October issue

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FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs. OCTOBER 2020

SUCCESS OF CYBERSECURITY

IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE AS THE ANALOGY SAYS

RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL SHIPS

With Covid-19, Digital Transformation has become the major project for all CIOs and CISOs and Cybersecurity has become the first point of consideration too.

Today, SASE based solutions are also becoming the technology of choice for the Cyber Security.

Enterprise IT World had a frank discussion with Nick Savvides, Strategic Business Director, APAC, Forcepoint about the entire market dynamics and advantage of Forcepoint.

P/22

REMOTE WORK: IS YOUR BUSINESS’S IT ENVIRONMENT READY FOR THE CHALLENGES CONFRONTING THE NEW NORMAL?

GUEST ARTICLE P-26

FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs.

PRESENTS

SECURITY

SY M P O S I U M AND

CYBER SENTINEL AWARDS 2020

THEME DECODING CYBER SECURITY AMID PANDEMIC 19TH DECEMBER 2020

2:00 PM to 5:00 PM

www.enterpriseitworld.com

EDITOR’S LETTER

LOCKDOWN 2.0 FUTURE OF WORK

Hello Friends.

INot only the cases of Covid-19 are growing faster in India but in the world too the number is growing faster. Looking at the situation, worldwide countries are considering lockdown again. Even the European Union has already started imposing lockdown.

Other countries are watching the development and thinking of how to manage the economy and business and do the needful.

Now the situation is how to continue work and how to manage business continuity. The predicament of the organizations is quite visible whether to bring people to office or allow them to continue working from home, etc. The biggest challenge is the security.

Remote work opens a big chink in the armour is the security and data leakage – possibility of security compromise is from two fronts – external and internal. Companies though have DLP in place but if concerted effort can be done the systemic leak can happen. Similarly, possibility of cyberattacks becomes higher. On top of this poor wireless connectivity and workplace. Not every household has the proper work place. At the same time wireless coverage in the residential areas is not that great.

NEXT MONTH SPECIAL

The CIOs and CISOs are in two states. One side they are confident that nothing is going to happen to their guarded assets on the other side, when the cases are surfacing they are facing a chilled spine.

As per Sophos research 82% of Indian companies have been attacked during last 6 months with Delhi being worst hit by ransomware followed by Bangalore, Kolkata and Mumbai. The trend shows that Delhi has organizations which are least bothered about the security.

So it is double attack on the organizations. One side organizations are not able to work properly.

On the other side the attackers are lurking to attack.

Attack on Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Haldiram, etc. are just the manifestation of the what the Ransomware can do to other companies. Of course no one knows how the penetration is happening.

So what the IT and Security leaders need to do is very peculiar to their organization. In order to understand that we are also on a pursuit. We are bringing in a lot of webinars and events where we are inviting the thought leaders and subject matter experts who come and speak about this.

I believe only talking to each other and understanding from the experience from others would help apart from investing on right technologies.

But the fact remains clear that the future of work is really Hybrid.

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

COVER STORY

SUPPLEMENT

DC WORLD

QUOTES FROM TOP CIOS

The next issue is dedicated to SDN & SDN WAN OPPORTUNITY. We would like to take feedback from the CIOs and OEMs and create our judgment on the same.

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

PLUS

Interviews and Case Studies

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

Send in your inputs to sanjay@accentinfomedia.com 4

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

CONTENTS V O L U M E 0 5 | I S S U E 0 7 | OCTOBER 2020 | W W W . E N T E R P R I S E I T W O R L D . C O M

FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs.

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

SECURITY

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EDITORIAL OFFICE Delhi: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, New Delhi-110016,

MAJORITY OF INDIAN COMPANIES REPORTED OVER 25% JUMP IN CYBER THREATS WHILE WORKING FROM HOME: CISCO INTERVIEW: /18 ServiceNow is working with customers to accelerate digital transformation and create new ways of working

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

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

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

Editorial~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 04 News~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 06

21 GUEST ARTICLE

Phone: 91-11-41657670 / 46151993 info@

INTERVIEW

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26

22

GUEST ARTICLE

INDUSTRY STUDY

DIJAM PANIGRAHI

NICK SAVVIDES

HEWITT LEE

ASHWANI RAWAT

How Today’s Manufacturers Are Moving Automation Technologies To The Cloud

Success of Cybersecurity is Good for Everyone as the Analogy says Rising Tide Lifts all Ships

Remote Work: Is your business’s IT environment ready for the challenges confronting the new normal?

Identification of Catchment Areas via Mobility Data

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD

ROUND UP

Enterprise IT World Honored Global CMOs B Y S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N FO M E D I A . C O M

Enterprise IT World honored 500 Global CMOs and Marketing Leaders at Global CMO Summit and Awards 2020. Organized virtually, the Global CMO Summit and Awards 2020 witnessed the convergence of the best marketing minds including CMOs and Senior Marketing Leaders of the global IT & ITES industry alongside the professors of marketing from premium B-Schools and authors.

World’s most prestigious award for Marketers, the Global CMO Leadership Award recognized the contribution of CMOs and Marketing Leaders who played a key role in aligning marketing strategies with business goals, and succeeded in contributing to the growth of the organization through sustainable competitive advantage.

This is the first and only Global Award of this kind,

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ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

where CMOs and Marketing leaders from 25 countries were recognized.

The Jury comprised of Industry Veterans, Academia, and Thought Leaders. A rigorous and independent process combined with detailed analysis was the base for the awards. It also included the contenders’ contribution to growth, the financial performance of the organization, product, and service innovation among others. The research team evaluated around 2,500 Global CMOs through primary and secondary research, post which the jury process was initiated to arrive at the final list of 500 winners.

The Awardees comprised CMOs, Marketing Directors, VPs and Marketing Heads from companies into IT, ITES, Telecom, Datacenter, Cloud and Managed Services.

D ATA BRIEFINING

Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 4% in 2021

Source: Gartner

ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

SIS Group Now Equipped with IceWarp’s Email Communication Solution

The SIS Group, renowned for its security services both in India and Australia with diverse solutions across the security spectrum has tied up with IceWarp for its email collaboration solution.

With more than 2,40,000 employees, and a huge database of customers; its backend processes and operations are both complex and huge. For a Security services management company like SIS Group, it becomes a challenge to protect its sensitive information for its operations. The association with IceWarp would aid the organization to function more efficiently and effectively without security

CIO

8

concerns.

Speaking on the deployment, Pramod Sharda – CEO, IceWarp India & Middle East quoted, “We are delighted to expand our engagement with SIS. The cumulative growth of our clientele acts as a constant reminder of us moving closer to our vision. A secure solution for every communication process is the need of the hour. We at IceWarp offer our customers ease of use, security, and efficiency through our complete solution for all their office work in a single window, without the requirement of a third-party application”.

Veeam Acquires Kasten to Accelerate Protection of Kubernetes-Native Workloads

Veeam Software has acquired Kasten, the market leader for Kubernetes Backup and Disaster Recovery, in a cash and stock transaction valued at $150M. According to 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, nearly threequarters of organizations are currently using or planning to use Kubernetes within the next two years.[i] Veeam believes this shift creates a massive opportunity for the future of data protection and the acquisition reinforces its commitment to support customers’ business transformation to future-ready architectures. With this new acquisition, Veeam will integrate Kasten into its marketleading Cloud Data Management platform for modern data protection and radically simplify data management for enterprises.

As applications using microservice-based architectures have quickly gained traction in the enterprise, this shift has established a new segment of application development methodology known as DevOps.

EVENTS

10 NOV 2020

12 NOV 2020

26 NOV 2020

Time: 11 AM

Time: 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM

Time: 9:30 PM - 12 PM (GMT+8)

Canon Middle East partner expansion and virtual roundtable event.

Future of Work Amid Hybrid Work Regime: This event is about understanding what is the future of work amid Covid-19

This LIVE online session will focus on Cloud and data center technology adoption, best practices and strategy for the Singapore market.

THIS IS ORGANIZED BY CANON INDIA MIDDLE EAST

THIS IS BY ACCENT INFO MEDIA

SINGAPORE CLOUD & DATACENTER DIGITAL SUMMIT

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

FireEye Introduces Mandiant Advantage

FireEye announced Mandiant Advantage: Threat Intelligence – the first SaaS-based offering by Mandiant Solutions to combine its Threat Intelligence with data from the frontlines of its industry-leading cyber incident response engagements, delivered through an easy-to-use management platform.

“For years, Mandiant Threat Intelligence has led the industry with the highest quality reporting that comprehensively details the threat environment, enabling organizations to prioritize threats and manage cyber security risk,” said Sandra Joyce, Executive Vice President of Mandiant Threat Intelligence at FireEye. “We are now making emerging intelligence accessible to all defenders as it is discovered, regardless of the technology they have deployed. Now customers of all sizes have unprecedented access to the depth and breadth of threat intelligence Mandiant offers, appropriate to their budget and unique needs.”

Mandiant Threat Intelligence provides organizations with information on active

QUICK BYTE ON

threats as they emerge and is the first generally available SaaS offering on the new Mandiant Advantage platform. Mandiant Solutions plans to introduce a family of Mandiant Advantage SaaS offerings to augment and automate global security teams with controlsagnostic, actionable breach, adversary, operational and machine intelligence data from the company’s global deployment of product telemetry and the Mandiant front lines.

With more than 300 intelligence analysts and researchers, and more than 200,000 hours in 2019 responding to breaches, Mandiant knows more about attackers and the latest threats than any other company in the security industry. Now with Mandiant Advantage: Threat Intelligence, security defenders can access these insights faster and in ways never shared before. By extending this timely look into what’s happening across multiple Mandiant frontlines, organizations can more easily prioritize the threats that matter to them most right now.

S/HE SAID IT

MR. GAURANG SINHA

DIRECTOR, GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY, FLOCK

“We welcome the introduction of the simplified guidelines by the government on remote work for the Indian ITeS industry. These guidelines not only reduce the compliance burden for these companies, but also encourage them to invest in the next paradigm of how work will happen.”

“Software for the solar industry has emerged as a key area where artificial intelligence is increasingly being adopted to deliver solutions considered hitherto impossible.”

R A H U L S A N K H E , C O - FO U N D E R , S E N S E H AW K

SECURITY

Nimbus Achieves Success with Cloud Backup Powered by Asigra Asigra and Malaysia-based Nimbus Cloud Services, a provider of public and private cloud services, data protection, IT security, etc., today announced the successful deployment of Asigra-powered cloud backup services throughout Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Nimbus is a next generation cloud services provider, anchored by a complete Cloud Management Platform to ease transition to the Cloud.

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

Tenable Unveils New Lumin Capabilities to Swiftly Predict and Address Cyber Risk

DigitalOcean Launches App Platform to Simplify Application Development in the Cloud The newly launched DigitalOcean App Platform, a new platform as a service (PaaS) offering that automates infrastructure management so developers can deploy their code to production in just a few clicks. The new offering advances the company’s managed services strategy to simplify cloud computing so developers as well as small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can focus more time creating software that changes the world.

“With millions of businesses started in the cloud each year, developers need a simple, fast and scalable way to ship the apps that power their ideas,” said Apurva Joshi, VP of Product, DigitalOcean. “With App Platform, we built upon DigitalOcean’s proven technology and signature simplicity to provide a fully managed experience that allows developers to stop

EXECUTIVE

worrying about infrastructure and get their apps to market faster. And, since it runs entirely on DigitalOcean, App Platform makes it easy for businesses to keep costs low and optimize their resources as they grow.”

App Platform maximizes productivity by letting developers deploy code directly from their GitHub repositories. Developers also can choose to re-deploy automatically when updates are pushed to the source repo.

Built on DigitalOcean Kubernetes, App Platform brings the power, scale, and flexibility of Kubernetes to customers without exposing them to any of its complexity. Additionally, since it is built on open standards, App Platform provides customers with more visibility into the underlying infrastructure than in a typical closed PaaS environment.

Tenable announced new Tenable Lumin innovations that empower customers to align business objectives with cybersecurity initiatives. The latest enhancements to the Cyber Exposure Management Platform enable organizations to predict which vulnerabilities pose the greatest business risk and act with confidence to effectively reduce risk across their modern, distributed environments.

As the performance of our global economy increasingly depends on the uptime and security of digital infrastructure, cyber risk has become inherent to business risk. But the modern attack surface has expanded with new assets — from cloud to IoT to operational technology — and CISOs struggle to understand their true level of exposure and address risk based on business priorities.

The following capabilities announced today will help CISOs and their security teams address the challenges of managing, measuring and reducing cyber risk in modern environments: Remediation Maturity helps security teams measure their speed and efficiency of remediating vulnerabilities and compares them against external peers and Tenable best practices. Remediation Maturity is now generally available in Tenable Lumin.

MOVEMENT Ravinder Arora, former CISO IRIS Software has joined Infogain as the Global Head of Information Security (CISO).

10 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

DigitalOcean announced that Hilary Schneider, CEO of Shutterfly, Inc., and Warren

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Appoints Amer Warsi as Channel Leader for India

Rupesh Pawar Joined Universal Sompo General Insurance as CISO

Former Salesforce Executive – Renzo Taal to Lead UiPath EMEA Region

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

BOOK

SHELF

Fall Again Rise Again GLOBAL UPDATE

BY

SANDEEP AGGARWAL

Commvault Announces Metallic Cloud Storage Service Commvault announced the availability of Metallic Cloud Storage Service, a fully integrated cloud storage target for Commvault Backup and Recovery software and HyperScale™ X appliance. Metallic Cloud Storage Service brings together brings together technology from Commvault and Microsoft Azure for security and scale, with single pane of glass management through the Commvault Command Center.

“The need to leverage the cloud is only accelerating, and having simple, direct access to cloud storage as a primary or secondary backup target allows us to facilitate our customers’ journeys to the cloud while also providing a critical step in ransomware readiness with an air-gapped cloud copy,” said Manoj Nair, General Manager Commvault. “The introduction of Metallic Cloud Storage Service built on Microsoft Azure, within Commvault Complete software and HyperScale X can transform the way companies adopt cloud storage with significant ease, while reducing risks, controlling costs, and providing data management and protection in-and-out of the cloud, all through one interface.”

Metallic Cloud Storage Service with Commvault data management software also goes beyond simplified cloud data management and reduced overhead to provide critical layered data security and resiliency against an ever-growing number of threats and vulnerabilities in hybrid cloud environments. For example, the FBI’s Cyber Division states the number of complaints about cyberattacks is as many as 4,000 a day, a 400% increase from what they were seeing pre-coronavirus.

“Metallic Cloud Storage protects against cyberattacks by combining the underlying security of Microsoft Azure and the encrypted authentication and monitoring within Commvault’s data management platform, that provides secure, air-gapped and immutable copies of customer data,” said Jürgen Willis, Partner Director of Program Management, Azure Storage, Microsoft. “As companies look to cloud to accelerate their digital transformation, reduce CAPEX, minimize risk, and improve remote work, Metallic Cloud Storage Service can help deliver against the most demanding data protection needs of today’s hybrid world.”

PRICE

RS. 207.00 (HARDCOVER) WHERE:

AMAZON.IN

About The Book This is an intimate and moving autobiography of one of India’s most successful start-up entrepreneurs. If ever there was anyone whose life could be described as nothing but a roller-coaster, it is that of Sandeep Aggarwal.

Key Feature ‘Fall again, rise again’ are words that sum up the entire life of the founder of two billion-dollar companies and shopclues. Sandeep’s story is that of a middle-class boy who could not speak English for much of his school life but dreamt to make it big someday. A young professional who went to the US and couldn’t get a job but eventually became a sought-after wall Street analyst.

Matrix Wins the Time2Leap R&D Award for Its Face Recognition Device

Matrix has bagged the Time2Leap Awards for Research & Development for designing and manufacturing its Face Recognition device. This award is to promote MSME and Start-up’s to scale

up and showcase their key innovations to global markets for considerable impact on economic and social development of India. Matrix’s Face Recognition device is based on cutting-edge Machine Learning technology where the device learns to detect and identify a human face based on intelligent and artificial video analytics (IVA).

On winning this prestigious award, Ganesh Jivani, Chief Executive of Matrix said, “We are happy to win this award for “Research & Development of Matrix’s Face Recognition Device.” We thank the jury for recognizing Matrix for our technologies, products and solutions that are

indigenously designed and manufactured in India. Matrix offers cutting-edge physical security and telecom solutions in more than 50 countries including many first-world technologically advanced nations. With 250+ R&D engineers, world-class infrastructure and processes, Matrix is committed to designing and manufacturing cutting-edge technology solutions for modern organizations. This award is a validation of Matrix’s innovation, design and manufacturing capabilities and will go a long way in motivating us towards building world-class technology solutions.”

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

11

ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

(C-SOC) is a great step forward by RBI: Brijesh Miglani of Forcepoint “This is a great step forward by RBI to strengthen the cybersecurity infrastructure of urban cooperative banks (UCBs) and will help enhance the security posture of UCBs in having mature cyber security practices against emerging cybersecurity threats. The most significant part of the new Technology Vision document is the fact that UCBs will now have to appoint Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and that boards will become responsible for cybersecurity.

The Cyber Security Framework for UCBs talks about setting up of a Cyber Security Operation Center (C-SOC). The SOC provides a setup for multiple technologies for better incident management, predictive and behavior analysis, and automation to help banks detect attacks at an early stage. This will help protect UCBs from cybersecurity breaches, particularly given that UCBs hold multiple data related to personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card industry (PCI).

To address these real-world hacks and breaches, UCBs should adopt a behaviour-based data protection approach that focuses on data and user behavior analytics.

Altair Acquires M-Base Engineering + Software GmbH Altair acquired M-Base Engineering + Software GmbH, a leading international supplier of material database and material information systems, with a focus on plastics. The acquisition of M-Base will allow Altair to offer the most comprehensive, high-fidelity plastics database available on the market, which will directly connect with Altair’s powerful solvers.

One of the most important decisions in product development is the selection of materials for production. Altair has been investing significantly in the area of material modeling for several years. The acquisition of M-Base is an important additional step to deliver comprehensive material information and infrastructure to predict and optimize product performance through simulation. M-Base’s offering covers the complete lifecycle of material data, from testing and test evaluation to computer-aided engineering (CAE) interfaces, with a focus on plastics.

M-Base brings to Altair first-rate plastics material data supplied directly by material producers, deep knowledge in material database technology, and plastics material data preparation from raw data to data consumable by designers and engineers.

NEC Technologies India is Now NEC Corporation India NEC Technologies India today announced its rebranding to NEC Corporation India (NEC), effective from September 21, 2020.

The shift reflects the company’s strong commitment to the country and India’s growing importance to the NEC Group’s global business.

NEC has plans to expand the portfolio and depth of its solutions and services offered both in the Indian market and globally. Supported by a strong and talented workforce of 6,000 employees in India, the company now serves as a global delivery hub for offshore support & product development, pursuing further growth in the domestic market.

Commenting on the occasion, Aalok Kumar, President & CEO, NEC Corpora12 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

tion India, said, “2020 marks an important year in the execution of our future business strategy to drive global growth trajectory for the NEC Group. We are promoting an ‘India Go Big’ initiative by leveraging our solution development and delivery capability from India to aid global business growth. The name change is a result of a rebranding effort designed to mirror the focused approach and our commitment to the Indian market.”

NEC started operations in India in the 1950’s and expanded its business from telecommunications to public safety, logistics, transportation, retail, finance, unified communication and IT platforms, serving across governments, businesses as well as individuals.

DIGEST 6 INDIAN STARTUPS TO LOOK OUT FOR Although this year started on a discouraging note, some resilient and innovative companies are pushing through and achieving impressive results.

This article will bring to you six Indian startups that you should be looking out for right now.

These startups are promising and are already making an impact in their respective fields.

GAMES2WIN Games2Win is a startup founded in 2005 and based in Mumbai. The company offers games that can be found on some of the most significant app stores from Google, Microsoft, and Apple. The startup also has an impressive portfolio of in-game ad networks, games’ social networks, and gaming platforms with tens of millions of users.

Between 2007 and 2013, Games2Win surprised the world when it raised $15 million in three rounds of funding and used this to expand its operations and provide better services.

MECH MOCHA Mech Mocha is a Bangalore-based startup with innovative ideas. The company was founded in 2013 by alumni from IIIT Gwalior.

The principal founder of the company is Arpita Kapoor. One year after it was founded, it raised funding and seed funding from a wide range of investors, including Devendra Parulekar, Ravi Trivedi, Sanjay Mehta, Flipkart, and Blume Ventures. The funding was up to $1 million.

Mech Mocha prides itself on its in-house technology and analysis of the Indian market to customize games for the average Indian person.

JALEXUS Jalexus is a startup with great potential. The company manages online casinos and their licenses and online presence. At the same time, it offers innovative gaming solutions to its clients and impresses its dedicated fan base with unique and fun casinos.

Jalexus recently launched Jungleraja online casino, an excellent site for online gambling.

The casino offers a wide range of slots, table games, live games, and more to players, as well as a wide range of payment methods.

It also holds a Curacao license, assuring players of its legitimacy and fairness.

JETSYNTHESYS This gaming development company is a part of the Jet Line Group. The startup was founded by Rajan Navani in 2014 and has since then grown in leaps and bounds.

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

MANAGEMENT

MANTRA

“Technology now allows people to connect anytime, anywhere, to anyone in the world, from almost any device.

NTT Ltd. Expands its Hyperscale Data Center Footprint in India

Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Technologies

Radware Partners with Airtel

Radware and Bharti Airtel announced a partnership under which Radware’s Cloud DDoS Protection, Cloud WAF, and Bot Manager cloud security services will be offered to enterprise customers by Airtel.

As part of the agreement, traffic from Airtel’s customers will be secured via a new India-based scrubbing service center, which is hosted by Airtel’s Nxtra Data.

“India has been strategic region for Radware for last 15 years. By setting up Scrubbing Center in India, Radware now brings Cloud-as-a-Service leading technology to our customers & partners “ said Nikhil Karan Taneja, VP & MD – India, Saarc, ME & GSI at Radware. “By launching a scrubbing center in India, our customer’s traffic will be processed within the country for DDoS,

WAF & BOT Manager when consuming it as a Service from Cloud with no impact to performance and in-line with the upcoming Data Residency law.

This will help us to serve all verticals & sectors including Govt., PSU’s & BFSI” Harmeen Mehta, CIO & Head of Cloud and Security business, Bharti Airtel said, “As businesses undergo digital transformation, their security requirements are also evolving given the ever changing, increasingly complex threats. We are delighted to partner with Radware and offer their solutions to customers in India as part of our Airtel Secure portfolio. We are also happy to host Radware’s new scrubbing center in India and the facility will bring new security capabilities to customers in the region.”

“Locally available Managed Cloud Services will ensure consistent security effectiveness across multi / Hybrid cloud customer environment and minimal efforts & operational efficiency for customers. Partnership with Airtel will act as force multiplier for our Business expansion the the Region” said Yoav Gazelle, VP – Worldwide Sales at Radware.

NTT Ltd.’s Global Data Centers division announced the expansion of its line of data center facilities with the launch of a new high-density and hyperscale data center in Mumbai, the financial capital of India. The Mumbai 7 Data Center operates with 375,000 sq.ft of colocation space, and will offer the capacity to host 5000 racks and over 30 MW of load. The new Mumbai 7 Data Center facility will expand NTT Ltd’s data center capacity (server room) in India by 30 percent.

NTT plans to invest around 2 billion dollars on the expansion of data centers, networks, and solar power projects in India.

The Mumbai 7 Data Center is the third hyperscale data center in Chandivali campus and is well connected by fiber from all four sides.

Together NTT’s Mumbai hub of data centers makes the Chandivali campus India’s first and largest operational hyperscale Data Center Park, which totals over 1,000,000 sq.ft., 13,000 racks and 100 MW of load capacity.

Druva Achieves AWS Digital Workplace Competency Status Druva has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Digital Workplace Competency status.

Today’s widespread remote working is expected to continue for the foreseeable future and according to Gartner, the endpoint install base is expected to grow by 16 percent in 2020.* In this environment, data is being increasingly created and stored on SaaS applications, as well as devices, as organizations deploy new tools for remote collaboration.

As an APN Advanced Technology Partner, Druva is able to deliver a high-performing, intelligent data protection platform for these environments that leverages the latest AWS innovations to bring customers value faster. Combined with Druva’s extensive workload coverage, secure

architecture and compliance support, it’s an ideal solution for supporting today’s remote organizations. “As businesses navigate unprecedented challenges in 2020, they need better solutions to enable their workforce, protect critical data on SaaS applications and devices, and strengthen business resilience,” said Thomas Been, Chief Marketing Officer, Druva.

“As organizations adapt to this changing landscape, Druva is dedicated to helping advance their digital transformation initiatives and protect their rapidly growing data footprints.

With a platform built on AWS that can be accessed from anywhere and deployed in as little as 15 minutes, we are proud to be one of the first AWS Partners to achieve the AWS Digital Workplace Competency.”

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

ESDS Awarded as India’s Best Workplace for Women 2020

Fortinet Named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure Fortinet has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner September 2020 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, placing higher in ability to execute and further in completeness of vision than its position the previous year.

Fortinet Delivers the Industry’s Most Flexible SD-WAN Solution Fortinet continues to drive innovation of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to deliver an organically developed solution that consolidates advanced routing, self-healing SD-WAN capabilities, and intuitive orchestration with the industry’s most flexible security options via integrated next-generation firewall or SASE-based cloud-delivered security.

Fortinet’s dedication to SD-WAN innovation has also resulted in the industry’s most extensive and secure SD-WAN solution, able to be deployed across the home, branch, campus and

multi-cloud. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN helps customers realize significant benefits, including: • Better user experience: Fortinet customers can dynamically learn and overcome WAN impairments at all edges through comprehensive selfhealing SD-WAN capabilities, which are powered by purpose-built ASICs for higher performance. AI and MLpowered application learning provides visibility and control to deliver the best application performance possible.

• Reduced costs and complexity: Fortinet’s Security-driven Networking approach converges networking and security into a unified Secure SD-WAN solution with centralized orchestration, enabling customers to reduce point products and operational complexity and achieve the best possible total cost of ownership (TCO).

ESDS Software Solution has been awarded as “India’s Best Workplaces for Women 2020” under the Top 50 category, certified by “Great Place to work” organization. ESDS has created a platform of equality and empowerment for the esteemed women employees with 0% wage gap between men and women.

This year there was a participation of 852 organizations which represented voices of over 4,59,386 women employees across 17 different industries.

The credibility of ESDS’s work culture lies with its Mission People HR Team which strives to create a culture of safety and happiness for their employees through its people engagement activities, training programs, webinars, learning sessions from legends to enhance leadership skills and ensure their talent, competence, skills and certifications. Every ESDSian has been supportive and nurturing towards uplifting the culture of equality for every woman colleague.

The Great Place to Work recognition holds a prestigious relevance as it builds pride and commitment amongst the potential employees of the company and also increases awareness of the organization culture. This is an acknowledgement which sizes the visibility of the brand and its stellar reputation. It also helps the company to stand different from the crowd of Employer Brand Recognitions in the world.

VMware and NVIDIA to Enable Next-Gen Hybrid Cloud Architecture and Bring AI to Every Enterprise At VMworld 2020, VMware and NVIDIA announced a broad partnership to deliver both an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI and a new architecture for data center, cloud and edge that uses NVIDIA® DPUs (data processing units) to support existing and next-generation applications.

Through this collaboration, the rich set of AI software available on the NVIDIA NGC hub will be integrated into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Tanzu. This will help accelerate AI adoption, enabling enterprises 14 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

to extend existing infrastructure for AI, manage all applications with a single set of operations, and deploy AI-ready infrastructure where the data resides, across the data center, cloud and edge.

Additionally, as part of Project Monterey separately announced today, the companies will partner to deliver an architecture for the hybrid cloud based on SmartNIC technology, including NVIDIA’s programmable NVIDIA BlueField-2.

The combination of VMware Cloud Foundation and NVIDIA BlueField-2 will offer nextgeneration infrastructure that is purpose-built for

the demands of AI, machine learning, highthroughput and data-centric apps. It will also deliver expanded application acceleration beyond AI to all enterprise workloads and provide an extra layer of security through a new architecture that offloads critical data center services from the CPU to SmartNICs and programmable DPUs. “We are partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to every enterprise; a true democratization of one of the most powerful technologies,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware.

IBM STUDY // DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

KAMAL SINGHANI, COUNTRY MANAGING PARTNER, GLOBAL BUSINESS SERVICES, IBM INDIA/SOUTH ASIA

IBM STUDY: GLOBAL C-SUITE EXECUTIVES ARE RAPIDLY ACCELERATING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION DUE TO COVID-19

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

In India prioritization of both Cloud and AI will increase by 25 percentage points in the next two years, finds IBM Study

A

new IBM study of global C-Suite executives revealed that nearly six in ten organizations have accelerated their digital transformations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, 66% of executives said they have completed initiatives that previously encountered resistance. In India, 55% of Indian executives plan to increase their prioritization of digital transformation efforts over the next two years.

The IBM Institute for Business Value study

“COVID-19 and the Future of Business,” includes input from more than 3,800 C-Suite executives in 20 countries and 22 industries, including 172 executives from India.

During the pandemic, traditional and perceived barriers to digital transformation like technology immaturity and employee opposition to change have fallen away. Now, executives see organizational complexity, inadequate skills and employee burnout as the biggest hurdles to overcome — both today and in the next two years.

The study shows that over the next two years,

most executives plan to focus on internal and operational capabilities, such as increasing prioritization of workforce skills and flexibility – critical areas to address in order to jumpstart progress.

“In the last few months, we have witnessed year-long digital transformation and adaption compressed into weeks. Companies in every industry have been encouraged to initiate digitisation measures, propelled by the infusion of automation and AI, and look forward to building cognitive enterprises of the future,” said Kamal Singhani, Country Managing Partner, Global Business Services, IBM India/South Asia.

“Looking ahead, I believe that our focus on Cloud & AI is going to be our competitive advantage as we propel our clients and businesses to achieve this vision while they quickly recover and sustain their path to growth, business continuity and resilience.”

The study reveals three proactive steps that emerging leaders are taking to survive and thrive: 1.Improving operational scalability and flexibility The report reveals that the majority of organizations are making permanent changes to their organizational strategy. For instance, 94 percent of global executives plan to participate in platform-based business models by 2022, and many will increase participation in ecosystems and partner networks. Executing these new strategies will require a more scalable and flexible IT infrastructure like hybrid cloud in India. Only eleven percent of executives in India are highly prioritizing operational scalability today, but that number will grow to 41% over the next two years.

2.Applying AI, automation and other exponential technologies to make workflows more intelligent Technologies like AI, automation and cybersecurity can make workflows more intelligent, responsive and secure – and they are increasing in priority across the board for global executives.

Over the next two years, executives in India report that they have plans to increasingly apply automation across all business functions. Big jumps are expected in procurement (2x), risk (2x), supply chain (2.3x) and R&D (3.1x) in the next two years. As executives increasingly invest in cloud, AI, automation and other exponential technologies, IBM recommends leaders should keep in mind the users of that technology – their people. These digital tools should enable a positive employee experience by design, and support people’s innovation and productivity.

3.Leading, engaging and enabling the workforce in new ways To accent the full content loginto: www.enterpriseitworld.com OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

15

SECURITY // CISCO

MAJORITY OF INDIAN COMPANIES REPORTED OVER 25% JUMP IN CYBER THREATS WHILE WORKING FROM HOME: CISCO VISHAK RAMAN, DIRECTOR, SECURITY BUSINESS, CISCO INDIA & SAARC

Organizations in India are seeing a significant increase in the cybersecurity challenges they face amid the shift to mass remote working, a new study by Cisco shows. According to the study, 73% of organizations in the country have experienced a 25% or more jump in either cyber threats or alerts since the start of COVID-19.

Cisco’s Future of Secure Remote Work Report revealed many Indian organizations were unprepared to make the accelerated transition to a remote workforce at the outset of COVID-19.

About two-thirds (65%) of organizations adopted cybersecurity measures during COVID-19 to support remote working.

The study is based on a survey of over 3,000 16 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

IT decision-makers globally, including over 1,900 respondents across 13 Asia Pacific markets, including India. It highlights the cybersecurity challenges companies faced as they shifted the majority of their employees to a remote working arrangement in a really short period of time.

With users connecting from outside the corporate walls, secure access – defined as the ability to verify identity and establish trust no matter how, where, or when users log in, is the top cybersecurity challenge faced by the largest proportion of Indian organizations (68%) when supporting remote workers. Other concerns raised by organizations include data privacy (66%) and protection against malware (62%).

“With organisations forced to shift to a new way of working almost overnight, the newly distributed workforce became a focal point for malicious actors. As a result, the pandemic has amplified the criticality of cybersecurity and

brought new complexities to the fore. Now, as remote work continues to garner traction, organisations are turning their attention to building a robust cybersecurity foundation, with cloud security emerging as the top investment for 31% of companies in reinventing their workplaces post COVID-19,” said Vishak Raman, Director, Security Business, Cisco India & SAARC. Endpoints are a growing challenge for organizations to protect, as users connect from their home Wi-Fi or use their personal devices to connect to corporate applications. About two in three respondents stated that office laptops/ desktops (66%) and personal devices (58%) posed a challenge to protect in a remote environment, followed by cloud applications at 42%.

An opportunity to transform for the future One trend that emerged in recent months is that a hybrid workplace – where employees move between working remotely and in the office – is the future. The findings of this study further underlined that. Over half (53%) of the organizations in India said they expect more than half of their workforce to continue working remotely post-pandemic. This compares to an average of just 28% of organizations with more than half of their workforce working remotely before the pandemic.

The good news is that as businesses prepare for this hybrid workplace, cybersecurity now tops corporate priorities, with 84% of organizations in India saying that cybersecurity is now a top priority for them. What is even better is that they are translating this into concrete action. The study highlights that 77% of organizations in the region plan to increase their future investment in cybersecurity due to COVID-19.

There are still challenges, though, that need to be addressed. While almost all (97%) organizations have made changes to their cybersecurity policies to support remote working, further simplicity and education are needed. According to the study, 60% of Indian organizations said that having too many tools/solutions to manage was a challenge faced in reinforcing cybersecurity protocols for remote working, followed by a lack of employee education and awareness (55%).

“Deploying multiple cybersecurity tools reinforces a fragmented and complex security environment that is prone to risks arising from human error. This calls for the implementation of a comprehensive and integrated security approach that can provide a seamless experience for users as well as IT teams. Further, greater focus must be laid on educating and building employee awareness as these endpoints will become the first line of defence for the organisation of the future,” Vishak added.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES // DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

this initiative. Our goal is to give customers the freedom to scale resources in ways that work best for them, so they can quickly respond to changes and focus less on IT and more on their business needs.”

JEFF CLARKE, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AND VICE CHAIRMAN, DELL

TECHNOLOGIES

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

DELL TECHNO LOGIES PROJECT APEX ACCELERATES AS-A-SERVICE STRATEGY

D

ell Technologies expands its as-a-Service capabilities with Project APEX to simplify how customers and partners access Dell technology on-demand—across storage, servers, networking, hyperconverged infrastructure, PCs and broader solutions.

Project APEX will unify the company’s as-aService and cloud strategies, technology offerings, and go-to-market efforts. Businesses will have

a consistent as-a-Service experience wherever they run workloads including on-premises, edge locations and public clouds.

“Project APEX will give our customers choice, simplicity and a consistent experience across PCs and IT infrastructure from one trusted partner—unmatched in the industry,” said Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman, Dell Technologies. “We’re building upon our long history of offering on-demand technology with

Dell Technologies as-a-Service and cloud advancements The new Dell Technologies Cloud Console will provide the foundation for Project APEX and will deliver a single, seamless experience for customers to manage their cloud and as-a-Service journey. Businesses can browse the marketplace and order cloud services and as-a-Service solutions to quickly address their needs. With a few clicks, customers can deploy workloads, manage their multi-cloud resources, monitor their costs in real-time and add capabilities.

Available in the first half of next year, Dell Technologies Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) is an on-premises, as-a-Service portfolio of scalable and elastic storage resources that will offer block and file data services and a broad range of enterprise-class features. STaaS is designed for OPEX transactions and allows customers to easily manage their STaaS resources via the Dell Technologies Cloud Console.

Dell continues to expand its Dell Technologies Cloud and as-a-Service offerings with additional advances: Dell Technologies Cloud Platform instancebased offerings— Customers can get started with hybrid cloud for as low as $47 per instance per month2 with subscription pricing, making it easy to buy and scale cloud resources with pre-defined configurations through the new Dell Technologies Cloud Console.

Geographic Expansions— Dell Technologies is extending Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription availability to the United Kingdom, France and Germany with further global expansion coming soon.

Dell Technologies Cloud PowerProtect for Multi-cloud— This fully-managed service helps customers protect their data and applications across public clouds in a single destination via a low latency connection to the major public clouds. Businesses save costs through the PowerProtect appliance’s deduplication technology and realize additional savings with zero egress fees when retrieving their data from Microsoft Azure.

Pre-approved Flex On Demand pricing— The pre-configured pricing makes it simpler for customers to select and deploy Dell Technologies solutions with a pay-per-use experience. Dell Technologies partners globally will receive a rebate up to 20% on Flex On Demand solutions.

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

17

INTERVIEW // DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

What is the market scenario now amid the pandemic? Which are the sectors driving growth in the market?

Digital transformation was a business imperative pre-COVID with IT spending in India forecast to grow $94 Billion in 2020, according to Gartner.

Post-COVID, CIOs are more cautious with their spending on IT hardware but digital transformation initiatives in India continue to accelerate.

Telehealth, smart-chatbots, mobile apps and distance learning are mission critical products and services in the ‘new normal’. Companies are fast-tracking digital initiatives to overcome unexpected disruptions and reimagine the future of their business. ServiceNow is the strategic workflow authority and we are at the centre of this digital transformation.

CEO’s continue to feel pressure to digitally transform their businesses to protect revenue, maintain business continuity and improve productivity. In doing so, they are also transforming how they enable their people to work. There is an urgent need to execute simple business process, digitally and enable people to work how they want to.

Education, healthcare and public services are among the top industries in India driving digital initiatives as a result of the pandemic. Across these and other industries, the challenge faced is turning multiple systems of record into an integrated system of action. The pandemic has created more pressure, to get systems up and running quickly. That’s not easy when these systems live on separate platforms with limited or no connection.

Industries with more advanced digital foundations pre-pandemic, such as retail and banking, are now focused on experience-driven digital initiatives using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Organisations with digitally enabled workflows can build or expand programs on many dimensions, in a matter of days instead of months, and are better equipped to manage rapidly evolving employee and customer experiences.

How ServiceNow is supporting the organizations in the new normal?

As India prepares to slowly reopen in stages, ServiceNow is working with customers to enable the modern enterprise workflows required to get people back to the workplace, to accelerate digital transformation and create new ways of working.

In March, ServiceNow released four no-charge Safe Workplace apps as part of the emergency response to the pandemic. Since then, we’ve launched our Safe Workplace apps suite and dashboard, helping to bring employees safely back to the workplace, no matter what industry you’re in. And, our engineering teams, including talent 18 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

A R U N

B A L A S U B R A M A N I A N

Managing Director – India & SAARC, ServiceNow

from our Development Centre in India, continue to deliver product innovations every two weeks.

More than 600 organizations worldwide have downloaded our Safe Workplace suite, including Uber, Coca Cola European Partners and Bank United who are using the suite to return to the workplace safely.

WFH or WFA comes with a lot of security challenges, what is the advice of ServiceNow in this situation?

The sudden surge in people working from home has put enormous stress on security resources that are already stretched thin. In addition to protecting the corporate network, CISOs must now worry about every employee’s laptop and home Wi-Fi setup at a time when security threats are

multiplying and attacks are accelerating, playing on pandemic fears.

The only way to address this new, advanced threat landscape sustainably is with digital processes – automation, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Workflows that may have operated manually in the past—operations, business intelligence, and supply chain—are suddenly candidates for automation. And many enterprises are finding out that they’re not as automated as they thought they were.

Cloud is one big area of growth, what else?

We’re moving to a predictive world with the power of new technologies like 5G, IOT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION // INTERVIEW

SERVICENOW IS WORKING WITH CUSTOMERS TO ACCELERATE DIGITAL TRANSFO RMATION AND CREATE NEW WAYS OF WORKING We’re going to be in an instant-response world.

In the future, businesses are not going to be dealing with incident management that isn’t first predicted, and in many cases taken care of before the problem even shows itself up to the customer.

Technology like AI will fast-track mission critical decisions for leaders with high accuracy and impact. 5G will be one of the big transformational agents of change as we look ahead five years.

What are the top 10 challenges of the business that ServiceNow takes care of? What is the competitive advantage of ServiceNow? The world is experiencing a seismic shift from the obsolete “business process evolution” to a new “workflow revolution”. The way work has traditionally been done, no longer works and business leaders are seeking ‘digital first’ solutions. But the focus on technology and the tools alone will not make the biggest difference. The opportunity is really about people and empowering them with technology so they can work better, in any location at any time. This is how to protect revenue and increase productivity. Being digital first really means having systems in place that break down departmental silos and create digital workflows that deliver great employee and customer experi-

ences, increasing productivity across industries.

ServiceNow not only delivers organizations solutions to safely manage the return to company workplaces, but also enables the modern enterprise workflows required to create new ways of working. We’re not just helping companies reopen for work, we’re helping our customers reimagine how work gets done. Managing critical workflows will be critical to providing employees the services and experiences they need to do their jobs seamlessly and efficiently.

The ServiceNow advantage is a unique platform – one platform, one data model, one architecture – to make work, work better for people.

Many critiques say ServiceNow is not intuitive, there is lack of trained professionals, it is complicated, and registrant to customization, what is your say on this?

When businesses are looking to solve for a specific challenge, customising technology to address a business process is generally the first instinct. But the reality is that this approach often carries broken manual processes over to the digital world, instead of thinking with the outcome in mind – the impact on the customer,

employee, and mapping the best practice digital workflow processes.

ServiceNow delivers one single system of action to a company and best practice digital workflows, end-to-end. The Now Platform gives organisations the ability to build applications, connect departments and deliver best practice digital processes that talk to one another. From HR to finance, legal, IT and more, the experience must be intuitive for every employee engaged in a process. ServiceNow’s automation capabilities ensure interoperability and seamless connectivity.

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for ServiceNow. ServiceNow has tripled its employee base in India in the last two years and we are committed to continued investment and growth of ServiceNow professionals.

Provide some names who have grown on ServiceNow with some use cases?

ServiceNow has been delivering digital workflows to India enterprise organisations since 2004.

We’ve seen particularly strong appetite for digital transformation from Telecommunications, Manufacturing, and Financial Services.

ServiceNow’s growing customer base includes some of India’s leading telecommunications providers, including Tata Communications and Bharti Airtel.

In just six weeks Airtel transformed their business operations with ServiceNow. Through the consolidation of four systems and integration of 30 tools, Airtel reduced manual work by 80 percent and reduced outages hours by 75 percent.

Airtel also delivered a self-service portal where employees could find answers and get help on their own 24/7, while delivering a better, flexible service experience.

Which sectors are best fit for ServiceNow and why?

Any workflow in an enterprise is a candidate for a Now Platform-based application, connecting IT to Finance, Customer Support, HR and more. Organisations can build applications that automate existing processes and create efficient, digital workflows at scale.

What is your overall growth strategy for this year?

ServiceNow is well positioned to become the defining enterprise software company of the 21st Century. We have enormous organic growth opportunity to get to $10B and drive global innovation. We will do this through verticals, buying centres, scaling the ecosystem and geographic expansion.

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

19

COLLABORATION

ICEWARP FORMULATES STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESSES TO BE FUTURE READY

Post COVID-19, businesses are taking a drastic shift now. While every industry is expected to change while adapting to the New Normal, in this transformation the IT sector is going to play a very significant role. There is a striking difference in the way things used to happen before the pandemic and post-pandemic. The same has further changed the way we are working; partially from home and partially by teams sitting in offices. This has made working challenging in terms of technology, hardware, and skills of people to make the best use of those technologies.

Therefore, instead of waiting and watching what others are doing, it is always better to take a stance and formulate a new roadmap for the future.

IceWarp, a global leader for developing email communication and collaboration solutions, hosted a webinar discussing Post Covid Scenario of Business World. Team collaboration is one of the core focus areas for productivity to be in place, however, the operations designed with efficient team-working tools and technologies that enable the same may or may not be up to the mark. The 20 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

webinar witnessed the presence of an eminent panel of experts from across the industry; they provided their insights, interpretations and innovations on the New Normal.

The eminent panel of experts from across the industry including K. R. C. Murty – Senior Vice President, Head of RTB (Information Technology) at Kotak Mahindra Bank, Puneet Kaur Kohli – CTO at Universal Sompo General Insurance, Prakash Dharmani Global CIO – Essel Propack Limited, Pramod Sharda – CEO, IceWarp India & Middle East were in attendance. The panel discussed the best ideas possible to redesign the success platforms for CXO’s from all business verticals.

Commenting on the same, Pramod Sharda, CEO, IceWarp India & Middle East quoted, “The near future is a phase to rebuild the businesses and hence the impact of finance might be very high, we are thankful to our fellow attendees for their participation and valuable time. It was an honour to host prominent figures from the IT industry those were able to attend the webinar

and making it a great success. Our webinar aims to be a knowledge-sharing and learning exchange session to discuss the future trends for the smooth flow of businesses. We will continue to bring in such engaging and meaningful webinars in the near future as well”.

Understanding the role of technology in a changing environment is the need of the moment, the new era calls for tools like Video Conferencing, File Sharing, and others. Data Privacy and Security is another crucial element with the security aspect of the stored data as various organizations are required to maintain a huge database and also compliances to be followed through.

The webinar was attended by Industry experts, CIOs, CTOs, IceWarp customers and Partners, etc. During the Webinar a conclusive discussion transpired, understanding the role of technology in a changing environment is need of the moment, the new era calls for tools like video conferencing, file sharing, and others.

AUTOMATION TECHNOLOGIES // GUEST COLUMN

HOW TODAY’S MANUFACTURERS ARE MOVING AUTOMATION TECHNO LOGIES TO THE CLOUD

DIJAM PANIGRAHI, Co-founder and COO of Grid Raster Inc.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

“A leading provider of cloud-based AR/VR platforms that power compelling high quality AR/VR experiences on mobile devices for enterprises.”

There are many industries where manufacturing continues to be the backbone of the economy, where companies that produce products and goods used by both businesses and consumers have found a way to push forward during the COVID-pandemic.

Even though manufacturing has continued throughout 2020, it is showing signs of a slight slowdown in a year highlighted by great economic challenges.

According to a recent report in Reuters, The Institute for Supply Management (ISM)1 said its index of national factory activity fell to a reading of 55.4 in September, down slightly from 56 in August. Despite the slowdown, September marked the fourth straight month of growth and it compares to an August figure that was the highest level dating back to November 2018.

A reading above 50 indicates expansion in manufacturing, which accounts for

11.3% of the U.S. economy.

Technology Has Helped Manufacturers Push Forward in 2020 Technology has helped manufacturers maintain factory output despite the challenges posed by COVID-19. One technology in particularly is the suite of Immersive Mixed Reality (MR) technologies – which are best described as a fully immersive experience that brings virtual objects into the real world or one which blends the physical world with the digital one.

MR technologies, including Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are poised to grow considerably over the next few years. In fact, more manufacturers are leveraging this technology as the Augmented Reality market2 is expected to reach $70-$75 billion in revenue by 2023.

Not All AR/VR Platform Environments Are Created Equal Manufacturers should be cautious in how they design and deploy these technologies, because there is great difference in the platform they are built on and maximized for use.

Even though technologies like AR/VR have been in use for several years, many manufacturers have deployed virtual solutions that are built upon an on-premise environment, where all the technology data is stored locally. This buildout was more common a few years ago and was considered the de facto platform for this type of technology.

On-premise AR/VR infrastructures limit the speed and scalability needed for today’s virtual designs, and it limits the ability to conduct knowledge sharing between organizations that can be critical when designing new products and understanding the best way for virtual buildouts.

Cloud-Based Automation

Technologies Proving Pivotal Manufacturers are overcoming these limitations by leveraging cloud-based (or remote server based) AR/VR platforms powered by distributed cloud architecture and 3D vision-based AI. These cloud platforms provide the desired performance and scalability to drive innovation in the industry at speed and scale.

Enterprise-grade high-quality AR/VR platforms require both performance and scale. However, existing systems such as MS HoloLens and others are severely limited in both aspects. Most enterprises have a rich repository of existing complex 3D CAD/ CAM models created over the years. These 3D models may vary in their complexity (such as poly count, hierarchy, details, etc), making it difficult to run and excel within on-premise virtual platform environments, restricted by device limitations.

This forces developers to decimate the contents (3D models/scenes) to fit to different mobile devices, spending months in the process and sacrificing on the overall quality of the experience.

As these virtual environments become richer and larger, the problem continues to compound.

This cycle is repeated for each of the different AR/VR hardware platforms, making it difficult for any enterprise to move from experiments and pilots to full scale deployable solutions, thus stunting the speed of innovation and effectiveness The device limitations also severely restrict the capability of existing AR/VR systems to generate and work with very fine mesh with large polygon count models and point clouds, which is essential to collocate and precisely fuse the virtual objects on top of physical objects in the real world with complex surfaces, and varied lighting and environment.

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OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

21

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

INTERVIEW // CYBERSECURITY

Which verticals and technologies have been driving the current market? Of course, cloud is one around which everything is evolving?

There has been a real change in the way we approach building applications over the last five years. It started 10 years ago with the cloud becoming common and the last five years, it is really become amplified because it is not just about the adoption of cloud services but also it is a whole mentality. And today, every business is a technology business. It is only going to become more and more dependent on technology. And the adoption of cloud has done a lot to accelerate the transformation of businesses because not only it gave us this elastic compute, but it gave us a new way of thinking about solving problems. I can just use an API from here. My cloud vendor doesn’t have that API. But other person has built this I’ll just use that API, which has introduced a whole new way of Thinking about the way we build applications. Thinking about the way we build applications. The way that we do things. And if you combine that with the ubiquity of high-speed broadband, t has completely transformed what we expect from our organizations and what our users expect from organizations.

The wide scalability of broadband combined with the mindset of building cloud applications has completely transformed the way we design and build services. It has had a flow in it the way we design networks. And these old architectural styles of networks are no longer as relevant or as strong from both an outcomes perspective but also significantly from the security perspective, because one of the things that I really think that’s changing is that as we move more and more business into digitally transformed space, it changes our risk profiles. So, we’re no longer looking at organizational risk silos, we’re looking at a digital risk that cuts across those silos. And, when you think from risk perspective, it changes, not just what you want to do, but it changes the way you approach it, because what it means is security has to be fundamental to each piece of those organizational risk silos, because if it is fundamental one can build controls against that digital risk and you can mitigate that digital risk so security is also changing from being a back of house function to being a front of house function. End uses and consumers, whether they are businesses or people in their homes, care about security now. So an analyst inside an organization who is building a new banking product for a financial institution or designing that product for them security has to be fundamental and it has to be foundational piece – that cuts across all of the digital silos, that they normally have to worry about.

So is a lot of change from not only an architec22 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

N I C K

S AV V I D E S

Strategic Business Director, APAC, Forcepoint

In behavioral analytics, we have domain expertise in data protection, firewall, user

monitoring, Gateway and CASB. We are consolidating all of these into our offerings, which is why I welcome the pressure from the competition. tural perspective, but from a mindset perspective and now a digital risk perspective. So, all of these things are rally changing every industry – it does not matter if it is government services, BFSI, or healthcare or resources. Every single one of those is going through some sort of digital transformation that is touching every aspect of their business.

Three years ago, when I met the CIO of a construction company, he said I have trouble getting

funding from the board for security. Now security is fundamental for that organization. .

Are these companies spending enough dollar on security?

I think we’ve seen an increase in technology spending during the pandemic. People are cautious and looking at short term investment. They are bringing the projects forward because digitisations have been the saviour of

CYBERSECURITY // INTERVIEW

SUCCESS OF CYBERSECURITY IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE AS THE ANALOGY SAYS RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL SHIPS With Covid-19, Digital Transformation has become the major project for all CIOs and CISOs and Cybersecurity has become the first point of consideration too. Today, SASE based solutions are also becoming the technology of choice for the Cyber Security. Enterprise IT World had a frank discussion with Nick Savvides, Strategic Business Director, APAC, Forcepoint about the entire market dynamics and advantage of Forcepoint. many industries through this pandemic. On a micro level, if I give you an example, here in my hometown, there is a pub, which serves meals.

They had no online presence beforehand. You had to go in and sit down order your food. The pandemic came and they were shot down since March. So, all of a sudden, they have gone online.

They have taken this small business and digitized that. I can see that you home order a meal provide the registration number of your car. They see the registration number of my car and bring my meal out to me to come home. This is the example of a small business spending money on technology or their survival. And on the other side, the big businesses who have gone with online presence, finding it the only way they have got that money is coming through. You know, it might have been only 10% of sales at the start of the pandemic, but it is 100% now.

What is your vision around new solutions and products’ roadmap?

When I joined Forcepoint I thought that the vision of the organization is very clear and it sat well with the modern outlook. The way that a modern network would be built. And I thought to myself, if I were building a company, if I were the CIO, or the CISO of an organization and I was looking for a three-year journey of horizon – one and horizon two type of activities; Forcepoint would be a vendor that I would talk to.

We were well into this journey before the pandemic. We had decided last year that we have these great products we have got amazing DLP technology, user activity monitoring technology and probably the world leader in Insider Threat capabilities along without our web protection – CASB. But the modern architecture doesn’t really suit to try and take these things and stitch them together. So, we are going to go on a journey where we have these as cloud delivered offerings that operate on the edge of the network. That edge could be in the cloud, in someone’s data center or

could be at somebody’s home. We were already pivoting down that way. Then the pandemic happened, and it proved our business model. As I was saying that transition of five years is being compressed down. Our offerings now are more relevant to the market than ever. So, this architecture that we settled on take from the Gartner’s SASE model (Secure Access Service Edge) as well as from Foresters Zero Trust model. We combine these concepts to build out our new offerings. So we can deliver a 100% SASE product today that extends enterprises security controls into the cloud, which means that a user, whether they are in a building, in an office on a managed machine or whether they are at home on an unmanaged uncontrolled personal computer, the same level of protection is offered to the user through the company’s data because we sit in between the users and the data. So we launched our first part of our SASE offering, which we call our Cloud Security Gateway that really brings to get those advanced functions that we have around Data Loss Prevention, CASB, Web Protection, etc. and puts them together in the single unified offering.

Now we are launching the second part of that we call private access that takes our award-winning Next Generation Firewall to run inside somebody’s data center and putting that into the cloud.

Cloud is one big area of growth, what else?

We’re moving to a predictive world with the power of new technologies like 5G, IOT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

We’re going to be in an instant-response world.

In the future, businesses are not going to be dealing with incident management that isn’t first predicted, and in many cases taken care of before the problem even shows itself up to the customer.

Technology like AI will fast-track mission critical decisions for leaders with high accuracy and impact. 5G will be one of the big transformational agents of change as we look ahead five years.

So now as a user you have got firewall as a service. It means your home user is not just being protected by their router connected to the ISP but also protected by a full Next Generation Firewall stack in the cloud. And we’ve got private access and Zero Trust networking access going back into the organization.

So, that’s the complete SASE zero trust vision around that. The second thing that we’re doing is, well, we’ve got this fantastic Insider Threat user activity monitoring capability today with two products – Forcepoint Insider Threat and Fore Behavioral Analytics. But these have been the domains of only the largest enterprises in the world because they require a complex program of work to understand to operationalize. So, it is OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 23

INTERVIEW // CYBERSECURITY

the only regulated industries – typically financials, government, defense etc. utilize these technologies. But the same problem exists everywhere. So, what we are doing is we’re just about to launch what we call our Dynamic User Protection offering that takes those capabilities and democratizes them – puts them in the cloud and allows any organization to do that. What I see our great differentiator is going into next year into 2021 is taking the user activity and risk profiling and then driving Not just data protection actions that we do today but network protection actions that we can do in our SASE edge. This is what I call SASE Plus. It is what our chief product officer Nico Popp calls it the SASE of the fourth kinds.

It’s really pivoting not just to SASE but what I’m calling behavior based networking behavior and based data access so that only the right people, have the right access at the right times to the right data and only when they’re behaving appropriately. And that is what is our vision.

What is the differentiation of Forcepoint SASE offering?

If you just think about SASE, it is just the networking model. It is putting stuff at the edge of the cloud. What is different here is that we are instrumenting to understand the behavior. When you are instrumented to understand behavior, you start to collect all the signals. These might be human behavioral signals, device behavioral signals or threat signals. But either way it’s instrumented and we’re collecting them. Now the collection pieces is ease and you’ll ask anyone who is runs a scene, getting your logs into your scene is probably the easy part. Turning logs into action is the hard part. So how do you connect going from events to insights to action, because ultimately collecting data in instrumented something doesn’t make a difference or doesn’t matter if you can’t convert that to action. So, the action piece is where we’re focused on. Right now, a lot of SOCs run for customers dependent on a lot of manual processes. You have systems generating logs, then you have to investigate it and verified by an analyst and then decides what’s going to happen.

Our model is different. We are using a lot of AI and ML to scale this. We have dynamic responses.

I will give you a dynamic example that proves the vision. You have users who are at home and are utilizing a whole bunch of corporate services they are going through the SASE service edge – all of the SASE protections are there including Web Gateway to protect them against the web born threats, remote browser isolation for advanced threats sand boxing for very advanced threats, Next-Gen Firewall for those advanced networking threats, but I still cannot investigate what that person is doing. That is the SASE. I have a policy 24 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

that says, I’m going to restrict this person from sending this email or using this content in this way. That is great! That is what CASB and DLP does today. But if I just have rules, I always end up investigating things after they have happened. So, our model to make a move before the incident. It takes those signals and have an action that occurs before the event occurs – whether it is malicious or unintentional. Imagine a user at home using their computer going through a SASE cloud. If it is just SASE you’re not going to stop that person from inadvertently sharing data. If it is Forcepoint vision of SASE where we’ve put in our human analytics underneath our machine learning and AI that is observing what the user is doing and then gains insights and says, this user is posing a higher risk than the normal and automatically restricts them from doing certain actions. You have gone from waiting for something to happen to predicting something has happened and preventing it. But further as that uses risk goes up, it introduces the ability to do coaching. A lot of people make mistakes when they are busy or when they don’t know what to do when they aren’t aware of the threats. So, imagine a scenario where I have predicted that this user is presenting a risk to the organization. When he is performing the action, I am now going to pop up a message which ways, ‘this is a violation of policy, are you sure you want to go through with this. We have this virtuous cycle of this of not only just predicting a bad event, but also identifying and prioritizing coaching and training for users who are most at risk of causing a bad event. Now that that’s the true power there. We are now moving back in time and we are saying we can predict the bad event from occurring.

What I tell the CISOs is that the difference between our vision and every other SASE vision is that we are adding human intelligence and it has to be driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence otherwise, it doesn’t scale because you get all these signals you can’t make sense of it. You have to have data scientists, you have to have people understand human psychology, you have to have people who understand workflows.

These are the resource which do not come ease and cheap. We do that on behalf of the customers.

That’s the real secret sauce for us.

Can elaborate a little bit on SASE solutions being adopted from various business point of view?

The industries and verticals that are moving to SASE is faster than others are probably the retail and financial sector because they have a lot of branches.

It is also happening with the manufacturing where they have got diverse manufacturers. I don’t

think it is industry specific. It’s more the way the business operates because even in healthcare, where are chains of doctors, surgeries and pathology labs, they’re all going down that path too. Even in government services they are sending their people to work in regional centers and work from home.

If you look at the ecosystem what are the competitive advantage of Forcepoint SASE solution?

I go to RSA conference every year. I remember, people used to say end point security is dead.

When I walk around and see there are 700 exhibitors selling end point security. Now everyone is trying to sell their SASE story. It is a good thing.

First of all, the success of cybersecurity is good for everyone. There is an old analogy – Rising Tide Lifts all Ships. And we are one of those ships. It’s better for the business, consumers and citizens that people take cyber security more seriously. But why would someone pick a technology like force point over every other crowded voice in the space.

I answer is that ‘we are a company that is solely focused on this mission’.

‘We are a security pure play company that focuses on user and data protection. That’s all we do, we’re not selling productivity tools, we’re not selling infrastructure, we’re not selling all these other things that are distractions, which means we can do this very, very well. Not only can we do this very well we can invest heavily in this space to maintain our competitive edge.

Now we know we are under significant competitive pressure and what’s great about a company like Forcepoint is because we have focus, we can focus on improving and staying ahead and being the vendor of choice for the organizations. We have the size of nearly 3000 people. We have the investment, technology and uniqueness in our offering.

One or the other have expertise in one space.

For example, it might be web gateways. Great!

You might have a great Web Gateway. We’ve got a gateway too. But going from doing a Web Gateway to doing insider threat and understanding human behavior, it is a very big gap. And we do all of those pieces, really, really well. What I like about Forcepoint is that we have expertise in all of these areas on the vision, we are not stretching ourselves from one position to go to another. We are consolidating our existing excellent offerings into these cloud model.

In behavioral analytics, we have domain expertise in data protection, firewall, user monitoring, Gateway and CASB. We are consolidating all of these into that offering, which is why I think we will we. I welcome the pressure from the competition.

SERVER MARKET

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

INDIA SERVER MARKET REVENUE DECLINES YOY BY 22.3% TO REACH $272.0 MILLION IN Q2 2020 The overall server market in India witnessed a year-overyear (YoY) decline of 22.3% in terms of vendor revenue to reach $272.0 million in Q2 2020 (April-June) versus $350.2 million in Q2 2019, according to the latest IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker , Q2 2020 (September 2020 release).

The x86 server market accounts for 85.6% of overall server market in terms of revenue. The contribution to x86 server market continues to come from the professional services, telecommunications, followed by manufacturing and banking verticals. For the telecommunications vertical, spending was observed from several on-going projects and network expansion projects.

For the banking sector, spending from nationalized and private banks were focused on digital transformation, business continuity, and providing robust banking platforms to the customers. Manufacturing spend was largely driven by global players for their research related projects during Q2 2020.

The x86 server market in terms of revenue declined YoY

by 26.0% to reach $232.9 million in Q2 2020 from $314.8 million in Q2 2019. This decline was largely due to lower spend of hyperscalers compared to Q2 2019. Also, banks, telecom, and manufacturing verticals witnessed a sharp YoY revenue decline owing to operational constraints and financial challenges posed due to the pandemic. We expect market recovery in second half of CY2020 owing to deal spill-over and order backlogs.

In addition, we observe spend coming from in from telecom vendors, banks, federal government agencies, and global hyperscalers to support compute and SaaS requirements of large customers and to support the growing demand for virtual and business continuity solutions.

The non-x86 server market grew YoY by 10.3% to reach $39.1 million revenue, in Q2 2020. IBM continues to dominate the market accounting for 69.1% of revenue share, during Q2 2020 with a revenue of $27.0 million. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) came at second position followed by Oracle with a revenue share of 25.2% and 5.7% respectively.

Others, 30% HPE, 30%

Lenovo, 7% Dell Technologies, 23%

Cisco, 10%

In Q2 2020, HPE emerged as the top vendor in the India x86 server market with a revenue share of 30.3% and a revenue of $70.6 million. Key wins for HPE came from telecom vendors, IT and ITeS companies, high-tech semiconductor manufacturing companies, and banking organizations. Dell Technologies came at second spot with a revenue share of 22.9% and a revenue of $53.4 million.

Dell Technologies picked up large orders from IT and ITeS customers, manufacturing companies, telecom vendors, and banks. At number three is Cisco with a revenue share of 10.0% and a revenue of $23.2 million. Lenovo came in fourth

accounting for a revenue share of 7.2% and a revenue of $16.7 million.

“During 2020Q2, the server market witnessed lack of spend across major verticals, but this was offset by spike in the spend from global public cloud service providers. The trend of enterprises moving towards SaaS based solutions was also observed to ensure business continuity. We expect market to show signs of recovery in the form of on-going projects, tech refresh, and greenfield projects in H2 2020,” says Harshal Udatewar, Market Analyst, Server, IDC India.

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 25

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

GUEST COLUMN // REMOTE WORK

Panicked responses to the infamous COVID-19 have triggered strange, India has suffered more than 180 days of lockdown, yet substantial adaptation in remote collaboration innovations became an essential in work places for India organizations. However, the transition might not be easy, according to a survey by Barracuda Networks, nearly 66% of Indian organizations have had at least one data breach or cybersecurity incident since shifting to remote working during the pandemic, while 70% are concerned about unknown threats that will cause business disruption in the next six months. Further, it was found that 53% of India organizations do not have an updated cybersecurity strategy and also lack solutions to address vulnerabilities that have been exposed due to the shift.

What will be an ideal remote working environment?

In hindsight, businesses have been heavily deploying tools such as Microsoft Team, Zoom, 26 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

Slack, and other remote team collaboration tools for employees to leverage during this difficult time. However, the more concurrent users working online simultaneously, the heavier the resources and loading these service providers have to allocate. Consequently, we have to ask ourselves again, does a good remote and team collaboration environment only constitutes of the applications mentioned above, or there should be more to it? The answer should be more complex than a yes or no.

An ideal remote working environment is more than just utilizing collaboration tools provided online. The entire IT infrastructure, including networking and storage systems, needs serious reforms in order for businesses to ensure they have the capacity to host multiple users simultaneously, and to provide a stable and secure workflow for employees to operate remotely.

Traditionally, companies leverage traditional file server such as Windows file server to store and sync company data, unless employees access

REMOTE WORK // GUEST COLUMN

REMOTE WORK: IS YOUR BUSINESS’S IT ENVIRONMENT READY FOR THE CHALLENGES CONFRONTING THE NEW NORMAL? on-premise server with built-in remote access may definitely help with eliminating issues with remote team collaboration, unstructured data, and various security issues.

HEWITT LEE

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT HQ,DIRECTOR, SYNOLOGY INC.

the file servers using VPN, this framework conventionally was designed only for delivering services within the company’s network. Thus, that is why so many companies utilizes the hybrid cloud infrastructure such as the most common combination of Windows server and public clouds drives. Of course, this common practice often is being viewed as overly complicated, not to mention the added data breach risk in terms of unstructured and duplicated data, and resource allocation when adapting third party team collaboration tools. Thus, having a sophisticated

The cost benefit that businesses may concern With the recent rising demand in not just corporate remote collaboration mechanism but also stable and secure IT environment, a network attached storage (NAS) may just be the solution for businesses struggling with the problems mentioned above. Solution such as Synology NAS offers built-in collaboration tool that allows employees to edit files concurrently, and instant messaging app for team communication.

Additionally, such solution resonates the benefits of both Windows server and Google Drive, which allow files to be retrieved via mapped network drive, sync client, web portal or mobile app, all without the hassle of using VPN services.

Last but not least, what may come as a surprise is the cost benefit that businesses may experience.

The accumulative expenses contribute by the Windows server Client Access Licenses (CAL), public cloud storage license, and SaaS licenses could be massive, alternative deploying solutions like Synology Drive may save your company’s limited budget drastically when most features mentioned are completely license free.

With a solution that meets all of the criteria for working remotely, SMBs and enterprises may still operate normally even during a difficult time with so many employees work from home protocol without blowing up the budget out of proportion With COVID-19 stirring up so much uncertainty globally, the primary task a company should prioritize is to provide its employees a complete and consistent team collaboration infrastructure to not only ensures the continuation of the business, but also safeguards employees’ and their families’ wellbeing.

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 27

CLOUD COMPUTING

NEW REPORT ILLUST RATES NEED FOR HYBRID CLOUD SOLUTION ENABLING CONSISTENT OPERATIONS ACROSS MULTIPLE CLOUDS BALAKRISHNAN ANANTHARAMAN

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

VP AND MD-SALES, INDIA AND SAARC, NUTANIX

Nutanix’s new report analyzing key challenges and opportunities with hybrid cloud adoption says, while most see hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, the report showed that many struggle to adopt it — with 70% of organizations believing that their transformation is taking longer than expected.

However, the goal is clear: nearly all respondents (95%) think their organization would benefit from an optimal hybrid implementation providing consistent IT constructs and operations across multiple clouds, eliminating many of the challenges they currently face ranging from operational silos to staffing shortages.

As businesses everywhere struggle to adapt to a new reality, one thing is becoming even clearer: flexibility is crucial to business success. Whether enterprises need to leverage public cloud to deliver remote desktops quickly, consolidate disaster recovery sites, move workloads to a private cloud to stave off public cloud capacity concerns, or take advantage of on-demand capacity bursting, the current global situation has emphasized the need for an adaptable IT infrastructure for many businesses. But flexibility no longer means using both public and private clouds — it means having a consistent experience, tooling and operational practices across multiple clouds to dramatically simplify the ability to move applications and data to the most appropriate cloud environment.

“As companies continue to adopt remote working models, there will be an increased need for adaptable IT infrastructure. While public cloud has offered many benefits, such as increased agility and efficiency, more of India’s enterprises are real28 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

izing that it’s not a one-size-fits-all-solution and are embracing hybrid cloud as their infrastructure of choice. The survey highlights that, along with interoperability, enterprises are looking for a consistent experience across their different cloud environments. Hybrid cloud provides this,” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, VP and MD-Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix.

The report, commissioned by Nutanix and created by independent market research firm Vanson Bourne, analyzed key challenges businesses are currently facing when managing both public and private cloud infrastructures. The company surveyed 650 IT decision-makers from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.

Additional findings include: Public Cloud Alone is Not Always the Answer: Public cloud revolutionized the IT industry, offering more agility and operational efficiency.

And while it’s ideal for some applications and workloads, it’s not for others, leading businesses to embrace a hybrid infrastructure. According to the research, the majority of respondents have concerns about running business-critical applications, those most vital to their business, on public cloud, specifically around reliability (75%), portability (73%), and cost (72%). Additionally, some are simply unable to move their business-critical applications, due to complexity or cost. For example, the need to re-architect or re-platform applications (75%) and the complexity of the migration (71%) are top concerns preventing respondents from porting applications.

Hybrid Widens the IT Skills Gap: Although many businesses struggle to find enough quali-

fied IT talent, the issue grows when looking for professionals who can manage both a public and a private cloud infrastructure, as currently the two environments require different skill sets.

Most organizations (88%) are facing challenges in ensuring their IT staff has the necessary skills to manage a hybrid IT infrastructure, and over half (53%) see this as a top concern.

Skill Gaps Create Silos and Inefficiencies: Given the different skills required to manage public and private cloud infrastructures, businesses often need to rely on different teams creating silos, something that nearly all (95%) respondents encountered. Most importantly, they often impact the bottom line, something even more concerning at a time when many businesses are focused on optimizing resources. Nearly half of respondents identified resource sprawl (49%), an increase in costs (45%), and/or a waste of resources (43%) as concerns.

Portability is a Must and Not Just For Applications: For most businesses (88%) software licensing is a key aspect of a hybrid IT infrastructure, as many have run into difficulties surrounding licensing (58%) or vendor lock-in (58%) when moving to public cloud. Additionally, nearly two thirds (65%) are willing to consider subscription licensing for their IT infrastructure.

Businesses are looking for flexibility. It’s no longer a choice between private and public, or between different public cloud providers. Organizations need a solution providing consistent experience, tooling and operational practices across multiple clouds to address many of the challenges and operational inefficiencies they’re currently facing. An optimal hybrid cloud environment provides the consistency they need to take advantage of the full flexibility of multiple clouds, whether private or public.

INDUSTRY STUDY

ASHWANI RAWAT

CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR, TRANSERVE

IDENTIF ICATION OF CATCHMENT AREAS VIA MOBILITY DATA

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

C

atchment areas are essential for commercial entities such as retailers, wholesalers and other businesses since they draw most of their business from them. When you talk about the retail industry there has been a marked shift in recent years especially in how brick and mortar stores have been functioning, in fact, many of them have been facing closure. This disruption has been causing what can only be called a ‘retail apocalypse’ – and many businesses have arrived at a crucial point in their decision-making process regarding where a new store should open or which stores should be closed or kept open. When you think about these important considerations spatial data science can help in the identification of catchment areas via mobility data – which can help in tackling the challenges effectively.

Calculation of catchment areas is really essential for booming business sectors such as retail and real estate, as it helps businesses in better understanding its customers and then developing business strategies accordingly. Ranging from identifying circular trade areas through isochrones, to gravitational models to the usage of more advanced techniques that look at locationspecific variables – calculating catchment areas generally depends upon the kind of information and data that is available.

Historically speaking, two approaches have been commonly used for the identification of catchment areas. The first being circular catchment area, which is used to define the attraction on the basis of a fixed radius around the store;

and the second one being Isochrones area which is calculated on the basis of the maximum reach that the store has – that is through transportation such as walking, driving, cycling, etc. and the time range. Isochrones areas generally depend on cartographies and mapping of all the available streets and roads in given geography, which obviously helps in reaching a more accurate definition for the retail space in question.

Although these methods have worked traditionally one also has to factor in now the consideration that people who are visiting these retail spaces, could actually at a point be living, working or spending time in other places as well, which is outside the target catchment area. Hence, customer profiling needs many more considerations apart from these, and mobility data has proved to be quite helpful in doing so. Identification of human mobility with the help of GPS data tells you about footfall and origin-destination matrix as well as the various points of interest.

Additionally, one has to also calculate catchment areas for locations which may not have historical consumer data. Why it is so important to have the said data is because it will help in modelling any potential cannibalisation that might happen amongst branches of a business.

Hence, in order to identify optimal locations for a commercial space, generally, the following methodology is considered: Data Discovery that will help in the identification of relevant data to collate.

Grid Selection and Cell Enrichment based on the data that has been collected in the dis-

covery phase. Generally, this data concerns human mobility, commercial aspects, as well as socio-demographics.

Calculation of Catchment Area for the subset selected. The subset is selected generally by the application of a filter for the identification of cells that have high commercial potential – as gauged by human mobility data collected.

Optimisation of Algorithms that will help in the identification of the best locations. An approximation algorithm is generally developed using a greedy approach in linear programming on every step.

Mobility data that has been obtained from mobile devices, is a powerful tool and the catchment areas that are identified by the cleaning and aggregation of this data offers retailers and investors a much clearer picture regarding their target audience. Adding this data to location intelligence toolbox can help in modernising business decision making and help businesses in staying agile.

As witnessed by the collapse of the global economy due to the current pandemic, it has become even more imperative for retail and other sectors to use techniques and tools that will help them in making informed decisions that will allow them to get a competitive advantage. Mobility data when enriched with other data streams and helped by optimisation and other spatial techniques can aid in making a difference and tackling the challenges that the sectors are facing today as well as those that might arise in the future.

OCTOBER 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 29

MARKET WATCH

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

THE ECONOMICS OF OPEN STORAGE While pandemic-induced economic challenges have been devastating on many fronts, the financial system has responded to counter the unprecedented macro-financial shock. While the system experienced liquidity problems initially as Covid-19 premiered, these were mitigated by financial strategies induced by the country’s financial leadership.

Despite facing challenges at the domestic level, along with a rapidly transforming global landscape, the U.S. economy is still the largest and most technology hungry market in the world. The U.S. economy represents about 20% of total global output and is impressive by any measurement.

Moreover, according to the IMF, the U.S. has the sixth highest per capita GDP (PPP). The U.S. economy’s highly-developed and technologicallyadvanced services sector accounts for about 80% of this output.

According to recent data storage market projections by Coughlin Associates (1), growth in storage capacity shipments of HDDs is forecast to rise 20% year-over-year, rising from 1,200 exabytes in 2020 to nearly 4,000 exabytes by 2025.

The global enterprise storage market is observing growth due to factors such as the growing need to store large amounts of data among enterprises and growing advancements in enterprise storage systems and devices. Additionally, the increase in endpoint-driven data acquisition is expected to further boost the growth of storage requirements in the enterprise market. There is also a rising demand for cloud computing which is expected to fuel increasing sales for enterprise storage 30 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD OCTOBER 2020

systems now and in the years to come.

Proprietary vs. Open Enterprise Storage The vast majority of traditional enterprise systems are proprietary by design. With this comes a number of financial and operational hurdles faced by businesses worldwide, including nickel and dime premiums for important features such as frequent snapshots and/or replications, access to automation APIs, and friction when enterprise buyers have requirements for lower-cost licensing and support. Some features, such as silent corruption detection, data deduplication, and write cache resilience in the face of power outages, have traditionally been restricted to proprietary storage solutions targeting only the largest enterprises.

Many organizations see the end of standard vendor maintenance/upgrades as dated proprietary systems are cut from product lines and ongoing support agreements. With the cessation of this support comes an end to software upgrades and system enhancements necessary to maintain efficient operations. Management capabilities begin to fall behind and the integrity of sensitive data may become at risk as security features fall behind the industry standard. In response, IT storage professionals typically migrate organizational data to a new platform, which is disruptive, time consuming, and expensive. Those that remain with the outdated vendor or system architecture are faced with submitting to maintenance contracts with costly multipliers.

Unlike proprietary enterprise storage, Open Storage marries the benefits of Software Defined

Storage (SDS) and Open Source, enabling users to choose from a range of hardware, software, and support levels. Industry standard hardware and software components are integrated into a simpler system that leverages the cost structures of industry-standard servers. Some Open Storage solutions even support a range of file, block, and object access protocols and provide a unified storage solution which significantly reduces infrastructure needs and creates more application flexibility than traditional SAN storage. A select few Open Storage solutions also enable hyperconverged infrastructure with applications and storage integrated where it makes sense.

Open Source-based storage using industrystandard components and media is changing the industry dynamic by dramatically lowering the cost of true enterprise-grade storage. The approach has entered the enterprise mainstream as the industry moves past the point where open source was looked upon with skepticism, and the high volume of Open Storage users (and testers) has enabled very high software quality levels to be achieved. Now, many organizations have mandates to adopt Open Source in order to accelerate the economic and time-to-market benefits brought by the technology.

Open enterprise storage eliminates the coin-operated approach to feature upgrades, and instead, ships with a full suite of features that have no artificial capacity limits. This means that organizations can deploy storage solutions with the same set of features across their entire data center.

RNI NO: DEL ENG/ 2017/ 69906 Postal Reg. No.: DL-SW-01 / 4200 / 17-19

Date of Publication: 28 of Every Month Date of Posting: 1 & 2 of Every Month