This is a major task which we see for all the CTIO’s to focus as major milestones to achieve

in 2023. It’s also a strategy for all of us to focus and continue our activity towards Security which is still a very demanding need to be achieved. Internally to all our customers and partners we have evolved a Strategy initiative of TAS24 (Technology Accelerate Strategy 2024) which will summarise and focus on all these key areas above.

“The major focus for me from 2022 was to evolve the strategy to help the digitalisation journey for all our customers and partners across the Globe. 6D Technologies develops technologies in the areas of Digital BSS, Customer engagement platforms, Digital financial platforms, digital

connectivity. This accomplishment will undoubtedly establish a new

NIKHIL PAUL CIO, 6D TECHNOLOGIES

The outcome for all CTIO or CIO is to meet the Digitalisation journey for all our customer and partners. At the same time also meet the Economics of Cost and contain expenses for the year 2023 and for future.

How have you helped move business forward?

The major focus for me from 2022 was to evolve the strategy to help the digitalisation journey for all our customers and partners across the Globe. 6D Technologies develops technologies in the areas of Digital BSS, Customer engagement platforms, Digital financial platforms, digital service delivery platforms, Sales & distribution, and 5G, IoT, and M2M connectivity. This accomplishment will undoubtedly establish a new bar for our team’s continued work on developing disruptive ideas across all the business categories. We have evolved a TAS24 strategy which is for focusing on all these areas including rebalance the products ad portfolios and focus on the fundamentals needs

of Cost economics and enabling the business for work from home and hybrid business model to support the DSP journeys.

Where do you see industry heading in

2023?

Coming from Telco Industry we see a major transformation journey of all our customers and partners to DSP evolution. Some of the areas which will be in key focus will be 5G , AI and ML , IOT & M2M. We see a huge influx of requirements where we see a lot of Enterprises moving from the traditional way of doing business to 5G Enterprise areas. This means not just our partners and customers, but internally the IT and Product originations to be matured to handle this demand from both technology and human factors. This is the biggest focus we have in this year 2023 to enable a smooth transition of this journey with best economics considered. As I have stated before as well every CIO or CTIO is not just a technical function anymore we also focus on the

Business bridging to address the best ROI for both our customers and for the organisation.

What are your strategic plans for 2023?

We have a clear strategy plan called TAS24 (Technology Accelerate Strategy 2024) which has been put in action from year 2022 which is a clear roadmap plan till 2024. The key focus on this strategy is to focus on the Cloudification of all our product lines with keeping in track the Cloud Rationalisation and Cost and usage optimisation. This also focus on Ealing our products and Human Resources to enable the journey of Digital transformation of our customers and partners to DSP.

The areas of the TAS24 give very high focus on the human elements of enabling our resources for technological, cultural improvements, sustainability initiatives and enable hybrid work model for adapting them to take these new challenges.

Can you tell about the projects you are embarking upon for 2023?

Our organisation – 6D technologies is focusing on the products and areas of Digital BSS, Customer engagement platforms, Digital financial platforms, Digital service delivery platforms, Sales & distribution, and 5G, IoT, and M2M connectivity. These products are deployed across multiple geographies today connecting humans and delivery social improvement with connectivity. We are also developing these products to meet the DSP journey for our customers and partners. We believe we deliver both ROI and Digital milestones to them in a time to market mode to make them a big success across the globe.

“We have evolved a TAS24 strategy which is for focusing on all these areas including rebalance the products ad portfolios and focus on the fundamentals needs of Cost economics.”

BY SANJAY @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Briefly introduce Cairn Oil & Gas and its operations in India

Cairn Oil & Gas, a vertical of Vedanta Ltd., is the largest independent oil and gas exploration and production company in India. We have expanded our operations steadily over the past two decades and established a pan-India presence across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. Now, we have set a firm goal to double our domestic crude oil production, increase our contribution to 50% and reduce our country’s dependence on imports. For this, we have established clear objectives for operations that can increase efficiency and aid the country’s transition towards achieving energy Aatmanirbharta. Here, especially, digital tools are playing a critical role in streamlining processes and increasing efficiency. Exploration and production have traditionally been rooted in man-machine proximity, and today, Cairn Oil & Gas is leading digital transformation in the sector.

Briefly tell us about the IT infrastructure and resources you are handling. Currently, we are spread across three data centres. The first one is a co-location service that acts as the primary data centre, the second one is for DR purposes, and the third is a captive data centre located at our office premises.

Going forward, we are aggressively pursuing a cloud-first strategy where we prioritize deploying new solutions on the cloud completely and are migrating existing on-premise computing onto the public cloud with a plan to migrate around 80% of workloads onto the cloud. We follow both multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies. From a multi-cloud perspective, we have deployed our workloads on both Azure and AWS. From a hybrid cloud perspective, we plan to move >80% of our workload to the cloud.

The core IT & Innovation team comprises 25 full-time equivalents with a dedicated team focusing on IT operations and ensuring the daily operations are running smoothly. In the Innovation vertical, we are delivering new solutions through digital solutions across the entire value chain. Apart from this, we have outsourced our IT development and maintenance to a technology partner.

What are your learnings from the digital transformation journey?

The key learning for me from the Digital transformation journey is that the benefits come not from implementing new technologies but from transforming your organization to take advantage of the possibilities that new technologies provide. Major digital transformation initiatives are

CAIRN OIL & GAS

DIGITAL SOLUTIONS FOR THE OIL AND GAS SECTOR

centered on re-envisioning customer experience, operational processes, and business models.

It is equally important that before initiating a digital project, one needs to be clear about the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) impacted and the mechanism to track those KPIs postimplementation. Many times, questions are asked about the benefits post-implementation and, hence, this should be clearly defined before a project is initiated

Finally, digital is an evolving area where you need the agility and innovation that a start-up brings. Ensure, you have created an eco-system of start-ups that can quickly help you pilot emerging areas and help you take that product to market early.

What were the challenges for Cairn? Cairn had always believed in Digital and was one of the early adopters of Digital across global Oil and Gas organizations. However, as we pursued our Digital agenda, we faced certain challenges and I want to highlight the top three which we faced.

The first challenge was to reimagine the entire spectrum of activities with innovation in digitalization. Different business units sometimes brought in the same challenges and there was no defined mechanism for capturing the challenges and acting upon them.

The second challenge was to develop the necessary competencies in business, digital, and IT work streams. People who have business knowledge may not understand technology, and vice-versa. Importantly, Digital adoption is only successful when one sees and feels the impact of this technology on their productivity. For that, we

needed a program to educate and enable every person in the organization on key Digital tools.

The third challenge was how do we leverage the start-up ecosystem as they had many innovative solutions and were quick to implement them. Unfortunately, our entire procurement process was long and geared to select big vendors. With a start-up, one needs to alter their historical procurement process to facilitate quick selection and onboarding.

As a CDIO, how did you mitigate those challenges?

First, we accessed Cairn’s current level of digital maturity through a global partner and formulated a digital strategy and vision for standardization of solutions across business units by creating a centre of excellence team to address the gaps. Working closely with all the business teams we identified the business problems by conducting periodic ideation workshops and accessing the business process for improvement. We are benchmarking our parameters with industry leaders against KPI in terms of production uptime and optimization, cost of operation, time to first oil, and productivity increase. New projects are then initiated to improve these KPIs. At Cairn, we carry out quick proof of concepts and later on the scale these PoC across all business units.

Second, to bridge the gap between the business function and technology we are conducting various technology empowerment sessions via our m-power session. These sessions are open to all employees and give an overview of different technologies that have already been deployed in Cairn also giving a glimpse of current trends in industries. We are carrying out Disha Digital

Developing the most advanced technologies is a key business imperative today as India doubles down on its goal of reducing import dependence and achieving energy aatmanirbhart

Hackathons encouraging young leaders to develop and adopt these new technologies to solve their daily issues. We elevated our young and aspirational talent through management act-up programs. Also, we have been actively pursuing digital education through the group’s Project Pratham which is enabling digital literacy and motivating transformation across levels of the organization.

Thirdly, to reduce the lead time for onboarding business partners for deploying solutions, we have launched the Spark program where we encourage startups to take the business challenges and come up with innovative solutions. We have in the first phase of implementation we have an ecosystem of hundred-plus startups and solutions such as drone-based inspections were an outcome of this program.

What projects you have executed and what are there in pipeline?

Cairn has carried out multiple projects impacting the key KPI such as increasing production

volumes, reducing cost and time to first oil, and productivity enhancement by improving ways of working.

Some of the projects for production volumes include Digital Twin for the optimization of plant parameters based on a virtual model of the plant. The digital twin is helping us to simulate real-time plant parameters in an optimized way. Projects like Advanced Process Controls (APCs) where the equipment can be operated in an optimized range following all the real-time constraints.

Currently, we have deployed APCs that helped to increase ~500 bopd.

For lowering the cost of operations and increasing the availability of the plant, we are currently using a Drone-based inspection of the overhead electric transmission line for carrying out predictive maintenance and reducing breakdown. At Cairn, we have scaled projects like predictive control across multiple locations across various business units which are helping us to reduce operation costs by avoiding production losses and increasing our throughput.

We are having a healthy pipeline where we are working on improving ways of working by transforming the traditional way of working. With solutions like robotic process automation, we are automating daily routine work increasing overall productivity, and delivering soft value to employees. Solutions like e-Permit to work will help increase the visibility to managers and execute work orders in a faster and safer way. With, AI-based safety surveillance capturing the hazardous environment and practices can is increased thus reducing the HSE risk and increasing compliance for reducing lost time in injury.

We are also exploring the technologies like Metaverse for remote operations that can help reduce the cost of operations. We are also parallelly exploring advanced use cases of robotics for navigating confined spaces to detect anomalies in equipment.

Cybersecurity has been a critical challenge for the oil & gas sector, how have you ensured safe digital at Cairn? A strong cybersecurity approach is imperative today as we make the digital transformation and work towards combatting undesirable vulnerabilities. The insurance that the connected world depends on is the development of cyber resilience. Cairn is equipped with world class security operation centre to detect suspicious activities and generate alerts when detected. A Security Operations Centre (SOC) analyst in collaboration with the Operations team can analyze the problem and take the necessary steps to eliminate the threat.

“We are aggressively pursuing a cloudfirst strategy where we prioritize deploying new solutions on the cloud completely and are migrating existing on-premise computing onto the public cloud with a plan to migrate around 80% of workloads onto the cloud.”

FINTECH OPENING NEW FRONTIERS IN INDIA GROWTH STORY

Fintech one of the growth pillars for India’s emergence as the third largest economy

The Fintech sector in India is playing a disruptive role enabling the country to reach strategic goals by extending financial inclusion to the underserved sections and facilitating India’s dream to become the third largest economy in the world by 2029.

This is backed by a strong foundation wherein several government initiatives and digital technology penetration have coalesced to facilitate the rise of fintech.

Among this the JAM trinity, comprising Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile, Unified Payment Interface (UPI) system, and other positive regulatory frameworks have accelerated digital innovation amongst traditional banks and fintech.

One of the most enabling factors has been India’s mobile penetration. With an expected growth of approximately 1.1 billion smartphone users by 2026, India is well on its way to becoming a mobile-first economy,

not least of all in the consumption of financial services. Fintech adoption in India is growing at a rapid pace with a growth rate of 87%, digital adoption of financial services is significantly higher than the rest of the world which stands at an average of 64%.

This is having a rippling effect in the overall payment system. In September 2022, payment through UPI had crossed a milestone of Rs 11 lakh crore according to data released by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). According to Reserve Bank of India, the share of cheque payments in total payment systems transactions stood at just 1.7% in 2020 from 7.5% in 2017.

Small wonder, India is becoming the FinTech hub for the world with an estimated market opportunity of $1.3 trillion by 2025 according to Payment Council of India (PCI). With more than 4,200 active start-ups, over 550 fintech start-ups have received funding of $22 billion between 2014 and 2022.

In fact, Bain & Co pegs the investment in

AJAYAN NARAYANAN VP AND HEAD OF DIGITAL BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS, SUNLIFE ASIA SERVICE CENTER

isit the bank to do any of the basic banking services such as taking a loan, doing an investment and transferring money which have undergone transformative changes.”

fintech companies much higher at $19 billion just between 2021 and 2022, resulting in the addition of 18 fintech unicorns. The India Fintech Report 2022 by Bain estimates that fintech currently account for about 7% of India’s $1.4 trillion financial services (FS) Enterprise value (EV) and the sector is expected to grow to $350 billion in EV by 2026, representing nearly 15% of financial services market cap.

Speaking about the disruptive emergence of fintech and the impact on the banking sector,

Ajayan Narayanan VP and Head of Digital Business and Technology Solutions, Sunlife Asia Service Center, says, “Techtonic shifts are happening in the banking industry. So, basic banking services such as taking a loan, doing an investment and transferring money have undergone transformative changes. Visiting the bank is irrelevant and customers do not have to visit the bank to do any of these activities.”

Government Initiatives as a Growth

Enabler

With more than 65% of India’s population living in rural areas with limited or no access to financial services, the Indian government is on an overdrive to facilitate financial inclusion with a host of initiatives. This includes initiatives to boost a digital infrastructure such as digital KYC, video KYC, e-signatures that have transformed India’s digital payment landscape.

The key enabler of India’s transformed digital payment landscape is the JAM Trinity. The Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) is one of the biggest financial inclusion initiatives in the world to provide universal banking services to unbanked households. Aadhaar, the Unique Identification Authority of India’s flagship product, is a simple but effective method to verify individuals and beneficiaries based on biometric information.

One of the major objectives of Digital India is to achieve faceless, paperless and cashless status with the highest priority to bring every segment under the fold of digital payment services. Towards that the government has promoted easy and convenient modes of digital payment such as Bharat Interface for Money-Unified Payments Interface (BHIM-UPI); Immediate Payment Service (IMPS); pre-paid payment instruments (PPIs) and National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) system which have transformed digital payment ecosystem by increasing Person-toPerson (P2P) as well as Person-to-Merchant (P2M) payments. At the same time, pre-existing payment modes such as debit cards, credit cards, National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) and Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) have also grown at a fast pace.

BHIM-UPI has emerged as the preferred payment mode of users. The Government of India also launched the digital payment solution e-RUPI, a cashless and contactless instrument for digital payment to make Direct Benefit Transfer

- In September 2022, payment through UPI had crossed Rs 11 lakh crore, according to National Payments Corporation of India.

- The share of cheque payments in

total payment systems transactions stood at just 1.7% in 2020 from 7.5% in 2017, according to Reserve Bank of India.

- India is becoming the FinTech

hub for the world with an estimated market opportunity of $1.3 trillion by 2025, according to Payment Council of India.

“Techtonic shifts are happening in the banking industry. Visiting the bank is irrelevant and customers do not have to v

(DBT) more effective in digital transactions. Given the size of India’s population and the varying levels of financial services penetration, the RBI has been pushing multiple payment options to cater to different needs of the population.

UPI, an instant payment system, developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application, merging several banking features, seamless fund routing and merchant payments into one hood. Constituting more than 40% of all digital transactions UPI has given a boost to small businesses, street vendors and migrant workers with fast and secure bankto-bank transactions. Money transfer in UPI is possible by simply scanning a QR code. What is revolutionary is that recently UPI has been introduced for feature phones that can potentially connect 400 million users in rural areas.

Much of the financial technology innovation has been riding on the India stack, an open technology based digital identity and payment system. The Government has promoted the stack among traditional public sector banks and fintech companies and the easy integration capabilities have opened possibilities for fintech innovation.

In turn, the fintech and the Indian financial sector have readily embraced advanced technologies including Cloud and data analytics to create a mesh of interconnected network for data driven insights to drive new business opportunities. “Advancement in cloud and data are really equipping organizations to transform and become leaders. We are living in a data decade as everything we do creates data, and if you harness it properly you can provide new CX for the market,” says Ajayan, VP of Sunlife Asia Service Center.

India Talent and Innovation as Growth Driver

The success of the Fintech story is grounded in India’s growth story. A surging population of mil-

lennials, a large segment of unbanked population, huge talent pool, adoption of modern technology, favorable regulatory regime and an investor community that believes in India’s growth story.

Fintech in India are able to innovate and bring new products to market at speed and scale by tapping into a skilled talent pool. With a total base of five million total tech talent pool, it is one of the highest skilled workforce in the world registering 10% growth in direct employee pool with a net addition of 450,000 to the employee base in 2022 according to Nasscom.

Access to skilled employees provides fintech great leverage to exploit the latest technologies and design new partnerships and collaborations and grow the market by targeting new market segments.

One of India’s leading payment platform, PhonePe, has deployed over 10 lakh SmartSpeakers to merchant partners across India. The company has processed over 100 crores (1 billion) transactions via the devices, within three months of launch to strengthen its offline merchant payments across the country. Introduced for reliable and convenient payment tracking at merchant locations, the company has received phenomenal

VIVEK LOHCHEB HEAD OF OFFLINE BUSINESS PHONEPE

PhonePe’s SmartSpeaker

partners,

the mass market,

response and the demand for SmartSpeakers has surged amongst new merchant partners, across the urban and rural markets.

Speaking about the new feature, Vivek Lohcheb, Head of Offline Business at PhonePe said, “Digital payments are now ubiquitous in India as they have helped eliminate various issues pertaining to cash transactions. PhonePe’s SmartSpeaker is a big step in providing cutting-edge payment services to merchant partners, especially in the mass market, and this has opened up a new channel for engaging with our vast merchant base. Deploying more than 10 lakh devices in less than

Partnership Imperative for Traditional Banks and Fintech in India*

- 75% of CXOs in traditional financial organizations says partnering with

fintech is critical to retain leadership position in the market.

- 65% of CXOs wanted to partner with fintech for customer acquisition and to deliver a superior

customer experience.

- Fintech want to partner for regulatory expertise, requisite licences, access to low-cost capital *CXO survey by Bain India

“Digital payments are now ubiquitous in India as they have helped eliminate various issues pertaining to cash transactions.

is a big step in providing cutting-edge payment services to merchant

especially in

and this has opened up a new channel for engaging with our vast merchant base.”

India is becoming the FinTech hub for the world with an estimated market opportunity of $1.3 trillion by 2025 according to Payment Council of India (PCI).

With more than 4,200 active start-ups, over 550 fintech start-ups have received funding of $22 billion between 2014 and 2022.

three months is a significant milestone at which retailers have embraced this value added offering from PhonePe.”

With more than 65 million MSMEs underserved by the formal banking sector, Fintech is bridging the gap by leveraging digital technology and opening up new possibilities for all stakeholders.

MSME comprise 28.7% to India’s GDP and contribute 40% of exports and fintech such as Easy Pay, Flexipay, Kinara Capital, Lendingkart Finance, Indifi and CredAble have innovative offerings for MSMEs providing co-lateral-free loans and access to credit in a quick and easy manner.

Aditya Harkauli, Chief Business Officer, Indifi, said, “Several small businesses in India still struggle to run their operations seamlessly due to lack of access to formal credit. Since its inception, Indifi has strived to address this credit gap.”

Fintech Market Trends and Dynamics in India

Three dominant themes in fintech market are likely to stand out. This includes Consumption banking, Neobanking and fintech infrastructure. According to Bain analysis, rapid economic growth in the country will create more affluence households triggering consumption in the range of USD2.7 trillion by 2026.

An addition of 4 million affluent households and about 33 million mass affluent household is expected to drive two to two and half times spending on essential items and three to four times more on well-being products.

Despite the Covid pandemic, unsecured retail financing has grown by 25% between 2019 and 2022 with semi-urban areas leading the growth in unsecured financing. A report by CASHe an AI-driven financial wellness platform, 89% of millennials in India have a wealth management strategy for future contingencies even as they look for opportunities for stronger growth in

post-pandemic times.

Another study by Home Credit India finds that over 50 per cent of borrowers prefer equated monthly instalment (EMI) cards for shopping or borrowing money, and more than three-fourths of such debtors were from Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. Gen Z and millennials are optimistic about digital lending services and borrowing continues to grow unabated despite strong macroeconomic headwinds, with 75 per cent borrowers taking loans for consumer durables, home appliances, home renovation and business.

Bain India estimates that more than 40% Indian customers are likely to transition to online channels for banking transactions, travel and lifestyle due to favorable digital ecosystem and changing consumer habits, which bodes well for the fintech industry. “In the last 6 to 8 years, fintechs and insurtechs are really disrupting the sector. Changes in customer experiences, regulatory environment, competition from non-traditional players, are demanding the finance sector to constantly innovate to remain relevant,”says Ajayan of Sunlife Asia Service Center.

According to a CXO survey by Bain India, 75% of traditional financial institutions have indicated that partnering with fintech is a critical enabler to retain leadership position in the market. The survey also found 65% of CXOs wanted to partner with fintech for customer acquisition and to deliver a superior customer experience, while fintech wanted to partner incumbents for regulatory expertise, requisite requirements and access to low-cost capital.

While risk management emerge a key concern for traditional banks to partner with fintech, tech agility and digital ways of working are key concern areas for fintech while partnering with traditional financial institutions, finds the Bain Survey.

India Fintech Blazing a Trail

The Indian fintech ecosystem have leveraged the

digital opportunity to partner with traditional financial services organizations to create one of the largest marketplaces in the world. This speed, scale and innovation displayed by Indian fintech along with favorable regulatory environment and government initiatives have won the confidence of the investor community and the sector has successfully attracted unprecedented funding.

Traditional financial services companies have a renewed focus on customer first strategy designing new customer experiences leveraging technology and new partnership models. Financial services companies are leveraging data analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities in partnerships with fintech to co-create personalized customers experiences.

The regulatory framework with ground breaking initiatives such as the Account Aggregator Network has pushed traditional banks to onboard more than a billion accounts to create the largest open banking ecosystem in the world. Today the India fintech story is one of the most discussed in the financial world and it is well on its way to setting the stage of Fintech 2.0.

One of India’s leading payment platform, PhonePe, has deployed over 10 lakh SmartSpeakers to merchant partners across India. The company has processed over 100 crores (1 billion) transactions via the devices, within three months of launch to strengthen its offline merchant payments across the country.

SHEIKH AMZAD SR. MANAGER IT, VANDANA GLOBAL

BY AMBIKA @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Introduction

As we move to 2023, technologies are going to change in a big way. In order to effectively secure and prepare businesses to undertake digital transformation, CIOs would have to arm themselves with the ability and wherewithal to create change and provide data insights to their companies. Part of this crucial exercise involves keeping up with key tech predictions and aligning IT policies with market mega trends. Common Predictions that we see for 2023 centres around AI and metaverse, digital immune systems and industry cloud platform, since many CIOs will be experimenting with the implementation of some of the technologies identified in the trend reporting.

The ongoing year will see CIOs beginning to develop and raise a team of leaders in their organizations. Digital skills too will take centrestage and are set to become an imperative for businesses, and IT will lead the way in teaching and coaching their peers.

What do you see as CIO’s top Priority?

For CIOs, the challenge is how to match that boldness so they can not only enable the business’ aspirations for growth but also shape them. That

VANDANA GLOBAL

CIO NEEDS TO ADAPT TO THE TECH EVOLUTION AND SITUATION

2023 is going to be a year a technology adoption by the IT Leaders. We at Enterprise IT World would like to understand the viewpoints of the IT headers about their opinion. Sheikh Amzad, Sr. Manager IT, Vandana Global speaks about his understanding of the situation

challenge is even more seminal because even a quick glance under the hood of the top goals of many businesses reveals that their goals are unreachable without technology. Like it or not, CIOs are in the spotlight. Following points to be considered:

1. Know your customer as well as you know your technology.

2. Put cloud at the center of your tech strategy.

3. Make developer experience the cornerstone of talent strategy.

4. Become the fastest learner.

5. Make security an enabler of speed and growth.

6. Choose better over more when it comes to data.

How have you helped move business forward?

As a CIO or IT leader, put my business in a position to adapt. Part of that is understanding how recent events will shape the near future. Another part is keeping tabs on upcoming technology trends. With that in mind, some technologies that all CIOs and IT leaders can’t ignore in the coming year include:

1. Low-code and no-code development.

2. Developing a deep understanding of the customer experience.

3. Building an agile & scrum platform.

4. Clearly communicating the business need for and impacts of IT changes.

Where do you see industry heading in

2023?

By revolutionize how businesses operate by achieving greater accuracy and consistency, driving overall market growth.

2023 is also expected to witness the penetration of Vandana Global Limited into empowering India. The group has positioned itself today to create high value across diverse domains with four key differentiators are state of the art manufacturing technology, efficient quality management, on-time delivery, and commitment to consumer satisfaction and support.

What are your strategic plans for 2023? IT leaders always learning new lessons for implementing value-oriented IT initiatives and establishing thriving workplace cultures against the backdrop of economic uncertainty. CIOs anticipate addressing these and other challenges in the year ahead, but we also have big plans for 2023.

These plans go beyond any single tech initiative or innovation. Instead, we speak to the overarching objectives we have for the upcoming year and the big-picture goals we hope to achieve.

1. To protect the mission: Means focusing on innovation and using technologies such as artificial intelligence to enable to deliver the best experience possible for its customers.

2. To shift back to strategic IT successes, staying in that reactionary mode no longer makes sense nor will it lead to the best work going forward. Away from that reactive mindset back to being more strategic heading into the new year.

“2023 is expected to witness the penetration of Vandana Global Limited into empowering India.”

PDG

STRONG PLATFORM LEADERSHIP OF PDG MU1 TO GIVE PEACE OF MIND TO THE CIOS

As the globe spins into an era where massive digitalization is a welcome reality, it has called for setting up of massive hyperscale data centers and the epicentre of activities is becoming APAC region. PDG’s strategy is definitely well thought out

n the language of the CEO of Princeton Digital Group (PDG), Rangu Salgame, APAC is going to see a revolution of Data Centers for three simple reasons. For example, acceleration of cloud since the pandemic is one of the reasons along with e-commerce in all the markets in Asia. From the cloud perspective a lot of adoption is happening in the large organizations along with the government and public sectors. As per him, even though the cloud adoption is aggressive but still the region is at a very nascent stage. So fast forward in next 10 -15 years a lot of aggression would happen in the cloud adoption, and it will propel the consumption of the Data Center capacity. E-commerce is going at a doble digit pace which requires a large-scale digital

infrastructure. The region is having more than 3 billion people and they continue to use smartphones to drive e-commerce business. Apart from this, digital content is being consumed by these smart phones among the 3 billion people which is another factor to propel the data centers and co-location space.

Keeping the growth trajectory, global data center companies like Digital Realty, Princeton Digital Group (PDG) and Equinix have made massive invest in the region.

India being one of the hot beds for data centers because of its massive digital drive along with thrust on infrastructure development, government have brought out data center policy thereby boosting the growth in the data centers. We see cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon have expanded their network of the facilities in the country. Indian companies including Yotta, Reliance Data Center and AdaniConneX entered the market last year apart from the expansion of the existing companies including CTRLs, NTT, Web Werks, Nxtra, etc.

India has 138 data centers built across 11 million square feet of area and has 737 MW of IT capacity. Mumbai and Chennai alone account for 57% of this capacity. Independent study says that 45 more data centers spanning 13 million square feet and 1,015 MW of IT capacity will be ready by the end of 2025.

At the fag end of 2022, PDG launched its MU1 data center in Mumbai. The beauty of the company is its commitment to the business as the MU1 DC got completed within a record time of 20 months from the day of its announcement.

This is a 48MW of IT capacity across two buildings span across roughly six acres within a larger IT campus at Airoli, Navi Mumbai.

As per the company statement, MU1 will be powered up to 40% by renewable energy and will operate on minimal water consumption. In addition, the facility is the first Open Compute Project (OCP) certified data center in the country and will also be Uptime Tier III certified. The total cost incurred to set up this facility goes up to $300 million.

Vipin Shirsat, General Manager, India, Princeton Digital Group (PDG)

“By default, we have a lot of specifications in our data center that easily works for our customers.”

Established in 2017, Singapore-headquartered PDG is a market leader in Asia’s hyperscale data center market with presence in five countries with a portfolio of 20 data centers and 600 MW capacity. The company is backed by blue-chip institutional investment firms like Warburg Pincus, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) and Mubadala Investment Company (Mubadala).

PDG develops and operates data center infrastructure in the dynamic digital economies of Asia including China, Singapore, India, Indonesia, and Japan. With 20 data centers in 14 cities across 5 countries and counting, it unleashes the growth potential of global hyperscalers and enterprises.

The PDG leadership team is made up of industry veterans from the global telecommunication, internet infrastructure, data center, and real estate sectors. Its strong platform leadership is complemented by deep in-country teams. Its unique three-pronged investment strategy of acquisition, development and carve-outs supports its mission to bring scale with speed to market to Asia’s most dynamic regions.

We spoke to Vipin Shirsat, General Manager, India, Princeton Digital Group (PDG) to understand how PDG is relevant to the Indian customers who are hungry adopt digital transformation.

With over 10 years of deep experience in the

DC industry, Vipin has driven exceptional growth by working closely with the global hyperscalers and internet companies.

In exclusive chat with Enterprise IT World, Vipin reveals the uniqueness of his company’s offerings; the challenges faced by the CIO community and how PDG is acting as a catalyst to solve those challenges.

INTERVIEW

How are you mitigating the CIO challenges of taking workload to cloud vis-à-vis keeping it in co-locations infrastructure?

People are trying to figure out what is the best way. Traditional way is to put your servers inside your office. Today there are options to put into the third-party servers like ours or take some load onto the cloud. I think this is a constant decision making of every CIO in terms of what do I put in cloud and what do I put in the third-party servers or on-premises. I think a lot of CIOs are thinking that having something on premise is not the best solution. Of course, there are exceptions to this statement. The reason for that is to manage the size of some capacity, which outgrows in a couple of months. Secondly, as applications are becoming complicated, the need for uptime is becoming higher and higher. Just one data center

is not enough. You need a DR. You need a DC along with a near DC and DR and a permutation and combination in these things. Provisioning all those things inhouse is not feasible. Doing things on cloud have their own advantages and disadvantage and that’s where co-location comes into play. The advantage with cloud is that you should be able to manage your cloud usage very well. At the same time, there is some infra required for many cases – may be patient’s information, core banking or R&D lab for a large enterprise. Sometimes people are not comfortable putting these types of data on cloud. At times there are technical reasons, or it is a comfort zone of CIOs to put it in their own infra. This is where a standardized scalable capacity helps the CIOs.

Second is all responsible organizations today have their own sustainability goals and that’s where data centers like ours who have embedded sustainability in all the phases of building and operating the data centers become an easy choice for them. We have been awarded with IGBC Platinum certification.

Our data centers are optimized from the level of scalability and high density. We have a strong engineering team which will be able to customize anything that the CIOs want which may not be possible in-house.

What are your competitive advantages?

First is that we provide predictable delivery. Second is the core engineering team enables us to do some things, which are difficult to achieve in today’s market because each of them has come with an immense amount of experience in the industry. By default, we have a lot of specifications in our data center that easily works for our customers. We are open for any levels of customizations. We follow extremely stringent safety stands. We also have a third-party consultant on safety, who makes sure that all the processes are implemented. They do periodic audit. They do surprise visits and that helps in elevating our safety levels. Also, when you have a very strong engineering team, there are various ways in which you can build a data center. You can either appoint a general contractor, ask them to do it. For someone like us, we do procurement directly. We have 15 large procurement processes, for example, UPS, PDU, power, transformer, GS – each of these for us are separate packages and there are 20 smaller packages. For each package we require 3- 6 organizations to participate in

RFQ process. We do all of the innovations in House. That gives us few advantages. One is best cost advantage. Our cost of investment is one of the best. Second is it creates great control on our partners on the supply chain, timelines of delivery, quality of delivery or any kind of customization, etc. That enables our output of giving good quality and timely quality. We are the only company that everyone in the organization is a certified data center professional – even the accountant, the investment analyst, the head of finance. They have done the basic course on data center. They understand the technicality of data center. The core engineering team and the core operations team. The engineering team is ATD (Accredited Tier Designers). The operations team is in the process of getting similar certification process. So, we train our employees with necessary certifications to make them best engineering team out there in the industry and that’s how we compete with other organizations in the industry.

What’s the roadmap as far as sustainability is concerned?

When we talk about power utilization, 40% is something that we are doing from non -conventional energy sources but we are already working with partners to figure out, how we can take this 40% to something higher.

But when it comes to sustainability, it is a constant process. It starts from designing of the data center – wow do you structure the processes and how do we minimize the losses and it also continues with the choice of the equipment that we are using. Besides we are also working on operations part of it … what is the temperature that the customers desires, what is the set point, etc. And then these infrastructures are about to run for 10-40 years, to some extent, you also future proof your data center.

How relevant is MU1 data center for your company? What is your plan?

India is one of the key geographies across Asia growing at a very fast rate. The data center industry is expected to double in three years. Given that fact, our Co- founders have a lot of experience in India market also. So, India is a very crucial market for us. It’s a huge milestone because we are operationalizing capacity in India. We won’t stop here. We want to be a formidable co-location player in India. The idea is to expand capacity in Mumbai beyond this data center and also expand it to the leading cities including Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, etc. We will have data centers in these cities of at least a similar size if not more.

What is your participation in Edge data centers?

Edge data center has two meanings. One is the data center with highly network dense. Secondly is the data center closer to the customers. So that is a process that we are watching very closely. As we see that place developing, we are open to invest in those data centers although the size would be comparatively smaller.

SNOWFLAKE

2023 TRENDS & PREDICTIONS FROM SNOWFLAKE

As India’s digital revolution looks to turn the next decade into a ‘tech’ade, cloud adoption is going to be crucial to this growth agenda. We are seeing more enterprises rapidly moving to cloud solutions to solve complex business challenges, become agile, and drive innovation. According to a 2022 NASSCOM report, cloud has the potential to account for approximately 8 percent relative share of India’s GDP in 2026 with a 4X growth over the next five years, and create 14 million jobs in 2026, growing 3X over the next five years.

As we look forward to the new year, Vimal Venkatram, MD India at Snowflake, shares some key data trends to look out for in 2023.

Prediction 1 – Board members will prioritize for actionable cybersecurity insights

The rise of security data lakes in the cloud will make it much easier to generate near-real-time reports around critical security metrics. We have already seen increased interest at the executive level in this type of data, and in 2023, board members will demand transparency through quantified insights on the company’s security posture, areas of weakness, and rate of improvement. While standard in other departments, cybersecurity has been lagging in providing this visibility, and in 2023, will play a quintessential

factor in safeguarding the business and its data.

Prediction 2 – Retailers will embrace data monetization in response to macroeconomic pressures

In recent years, many retailers were allergic to the idea of data monetization and refused to discuss it. Today, as we move into 2023, almost every retailer is having these conversations at the c-suite and board levels. We are in a discovery phase as retailers realized that governance of data in the cloud enables them to do a lot with this data that they could not do previously, while also streamlining how CPG companies are able to acquire this data. Data monetization offers an exciting source for revenue, but retailers are going to make sure they’re leveraging this data to make better business decisions that are mutually beneficial for the retailer-CPG relationship.

Prediction 3 – Data clean rooms will be used to boost campaign performance

Talking about the Media and Entertainment sector, we saw early adoption with data clean rooms from media companies and publishers on the sell side in 2022 but in 2023, it’s going to reach across the entire advertising and marketing ecosystem. We’re in the midst of a mass realization of how drastically the collaboration, privacy and governance features of data clean rooms benefit

all parties involved. We’re going to see improved campaign performance across the board as marketers evolve from targeting and measuring off of just their cookies, instead of just using their actual customer data to provide better targeting to improve marketing performance and measurement. Data clean rooms will shift from theoretical discussion to real world use-case.

Prediction 4 – Healthcare and pharmaceutical industries will, like retail, strengthen supply chains with open data sharing

In the healthcare sector, medical product shortages during the pandemic put the supply chain in sharp focus, but now, even as the health crisis has normalized, we’re still seeing shortages of common and important treatments. One of the core issues is that the industry has become single threaded in its sourcing strategy. In 2023, we’ll witness a course correction in healthcare. Drug and device manufacturers are no longer able to plan their supply chains with their OWN data alone. With investment in technology that facilitates bi-directional data sharing across the entire product journey; from manufacturer to the supplier and all the way down to the individual hospital or pharmacy, new levels of real-time visibility will create not just a more resilient supply chains but a more resilient healthcare system overall.

“In recent years, many retailers were allergic to the idea of data monetization and refused to discuss it. Today, as we move into 2023, almost every retailer is having these conversations at the c-suite and board levels.”

As India’s digital revolution looks to turn the next decade into a ‘tech’ade, cloud adoption is going to be crucial to this growth agenda

BY AMBIKA @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

DE-CIX INDIA’S ON ITS ASTOUNDING ACHIEVEMENTS AND FUTURE PLANS FOR THE UPCOMING FY

Mr. Sudhir Kunder, Country Director, DE-CIX India, where he shares insights on the milestones achieved so far and the way forward for the next FY

As a company – how DE-CIX has performed in 2022 in the Indian end-user market?

DE-CIX has passed the test of 2022 with flying colours and we are proud to announce that.

▪

For the 2nd consecutive year, DE-CIX India is India’s Largest Interconnection Platform

▪ For 18 months at a stretch and to date, DE-CIX Mumbai has ranked as the Largest Interconnection Platform in the APAC region among 153 exchanges in 29 countries.

▪ 590+ networks, including India and Global Countries around the world, are connected to a world-class Interconnection Platform via DE-CIX, and our customers have upgraded by four digits, demonstrating their renewed trust in us.

▪

In the last year, the growth skyrocketed with a rise in the segments of :

OTT & VOD – 1075%

Gaming – 1055%

CDN – 550%

Social & Online Media – 516%

ISP – 475%

and Hosting – 282%.

What are the major technology opportunities you have participated in while coming to solving challenges in

the user market?

We have collaborated/participated on numerous high-profile projects using cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Virtual Reality (VR), 5G, Interconnected Data Centres and many more. This helped develop Edtech, Fintech, Agro, Gaming, Media and Autonomous Vehicles and in solving complicated challenges that improvised productivity and efficiency. Upon integrating with our services, the solution becomes more responsive, robust in performance, adaptable, secure and cost-effective.

Our collaborations with the Telco Giants & Data Centre Providers like Yotta & Lightstrom as well as reselling partners like AAA Cloud Telephony are worth mentioning.

In our pursuit of perfection, we’ve adopted the mantras of “Customer First” and “Customer Delight.” We take pride in offering services that our customers can rely on, keeping in mind the crucial role of a company’s reputation in its longterm success. As the market shifts from traditional to digital businesses, we are prepared to meet any new challenges head-on as the first legally compliant organisation on which companies rely.

How many net new customers have you added this year? Who are the

major names?

Over the past year, we’ve welcomed over 198 new members to our family. Since many of our customers use our White-Labelled Services to resell them under their own brand or one of our reseller brands, hence not all are reflected on our website.

What are other milestones you have achieved last year?

▪ DE-CIX India maintains its position as India’s Largest Interconnection Platform for the 2nd Consecutive year.

▪ Even after 1.5 years DE-CIX Mumbai continues to remain the Largest Interconnection Platform in the Asia Pacific region amongst 153 exchanges in 29 countries.

▪ Highest uptime, redefining the global benchmark.

▪ First Interconnection Platform in India to implement IRRDB filtering.

▪ Inner Review Awarded DE-CIX India “The 10 Fastest Growing Companies to Watch-2022”.

Which industries have adopted DE-CIX technologies aggressively vis-à-vis the competition?

As mentioned earlier DE-CIX is the only provider that allows Internet Exchange, Cloud Exchange, and Microsoft Azure Peering Services to coexist on a Single Access Port. DE-CIX is the first company of its kind to offer this to the Indian market.

Raitel, Powergrid, Jubilant Enpro, Uddan, BSNL, Godfrey Phillips, Tea Board, Extra Marks, NTPC, and IITM Pravartar are some of the names we take pride in mentioning as our valued clients, who have been able to achieve the acceleration of their digital transformation endeavours by virtue of using our Peering & DirectCLOUD Services. They look forward to and appreciate our upcoming services, such as MAPS.

Companies representing BFSI, Logistics, Fintech, Edtech, Gaming, Entertainment, Autonomous vehicles and much more use our Services. The range of our service offerings and the confidence placed in us by so many different companies are what sets us apart in the marketplace.

While working with one of our Peering Experts, our clients receive support throughout the entire Life Cycle Management process, from identifying and prioritising needs to receiving

SUDHIR KUNDER COUNTRY DIRECTOR, DE-CIX INDIA

“Digital services & applications are now requiring lower latencies. If latency requirements continue to evolve at the same rate as innovation in recent years, then it means that digital infrastructure will become even more important in the future.”

training, feedback, and consultation during the ecosystem vendor/partner selection process, as well as assistance with making purchases, implementing new technologies, and more. This distinguishes us from the marketplace.

We have only one competitor and that is our-

selves. Outperforming ourselves, setting higher benchmarks and being better than what we were yesterday is our daily driving force.

What is your revenue growth expectation for this year?

We are pleased to share that in the past two years, our company’s revenue has grown exponentially. We are hoping to continue the same trend & grow manifold.

Also in today’s world “Latency is the new currency.” Digital services & applications are now requiring lower latencies. If latency requirements continue to evolve at the same rate as innovation in recent years, then it means that digital infrastructure will become even more important in the future. We are prepared to play our role by paving the way & leading businesses on this digital path.

We foresee that the digital industry will grow fivefold in the coming year, & we are looking forward to seeing our rocket ship growing on the revenue front in the same way.

What is your road map for 2023?

As an Interconnection Platform, we are connected with the maximum number of ISPs, CDNs, OTT players, and Telcos, and we are seeing an increasing number of participants from industry segments like Healthcare, Finance, Retail, Logistics, Pharma, Construction, Ecommerce, Media, and many more.[Text Wrapping Break][Text Wrapping Break]Our roadmap:

▪

Launch of Microsoft Azure Peering Services (MAPS) in Southern and Western India, covering the majority of Enterprises, SMEs, and SMBs.

▪ In the near future, we are focusing on establishing POPs in strategic locations at Data Centres with National and International organizations. Southern and Northern, will receive two Exchanges.

▪ We are also launching innovative services such as InterconnectionFLEX and Blackholing.

▪ Our service will have enhanced reach & increased availability due to Lightstorm’s Services.

▪ Establishment of Enterprise Business Unit (EBU), as well as enhancement of new alliance partners, as we did by the end of 2022.

Our company works diligently across multiple verticals in the Indian market and other SAARC countries as we are constantly upgrading our network to ensure that it can stand strong in times of ever-growing demand.

To summarise, DE-CIX is and will always be the medium through which digital is made available to everyone, everywhere.

W2S

KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HYBRID CLOUD VS MULTICLOUD – WHICH ONE TO CHOOSE?

control of it. The cloud now allows for the use of hybrid and multiple clouds.

Infrastructure, compliance, security, and many other elements are now part of the cloud ecosystem. Multiple clouds, either private or public, that are sourced from various vendors are included in a multi-cloud system. In contrast to a multicloud system, a hybrid cloud system is a cloud deployment paradigm that incorporates various cloud types. But what distinguishes a multi-cloud architecture from a hybrid one? The similarities and differences between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are thoroughly examined in this article.

What is a hybrid cloud?

Multicloud and hybrid clouds can be difficult to differentiate for organizations. You’ll get a better understanding of which architecture you chose after reading the tips

Combining the public cloud with a private cloud that is only used by the end user is known as a hybrid cloud. Private clouds used to be housed inside the user’s firewall, on-premises, but nowadays they are more frequently constructed in rented, vendor-owned data centers off-site.

There are two key reasons that hybrid cloud differs from multi-cloud:

▪ Typically, it combines both private and public clouds.

▪ Instead of remaining in distinct silos, its processes and data frequently interact, enhancing one another.

Benefits and drawbacks of using hybrid cloud

What factors should businesses take into account before deciding on the hybrid cloud?

Scalability: Hybrid cloud offers many of the same benefits as multi-cloud does to an enterprise. Businesses may grow more quickly thanks to the combined computing power of public and private clouds, which enables them to swiftly create cloud architecture and scale computing up or down virtually instantly.

MADHU KESAVAN FOUNDER & CEO, W2S SOLUTIONS

The terms “multi-cloud” and “hybrid cloud” both describe cloud deployments that combine many clouds. The kind of cloud infrastructure that each one uses varies.

The IT industry is still flourishing as a result of cloud computing technology. Beyond just data storage and security, the cloud has offered

other benefits. Private cloud infrastructures that could exclusively support a company’s data and workload were first recognized by the IT sector. With time, it became apparent that third-party companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft had developed the cloud-based solution, made it public, and were in

Computing speed: One advantage of hybrid cloud over multi-cloud is speed. Administrators can divide assets into segments when workloads are distributed across various cloud platforms. To meet particular demands, they might designate a private cloud platform, which would reduce latency and maintain the continuity of regular operations. They can develop in business while using public cloud applications like machine learning.

Alternatives: Over time, the definition of a hybrid cloud architecture has changed, and so have the available options for hybrid cloud computing. Organizations are combining hybrid cloud and edge computing more recently. This hybrid architecture combines edge devices with public clouds, employing the latter either in place of or in addition to private clouds. Edge computing describes data produced by an Internet

“The existence of a private cloud, frequently hosted by on-premise data centers, is the primary distinction between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing.”

of Things (IoT) device closest to its source. Additionally lowering latency and accelerating data retrieval is using edge devices in conjunction with cloud computing.

Security: On the public cloud side, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud both have advantages and downsides in terms of security. But in the private cloud, companies might be able to use more advanced encryption techniques and choose their configurations and standards for data security.

Personnel: With multi-cloud, employees who wish to master these platforms must put in twice as much or more effort to get certified and trained. For companies, however, that have experience with just one kind of public clouds, such as AWS or Azure, a hybrid cloud strategy might be a good fit.

Costs: When compared to running a data center, managed private clouds can help enterprises save money. Nevertheless, businesses who opt to design their private cloud that will need to hire personnel to build and maintain that environment. This results in more work needed to create and manage a private cloud.

What is multi-cloud?

Simply said, multi-cloud refers to a company’s use of a variety of cloud services, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. These cloud services are open to the public and frequently come from a wide range of cloud providers. Public clouds are those where companies or individuals contract with a third party, such as Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, to host their infrastructure and/or applications.

A business could decide to use numerous clouds for some reasons, including

▪ Obtaining best-in-class outcomes for various criteria and divisions

▪ Lowering expenses and increasing flexibility

▪ Preventing vendor monopoly

▪ Reducing reliance on a specific provider

Whatever the motivation behind their multicloud approach, organizations typically need to operate their public clouds in conjunction with other kinds of cloud environments to completely meet all of their needs.

Benefits and drawbacks of using a multicloud platform

What should businesses think about before implementing a multi-cloud strategy?

Innovation: More companies are now utilizing multi-cloud architecture to address various issues and provide their workforce with new resources. With these new capabilities, organizations may pick the best tools and promote more innovation. For instance, a public cloud platform with machine learning capabilities, might be demanded by software engineers, but legal and

financial departments may need more precise control over who can access critical data.

Processing power: Using an additional cloud platform might give a high-demand company access to more computing power.

Flexibility: If their needs change over time, some firms don’t want to be tied down to a contract with a single cloud provider. They can scale more readily and switch their attention from one platform to another if necessary with various public cloud environments. Users can migrate data and applications across or among platforms with ease thanks to multi-cloud, which makes use of two or more cloud platforms of the same type. This aids the organization’s disaster recovery efforts and data backup.

Security: Regardless of the architecture a company chooses, security in the cloud should always be given first consideration. Shared responsibility is the operating model used by public cloud computing platforms. The end user is in charge of maintaining the integrity of the data they store within that cloud platform, the cloud provider protects the security of the cloud itself. Administrators using a multi-cloud strategy must understand the security settings and identity and access management (IAM) rules for each platform.

Personnel: Cloud architects that are knowledgeable about each platform are needed for a multi-cloud approach. It will take twice as much labor to obtain certifications from two platforms, AWS and Azure. Additionally, if a company is growing, it can have a hard time finding new employees with multi-cloud experience.

Costs: Multi-cloud initiatives frequently leverage public cloud platforms, they may be less expensive for businesses to run than on-premises resources. But managing several cloud environments can be difficult. Businesses must constantly be aware of the costs associated with cloud computing to avoid overspending on any platform. By naming resources to link them back to the appropriate departments for payment purposes, a smart cloud tagging approach can help decrease complexity in public clouds. Administrators can discover cost-saving options and comprehend chargebacks by utilizing a cloud management platform.

Key Differences Between Hybrid Cloud vs Multi-Cloud

The existence of a private cloud, frequently hosted by on-premise data centers, is the primary distinction between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing. The term hybrid cloud refers to the use of a private cloud by a company. A private cloud that can be hosted on or off-premises is used in hybrid cloud computing in every case.

Multi-cloud environments consist of two or more public clouds, so these phrases overlap quite a bit.

Diversifying providers became simpler as the number of cloud service providers increased. It became more difficult to control cloud solutions as businesses wanted to harness various configurations to maximize their business processes.

To achieve increased reliability, performance, and expansion, hybrid clouds use both existing infrastructure and public cloud providers, as opposed to multi-clouds which use a multitude of public cloud providers. Multi-clouds can include on-premise infrastructure and mix different types, but some providers offer private multi-clouds. On-premises infrastructure is complemented by various types of clouds (public and private) within a hybrid cloud.

By combining existing infrastructure with public cloud providers, hybrid clouds can increase reliability, and performance, and expand compared to multi-clouds that use numerous public clouds.

Over 30% of large-enterprise firms would need to justify anything other than a cloud-only strategy for new IT initiatives, claims Gartner. They also forecast that by 2021, more than half of cloud-using enterprises will adopt a cloud-first strategy.

When choosing a cloud strategy, what should you consider?

Each public cloud provider has unique cost structures, as well as unique strengths and drawbacks. It takes a lot of reflection to develop a cloud strategy, including evaluation of current workloads, databases, networks, SLAs, storage requirements, and other factors. After that, businesses can start mapping their present and upcoming workload plans to the services provided by public cloud providers.

When using a multi-cloud strategy, the location of the other business IT components must be taken into account. For instance, if using a hybrid strategy, the database servers, authentication resources, monitoring, and management processes would all normally be placed on-premises. These resources would need to be housed somewhere and have access to all enterprise-wide resources to enable seamless operations if using a multi-cloud but not hybrid-cloud approach.

▪ Cloud-first and multi-cloud: Moving to a cloud-first strategy involves the entire organization, not just IT, and calls for a comprehensive approach to the rapidly expanding field of business technology that aids in defining objectives and results.

SAP MIGRATION

MIGRATION FROM SAP ERP ON-PREMISE TO SAP S/4HANA ON AZURE

There have been 400,000+ SAP customers globally, with bulk of them running on SAP ECC6.0 (On-Premise)

of Software Update Manager

• Ability to leverage the flexibility of Azure by running the conversion on a very powerful system

• Reduced business downtime by leveraging the above benefits

Prerequisites / System Requirement -

To use the DMO approach to migrate to Azure, your on-premise SAP ERP system should fulfil following requirements –

• SAP ERP system running on a non-HANA database (like Oracle/DB2)

• It should be Unicode system

• It should be running on SAP Netweaver Application server for ABAP component only (No Dual stack system supported) The successful migration needs an elaborate procedure involving six steps described below.

Step 1 – Prepare for the SAP S/4 HANA conversion

You need to prepare an overall project plan showing scheduled tasks, owners, dependency & dates.

• SAP Readiness Check – It finds out the readiness of your SAP ERP system for the conversion to SAP S/4 HANA. You need to run SAP’s Readiness Check tool to analyse your SAP ERP6.0 system, find out relevant simplification items, high-level custom code analysis, sizing, add-on compatibility etc.

• Maintenance Planner – You use this SAP’s tool to generate the download files (i.e. software package, stack configuration XML file) that SUM (Software Update Manager) uses for the conversion. Particularly the maintenance planner checks if there is a valid conversion path for your existing SAP ERP6.0 system.

PRASHANT PIMPALEKAR SR. VICE PRESIDENT (SAP PRACTICE), SIFY DIGITAL SERVICES LTD.

Introduction –

There have been 400,000+ SAP customers globally, with bulk of them running on SAP ECC6.0 (On-Premise). In order to take the Cloud advantage and enhanced performance/ functionality of SAP S/4 HANA, they have been planning the migration from SAP ERP On-Premise to SAP S/4 HANA on Azure, the hyper-scaler of choice.

The said migration is not the usual OS/ DB (Operating System/Database) migration but needs quite some consideration and close coordination between teams working on Azure and SAP.

Migration Procedure using DMO -

The conversion of On-Premise SAP ERP6.0 into SAP S/4 HANA On Azure uses the one-step approach of using Database Migration Option (DMO) of SAP’s Software Update Manager (SUM) tool.

Benefits of using DMO approach compared to the classical export/import method are:

• No export of the source database to the file system

• No transport of source database export files to Azure

• SAP S/4 HANA conversion ‘On-the-fly’ over the WAN MPLS connection using the DMO

• Simplification Item check – You run this check to find out the affected simplification items. It checks the consistency and shows SAP OSS Notes to fix the errors in mismatches.

Step 2 – Prepare the infrastructure and Azure connectivity

• Establish the network connection between your on-premise data centre and your Azure data centre:

To enable the DMO to Azure procedure work, you need to install an additional ABAP application server on Azure. This server should connect to the existing On-premise SAP global host of your SAP ERP system containing the ABAP central services (ASCS) instance as well as the global file system.

Software Update Manager is then started on the additional ABAP application server on Azure

to perform the SAP S/4 HANA conversion from there. During the procedure, the database content of the existing on-premise SAP ERP is migrated to the target SAP HANA database on Azure.

As a result, the network connection plays a major role during the database migration procedure. Network connection requirement depends mainly on the PROD database size and the maximum possible downtime window. A good network connection (i.e higher bandwidth and lower latency) is key for a fast database migration phase of the procedure.

Azure ExpressRoute – It is a highly recommended connectivity solution that offers more reliability, faster speed, consistent latency and higher security than typical connections over the internet.

Make sure to engage your ExpressRoute connectivity provider to set up connectivity with the best bandwidth after multiple tests. You can dynamically increase the ExpressRoute circuit bandwidth to meet the peak load without having to disrupt your existing connections at all.

• Make sure all the required ports are accessible on the firewall access control. You may require additional ports to run your productive SAP S/4 HANA system on Azure. Following points need to be considered in this context –

o Remote Function Call (RFC) connections to other SAP systems that will remain on-premise

o Connection to printers

o Connection to any secondary database that will remain on-premise

• Create VMs (Virtual Machines) for target system on Azure and prepare them for the installation of the target system. While a variety of Azure VM types are certified by SAP, following VM types are recommended for the primary application server host for S/4

HANA and for the Software Update manager conversion server –

o Dds_v4

o Eds_v4

o Das_v4

o Eas_v4

Following VM types are recommended for the database host for S/4 HANA & for the SAP HANA server –

o M o Mv2

o Msv2

o Mdsv2 series

SAP Note 1928533 can be referred for more details.

Following are the Azure storage options for SAP HSANA:

o Standard Solid-state disk (SSD)

o Premium SSD (SAP certified)

o Ultra disk (SAP certified)

o Axure NetApp files (SAP certified)

• ABAP custom code adaptation / remediation – You can migrate your ABAP custom code. The custom code migration process consists of the preparatory analysis and the adaptation of the custom code after the technical system conversion.

Step 3 – Prepare SAP systems installation

• Make sure that the time zone of both VMs on Azure (for the ABAP system and the SAP HANA database) is the same time zone as your on-premise SAP ERP system

• Use SAP support portal service to download and extract the required SAP software such as SAP Installation archive, Software Provisioning Manager (SWPM)

• Mount the required shares from the primary ABAP application server to the VM of the new application server on Azure. Make sure to share the SAP global directory and the SAP

global transport directory from the SAP global host of your on-premise SAP ERP system and mount them to the additional ABAP application server on Azure

• Create the required OS users on the new application server

Step 4 – Install the required SAP systems on Azure

Install the following systems on Azure:

• Additional ABAP application server instance

• SAP HANA database

Step 5 – Run the migration and SAP S/4 HANA conversion on Azure

• Prepare Software Update Manager on the additional ABAP application server on Azure

• Start Software Update Manager on the additional ABAP application server on Azure to migrate and convert the system

Step 6 – Post-migration activities

• Move the shared directories from On-premise to Azure

• Perform application-specific post-migration activities as per the ‘conversion guide for SAP S/4 HANA’

• Adopt the system landscape on Azure if required scaling out the SAP S/4 HANA system and resize the system for productive usage

The cycle time of the overall migration and conversion procedure depends on various factors like:

• Source database size

• Performance of the source database system (CPU & disk I/O)

• Network connection to Azure (bandwidth and latency)

• Size of the tables relevant for the SAP S/4 HANA conversion

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

There are two common SAP High Availability (HA) and DR options supported in Azure:

• Local HA using an availability set and DR using a paired region

• Cross-zone HA or metro DR using availability zone and another DR using a paired region

Replication node for SAP HANA system

replication should be set to asynchronous (at least during DMO execution) to avoid slowing down the primary database host.

Also the automatic failover of ASCS cluster and SAP HANA system replication Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery should be disabled while executing DMO.

Fig. 1 - One-step conversion from SAP ERP to SAP S/4 HANA using DMO to Azure

VMWARE

VMWARE, A LEADER IN MULTICLOUD SPACE ENABLES INDIAN CUSTOMERS IN THEIR PURSUIT OF BECOMING CLOUD-SMART

Helping

customers transition from Cloud-chaos to Cloud-Smart

As a company – how has VMWare performed in 2022 in the Indian Customer Industry?

We help our customers transition from ‘Cloud Chaos to Cloud Smart’ and accelerate their pace of innovation by turning multi-cloud complexity into a competitive advantage. As Indian enterprises get more focussed on delivering world-class experiences for their end customers, we also see a huge interest in modern applications services and microservices.

We understand our customer’s challenges and help them address them through VMware’s innovative products and solutions and expanded partnerships. In India, our solutions have helped customers across industries by modernizing their IT operations with cloud-native applications, migrating apps to any cloud and accelerating the delivery of new cloud-native apps. Additionally, VMware’s solutions have helped streamline management to establish consistent operations across data centers, edge environments and the cloud.

What are the major technologies or opportunities you have participated in while coming to solving challenges in the user market?

The two key areas where our technologies come into play are:

1. When customers want to move from Cloud

Chaos to Cloud Smart to reap the advantages of a multi-cloud environment

2. When enterprises are looking to modernize their application that helps them realize value faster and more efficiently

The goal of a multi-cloud journey becomes more complex when the customers have the choice to choose the appropriate cloud for the right app based on the demands of the specific app. Secondly, application modernization has become an important subject, especially for those enterprises that are predominantly customerfacing. The challenges that they face are scalability, performance, and reliability. They choose to modernize their applications to adapt to modern platforms like Kubernetes or containers. VMware offers end-to-end solutions to build, run and seamlessly manage these applications.

We understand that with digital transformation enterprises do face challenges in terms of cost, cybersecurity, and energy consumption. We believe that we are uniquely positioned to help them address these challenges through innovation and expanded partnerships.

Which industries have adopted VMware technologies aggressively vis-a-vis the competition?

VMware has been doing exceptionally well in sectors/industries like IT/ITEs, financial services,

service providers, and telecommunications. We have also been an integral part of nation-building by working with the central and state governments for projects like Safe City and Smart City. Other segments where we have witnessed growth opportunities are Pharma, Healthcare and Education/ Edu-tech.

How many net new customers have you added this year? Who are the major names?

While we can’t share specific numbers, we are truly encouraged by the opportunity to help our customers in the region. India has been on a digital-first trajectory for several years, and most organizations across sectors have now understood the importance of technology-driven transformation. However, this is not a one-size-fits-all world. It’s more like a wide array of possibilities that need to be considered carefully before embarking on any kind of digital transformation journey. We have a host of customers across all verticals and some of them are Indian Bank, Federal Bank, RailTel, National Stock Exchange and Vellore Institute of Technology, Chitale, and Airtel to name a few.

What is your revenue growth expectation for this year?

As a regional setup, we don’t share revenue growth expectations.

What are other milestones you have achieved last year?

We have a few big ones this year - VMware has helped enterprises move large customer-facing applications to modern applications platforms. The second one would be in helping customers to adopt the cloud and help them become cloud smart. Use cases like DR services on the cloud are unique and help bring significant ROI (return on investment) for our customers.

Another unique use case that comes to mind is how VMware has helped build a UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) solution that has helped our customer drive workplace modernization, implement zero trust, improve the digital employee experience, and reduce digital friction.

What is your road map for 2023?

VMware will continue to focus on executing our multi-cloud strategy and helping enterprises in their pursuit of becoming cloudsmart, modernizing applications, and helping our customers with our anywhere workplace

solutions. As enterprises go big on their cloud journey, they are also keen on managing costs and

MOHIT ARORA

addressing security. In

SR. DIRECTOR, COMMERCIAL AND GOVT. BUSINESS, VMWARE

“India has been on a digital-first trajectory for several years, and most organizations across sectors have now understood the importance of technology-driven transformation.”

2023 we will look at helping our customers in addressing the challenges

they face in terms of cost, cybersecurity, and energy consumption amongst others.

CHECK POINT

HEALTH CHECK OF CYBERSECURITY READINESS FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS

The Healthcare sector was the most targeted industry for ransomware during the third quarter of 2022, with one in 42 organizations impacted by ransomware according to Check Point Research (CPR).

As we start the New Year, the healthcare sector, a key sector in every country, can definitely expect a continued rise in attacks on their systems and networks, regardless of the size of the organization.

What’s the most effective way to achieve cyber resilience – to consolidate security or to take a best-of-breed vendor approach? It’s a longdebated topic within IT circles with each option offering viable technical and business arguments. As a CISO, every conclusion you come to will impact your cyber security effectiveness for years to come.

A recent survey by the Ponemon Institute stated that more than 20 percent of healthcare organizations reported increased patient mortality rates after experiencing a significant cyberattack and another 57 percent said they experience poor patient outcomes. Additionally, the study identified four common types of attacks – cloud compromise, ransomware, business email compromise/phishing, and supply chain.

Successful cyberattacks on healthcare organizations can be disruptive and even deadly, impacting the citizens of that country as well as other countries (with the advent of medical tourism) the most. According to the Check Point Threat Intelligence Report, here in India, organisations in the healthcare industry are the most impacted industry locally with 4,805 weekly attacks per organization as compared to 1,485 weekly attacks per organization globally. Such attacks such as the recent one at AIIMS is part of the nearly 1.9 million cyber attacks recorded on the Indian healthcare network this year, as well as attacks on Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, according to a report by CyberPeace Foundation.

In this blog, we use the healthcare industry to illustrate how a consolidated security approach can best assess and address your organization’s security gaps. Healthcare facilities such as hospitals, clinics, labs, and other medical environments offer a broad and complex attack surface covering networks, cloud infrastructure, desktop, and mobile endpoints, as well as network connected IoT devices. The latter are sensor-driven medical devices that track and monitor in real-time, with most not designed with security in mind.

Healthcare providers’ dynamic environments also introduce complex layers of user types and access privilege levels that can make sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) and other medical data ripe for cyber thieves.

The cost of a breach in the healthcare industry

The Healthcare sector was the most targeted industry for ransomware during the third quarter of 2022

SUNDAR BALASUBRAMANIAN MANAGING DIRECTOR, CHECK POINT SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES INDIA & SAARC

“The cost of a breach in the healthcare industry went up 42% in the past 24 months. For the 12th year in a row, healthcare had the highest average data breach cost of any industry with an average total cost of a breach ballooning at $10.10M.”

went up 42% in the past 24 months. For the 12th year in a row, healthcare had the highest average data breach cost of any industry with an average total cost of a breach ballooning at $10.10M. (Source: IBM and CPR).

The challenges of the healthcare system’s multi-vendor environment

Is security consolidation a viable option for healthcare professionals to consider? If so, how will it significantly enhance an organization’s security posture, improve security operational efficiency, and greatly reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)?

In their CISO Effectiveness Survey, Gartner reported that 78% of CISOs have 16 or more tools in their cybersecurity vendor portfolio; 12% have 46 or more, concluding that having too many security vendors results in complex security operations and increased security headcount. Eight percent of respondents saw vendor consolidation as an avenue for a more efficient security strategy. Where IT budgets are often constrained, the question arises: How do healthcare CISOs deal with the bloat of security products?

Consolidation is a big desire from customers—possibly a response to the tool sprawl that we mentioned earlier. There is a feeling in the market that there might already be too many companies, so it’s not just about more innovation but also building integrated platforms so customers can go to one place and get more baskets of services.

Healthcare organizations heavily targeted Check Point Research (CPR) reported that on average the healthcare sector experienced 1426 weekly attacks, a 60 percent increase in 2022 over the previous year. Some of the most high-profile

attacks have targeted healthcare organizations. In late 2022, National Health Services (NHS) in the UK suffered an attack and several services, treatment centers, and some mental health providers were taken offline.

Today’s ransomware economy is a complex operation extorting millions of dollars per ransom, holding entire organizations captive under the threat of a total system shutdown. As a business model, Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) has seen the appearance of low-cost affiliate programs for any criminal to get involved.

When exploring why this particular industry seems to be so heavily attacked, one of the key reasons could be around the massive amount of sensitive and confidential patient information collected, which could be worth millions to attackers, via blackmail or specific attacks on individuals. A case in point was the recent Medibank breach, Australia’s largest health insurer where late last year, hackers who stole customer data also released a file of pregnancy terminations.

With the increasing digitalisation across every industry, the healthcare industry is also facing an explosion of IoT and medical devices like insulin pumps and defibrillators, opening up more entry points for attacks, especially as security was not a primary concern in the design of such devices, many of which are sitting on flat networks and are not managed by the digital and security teams.

Attackers are also aware that such a critical industry like hospitals and medical centres cannot allow downtime or have medical systems which cannot work, as this will impact not just its reputation but also place lives at stake. Coupled by limited funds to spend on cybersecurity (with a higher preference to spend instead on medical supplies and improvement of medical

systems) and a lack of cyber education amongst the healthcare workers, means that the healthcare industry will continue to see cyberattacks for some time to come.

Check Point Infinity ELA Healthcare depends on innovative solutions and services, and any disruption can endanger lives and livelihoods. What actions can CISOs take to better ensure the protection of their organizations?

One answer is to consider the use of a consolidated security platform designed to guard against today’s critical zero-day and fifth-generation threats across the network, cloud, IoT, and endpoints. Consolidation is also a key benefit to cutting complexity to reduce cyber risks, a prediction Check Point Research also foresaw as part of their 2023 predictions. With the cyber-skills gap growing by over 25% in 2022, and organisations having more complex, distributed networks and cloud deployments, as an outcome of the pandemic, security leaders need a consolidation strategy to simplify their security operations, provide full end-to-end visibility and improve their defences. Without this, threat actors will continue to exploit weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Check Point Infinity architecture leverages Check Point’s ThreatCloud, a real-time global threat intelligence platform that monitors networks around the world for emerging threats and vulnerabilities and is based on a flexible ELA (enterprise license agreement) that can be tailored to an organization’s specific requirements and individual application priorities. Infinity ELA’s simplified pricing structure is clear and streamlined, allowing an organization to deploy security solutions gradually and optimize costs.

Figure 1: Top 3 targeted industries. Attacks on healthcare grew 60% YoY

Dr. Amith Singhee sets the strategy for the Research division in IBM India to fuel growth for IBM’s products and services. This includes foundational research in Hybrid Cloud, AI, Quantum Computing, Cybersecurity, and Sustainability.

As CTO, he engages with the regional ecosystem in academia and industry to represent IBM’s technology vision.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a key area of research at IBM Research India. In a conversation with Enterprise IT World Dr Amith discusses different aspect of NLP.

How is IBM leading the way in advancing breakthroughs in this field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

In recent decades, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced tremendous scientific advancements — from vast improvements in processing power and computational efficiency to the emergence of more flexible and reusable AI systems that succeed in a broader range of application and domain areas. As NLP enables computers to process human language in the form of text or voice data, our endeavour has been that NLP models must deliver high accuracy, are explainable, and trustworthy. Our advancements in NLP are also focused on enabling users to easily and effectively customize NLP for their needs without special training or complex layers of guidance and information to learn.

What are some NLP areas that IBM has as service offerings?

IBM has multiple products offering a multitude of NLP capabilities, ranging from fundamental ones like Named Entity Recognition (NER), dependency parser, and part-of-speech tagger across languages via Watson NLP, to building efficient chatbots via Watson Assistant or information search from documents via Watson discovery.

Very recently, Foundational Models (FM) like GPT-3, Instruct-GPT, Chat-GPT, etc. are the latest advancements in NLP, which as the name suggests, means having a model which can be extended for multiple downstream tasks with very less data. However, what’s important for its practical usage and adoption by the industry is how to use these FMs with enterprise data, keeping in mind, extending them with their own curated data for commercial purposes has legal blocks. This is where IBM leads the way in developing infrastructure that enables clients to build and deploy their own FM, and also provides a technology stack to use and extend the FM to multiple downstream applications. IBM is engaging with clients globally and making significant contributions to advance open source

DR. AMITH SINGHEE DIRECTOR, IBM RESEARCH INDIA AND

technology in this space, apart from advancing its own products and services, as a holistic approach to develop this infrastructure and stack. This is going to be a significant enabler in the coming days for businesses across industries to realize the full benefits of AI by leveraging more general AI technology in the form of Foundation Models.

we believe it can deliver better performance at a lower cost compared to building each model from scratch. For instance, in its first seven years, IBM Watson covered 12 languages, however, using foundation models it jumped to cover 25 languages in about a year.

For a decade or so now, we have seen how deep learning models have continued to grow and perform incredible feats. But, building and maintaining very large and complex models for each task we want to perform is unsustainable and expensive. To address this challenge, we are adapting these complex and powerful models to support many subsequent use cases, each of which is much faster and far less expensive to support. This new class of models is known in the industry as foundation models (FM) and

Another critical problem of generative models which limits their application in industry is hallucination: they tend to hallucinate and provide factually incorrect information and generating HAP (Hate, Abuse, and Profane) content. At IBM, we are actively working on inventing new AI paradigms to control and possibly negate such hallucinations and intelligent debiasing techniques to detect and handle HAP generation. All of these are active research challenges that have a direct impact on its industrial application. That’s why IBM is deeply engaged with ecosystems globally, and in India with the industry and government, with efforts to bring awareness, best practices, and tools around trustworthy and responsible AI.

CTO IBM INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA

“Enterprises need AI that understand the unique language of the industry and business, and that can extract insights from complex documents and data – without requiring sophisticated data science skill.”

Can you throw some light on how IBM is working towards addressing the complex NLP challenges for AI?

IBM

OUR FOCUS IS TO ENABLE EASY AND EFFECTIVE CUSTOMIZATION OF NLP

Thirdly, collecting, labeling, and auditing real data is expensive and no matter, how much you collect, they never fully capture the complexity of the physical world. In addition to that, healthcare records, financial data, and content on the web are all increasingly restricted due to privacy and copyright protection. Real data also comes with baked-in biases that can reinforce or amplify existing inequities. That’s why we are betting on synthetic data to fill in gaps where real data are in short supply. Synthetic data are computergenerated examples that can speed up the training of AI models, protect sensitive data, improve accuracy, or find and mitigate bias and security weaknesses.

Lastly, while AI systems are quickly evolving to do more across business and society, challenges remain to create systems that can demonstrate agility, flexibility, and a real understanding of the topics and problems they’re asked to solve and exhibit increased common sense. That’s why we are exploring new ways that can help AI exhibit human-like common sense, infer mental states, predict future actions, and even work with human partners.

A key metric for “learning more with less” is how to optimize the effort to bring NLP systems to a level of performance and trustworthiness to be useful in an enterprise setting and subsequently how quickly one can bring business value for internal and external users from it. For a long time, a proven strategy has been to start with a model pre-trained on existing public domain data, where the pre-training does most of the heavy lifting. Such pre-trained models are then finetuned for enterprise-specific tasks, assuming such adjustment does not need that huge amount of data. Recent innovations suggest that large language models can be customized with much less data if it is shown strategically chosen illustrated examples, a technique known as in-context learning with prompt tuning. Of course, all of these can further benefit from known NLP paradigms such as multi-task training, and adversarial learning to alleviate the need for task or domain-specific enterprise data. To that end, related NLP tasks like knowledge graph extraction, reasoning also play a vital role in conjunction with neural methods to make the most from less data.

For example, machine translation, creating chatbots, and multilingual question answering are a few examples of the most widely used NLP technologies. Therefore, the business segments dealing with human-computer interaction rely on diverse NLP capabilities in the AI journey to drive efficiencies in the supply chain, advertising efforts, or improve customer or employee engagement and thus are usually the first ones to adopt NLP advances. According to the 2022 IBM Morning Consult AI Adoption report, over 40% of IT professionals in India report that their company is using or considering using NLP solutions for business development (49%), security (45%), and customer care (44%). The report also states that a majority of IT professionals in India at organizations currently deploying AI say their company is using AI to improve customer service agent productivity (54%) and streamline how customers or employees find or resolve frequently asked questions (51%). There are also examples of more niche technologies that are specific to certain correlated segments. For example, no/low code program generation is mainly adopted by the software development segment, natural language understanding of task descriptions is needed in automation segment.

Which business areas/operations can NLP have a disruptive impact?

Enterprises need AI that understand the unique language of the industry and business, and that can extract insights from complex documents and data – without requiring sophisticated data science skills; work in many languages and easily integrate with an enterprise’s knowledge bank. IBM is driving a multi-faceted research agenda in the area of enterprise NLP that solves these challenges and allows clients to “learn more with less”. This idea is defined by three overarching objectives of NLP systems: Be adaptable to understand and process individualized needs; deliver solutions faster and enable trust and ease of use.

Another aspect of “learning with less” involves the drastic reduction in time to take research innovations to end users - be it customers or own workforce. It allows end users to directly interact with technology through NL utterances. When an enterprise NLP system comes online, users can access content and knowledge much faster through natural language, which makes the enterprise more agile as employees can learn fast with less effort and time.

Which business segments have widely adopted NLP?

Natural language processing is the driving force behind machine intelligence in many modern real-world applications from spam detection, virtual agents, text summarization, insights, hiring, sentiment analysis, and so on.

Some of the business areas where NLP already has had a big impact are - customer care; product search and business intelligence to name a few. Another sector where NLP made a huge impact is back-office services which benefit from document processing. Some examples include invoice processing, billing, and quote to cash like automation services. In fact, with the new advances in large language models, we have seen a tremendous promise of storing and recalling generic world knowledge or with some curated training, from customized corpus knowledge. Such systems can be foreseen as the much-needed highly intelligent AI assistant which facilitates human-in-the-loop applications in solving real-world information search.

Foundation Models and generative AI have the potential to dramatically accelerate AI adoption and disrupt AI applications. Foundation models will make it much easier for businesses to dive in and efficient AI-driven automation will enable more companies to deploy AI in a wider range of mission-critical situations. Our goal is to bring the power of foundation models to every enterprise in a frictionless hybrid-cloud environment.

And generative modeling will dramatically accelerate how we come up with new ideas around the discovery of things like new materials, drugs, climate solutions, and more.

How enterprise NLP allows businesses to “learn more with less”?

and other digital workloads. This places additional demands on cooling systems, which must protect these hot-running, often mission-critical workloads. Read Chilled Water Data Center

Cooling for Non-Raised Floor Applications to learn more.

Prefabricated

VERTIV RELEASES WHITE PAPERS ADDRESSING THE CHANGING DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE

ertiv has published three new white papers on critical data center infrastructure topics. The papers cover prefabricated modular design innovation, non-raised floor cooling strategies, and the potential for fuel cells as an alternative to traditional diesel generators. Global data center operators must balance growth and the need to add capacity quickly with the corresponding increases in energy and water consumption as they build out increasingly complex, hybrid networks leveraging enterprise, cloud, and

edge applications to meet skyrocketing consumer demand. The new Vertiv white papers address these issues as well as some future strategies that data center operators should consider.

Water Cooling Solutions

For decades, it was widely assumed that data center operators needed to use raised floor environments to allow for more efficient cooling of technology. However, data centers are becoming denser, with more compute being placed in densely packed areas to support big-data analytics

Modular Data Centers

Vertiv anticipates a continuing shift toward greener infrastructure in the form of prefabricated modular data center designs. Standardization will become the default approach not only for the enterprise, but also for hyperscale and the network’s edge, ranging from modular components such as power and cooling modules and skids to full-fledged prefabricated facilities. Read The Next Step in Prefabrication: Hybrid Design in Hyperscale Data Centers in its entirety to learn more.

In 2022, Vertiv was recognized as a Sample Vendor for micro data center solutions in two Gartner® Hype Cycle™ reports for Edge Computing and Midsize Enterprises, and in the Gartner report, Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Communications.

Better Fuel Efficiencies

As hyperscalers seek greater speed and efficiency, hydrogen fuel cells will be considered as a promising alternative to diesel generators. Vertiv is taking the lead in advancing the effective use of fuel cells to help operators meet their carbon neutral targets. Read Evaluating the Potential of Fuel Cells for Data Center Power to learn more.

Vertiv announced their top data center trends for 2023 in November, with predictions including increased regulation; wide-spread adoption of modular and prefabricated infrastructure; use of alternatives to diesel generators; liquid cooling for high density racks applications; and a focus on edge infrastructure to support the latency and density challenges of 5G and the metaverse.

With a vision to boost innovation, the state-of-the art engineering facility will support Vertiv product development and next generation Vertiv products

Shrirang Deshpande, Country Head – Strategic Programs, Vertiv

“Focusing on sustainability and, making data centers more energy efficient has been a priority for the industry for many years now.”