13th WIITF underlines the implications of cloud repatriation

(L to R) : Chander D Purswani, Director - Connect Star Networks, Smith Gonsalves, Director - CyberSmith SECURE, Dr. Deepak Sahu, Chief Editor, VARINDIA, Ajay Sawant, CEO & MD- Orient Technologies, Dr. Chitranjan Kesari, Chief Information, Officer, Idemeum India, Advocate (Dr.) Prashant Mali, Cybercrime & Privacy Lawyer- Bombay High Court, Dinesh O’ Bareja, Cybersecurity GRC Specialist- Open Security Alliance

Today, each and every corporate has their plans to win big with the Value-Added Resellers (popularly known as VARs) and partners, who have seen lucrative growth in this tech industry. Corporates engage with VARs and partners by building strong relationships through regular communication and collaboration. We have witnessed while people across the country were in self-isolation under stay-at-home orders imposed by the public officials, tech companies scrambled to bring support – and bring a sense of normalcy - to the economy. With cloud becoming mainstream, the number of workloads as well as breadth of applications continues to expand, enabling a new generation of mobile-first companies in India to innovate and scale on the cloud. Winning big with VARs and partners requires a well-designed partner program, regular communication and collaboration, and a commitment to building strong relationships based on trust and mutual benefit. To acknowledge this, VARINDIA has hosted its 13th edition of Western India Information Technology Fair, popularly recognised as the VAR SUMMIT on 21st of April, 2023 at Hotel Courtyard by Marriott, Mumbai. The theme of the event was CLOUD & BEYOND.

The VAR SUMMIT was attended by Adv (Dr.) Prashant Mali, Cybercrime & Privacy Lawyer- Bombay High Court; Dinesh O’ Bareja, Cybersecurity GRC Specialist, Open Security Alliance; R K Shastri, DB & NB Deptt. - SBI; Ajay Sawant, CEO & MD,Orient Technologies; Smith Gonsalves, Director - CyberSmithSECURE; Aman Thareja, M.D (India)- Forcepoint India & SAARC; Rajeev K Abichandani, Sr. Manager, GSI/NSI Alliances (India & SAARC), Fortinet; Amit Agrawal, Chief Business Officer, Web Werks Data Centers India; AmarishKarnik- Channel sales Director-Veeam Software (India & SAARC) and many more.

The event staged many presentations by the delegates and corporates. There was a Fire-Side chat session and a panel discussion session on cloud adoption and cloud repatriation, which are two strategies that businesses can use to manage their IT infrastructure and applications.

Later at the event, Chander D. Purswani, Director - Connect Star Networks launched a book on the success story named “A True Tale of PMC Depositors”. Umesh Gopinath Jadhav, an ardent patriot of the nation from Bengaluru was invited to share his life story of travelling over 1,30,000 Kms to collect soil from 150 families of slain jawans of our country.

On the theme of the event Dr. Deepak Sahu, Chief Editor, VARINDIA presented his welcome address saying, “With the rapid advancement of technology, our world has become increasingly digital, and it has affected almost every aspect of our lives. It is important to recognize that we cannot control everything in the digital world, but we can take steps to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits. Cloud computing has revolutionized the way we store, process, and access data. It has enabled businesses to scale their IT resources, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. The cloud has also opened up new opportunities for innovation and collaboration. With cloud becoming mainstream, the number of workloads as well as breadth of applications continues to expand, enabling a new generation of mobile-first companies in India to innovate and scale on the cloud.” 

Every organization should start preparing for cloud computing and Digital Personal Data Protection

“In IT act we have three sections, about which you should primarily bother. One is section 72 which talks about data breach and privacy. Second is section 80, which permits police to enter your premises and search and seizure work. Under Section 80 they have the power to seize all electronic items like mobile phones, iPads, laptops, and when it comes to cloud computing or data centers they try to confiscate all your blade servers or hard disks out of those servers or the storage devices. In some cases, they have sealed the whole data center and then taken the backup from experts, and then will send it to the forensics. Section 80 gives unlimited power to Police. The next is 43A, which is about compensation for failure to protect data. If section 43A hits you then the fine can reach crores of rupees.
Apart from this, you all should start preparation for cloud computing and Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP). The new Data Privacy Bill does not have any criminal liability. In DPDP the compensation will depend on the data protection board which contains only Govt employees but no judge. You can apply negotiation tactics in the DPDP boards. A new set of skills needs to be developed to be compliant with DPDP.” 
Advocate (Dr.) Prashant Mali 
Cybercrime & Privacy Lawyer- Bombay High Court
 

India houses an interesting mix of customers adopting cloud and cloud repatriation

“In India we have six data centers as of now from where we are offering the services. We are the most pragmatically growing data center organization while catering to all the micro-markets like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Noida, Pune and Mumbai. We started our journey on cloud with Nutanix, so we are providing Nutanix based services on cloud. We differ from others as on a single platform we offer hybrid multi-cloud managed services. It is a complete suite of services where we provide primary disaster recovery, cloud-on-ramp services, scalability to the cloud etc. All those use cases are possible as far as the cloud is concerned on Nutanix. During your journey towards the cloud, the main issue is how fast and reliably you can migrate. That is where our expertise coupled with Nutanix offers a very unique proposition to the customers where we can bring all the workloads to our data center faster and also can deploy multiple things at that given point of time. Rapid scalability, automation, simplified management and flexibility is something that we can offer to the customers. We try to improve the agility of the customer, reduce the cost and manage the risk. We have seen an interesting mix of customers where some are adopting the cloud and some are moving away from the cloud.”
Amit Agrawal  
Chief Business Officer, Web Werks - Iron Mountain Data Center

Fortinet converging the network and security into one

If we talk about Fortinet, most of you recognize just one flagship product and that is the firewall. As the firewall UTM is concerned, we have close to 40% market share so far. But this is just a starting point for us because a firewall is the foundation of convergence to a platform journey. Convergence cannot be achieved overnight, especially after COVID-19 customers are talking about consolidation, convergence and platform. Along with me you all would recognize cybersecurity as the most fragmented solution in the industry. If we look at the latest data from Gartner, they say that 75% of large organizations are actively pursuing a vendor consolidation strategy. Fortinet is converging the network and security into one. The converged benefits are reduced complexity, a single console management, a secured networking and cost saving. If we talk about how big the convergence is, then we are in a place where the security networking is 40% and the networking alone is 60%. In the next seven years, you will see that secured networking on the convergence will be bigger than the networking. In Fortinet we are bringing endpoints, security, networking, cloud, security operations all together onto a single platform in an organic approach, all managed by a single console to protect the broadest attack surface and better risk management.  
Rajeev K Abichandani, 
Sr. Manager, GSI/NSI Alliances (India & SAARC)- Fortinet

Panel Discussion Session: Cloud Adoption & Cloud Repatriation

Cloud repatriation may replace Cloud computing
Cloud adoption involves moving applications and data from on-premises servers to the cloud and it can be hosted by a third party provider. This strategy offers a number of benefits including scalability, flexibility and cost savings. At the same time Cloud repatriation involves moving applications and data back from the cloud to on-premise servers. This strategy may be adopted for a number of reasons such as a desire to regain control over IT infrastructure, improve security and reduce cost.

Dr. Deepak Sahu, Chief Editor, VARINDIA

Cloud made businesses simpler
Gone are those days when Cloud was used only for tests and developments. Now Cloud is inevitable. The businesses need freedom, flexibility, and agility. So there is always a fight between a CIO and users. Look at the way the e-commerce business we are all piling on. It is so easy to do shopping nowadays that we do not have to travel through the traffic, from one shop to another etc., all it is possible only with Cloud. Businesses have been made simpler by the Cloud.

Ajay Sawant
CEO & MD- Orient Technologies

Cloud computing acts as a rider to the latest technologies like AI, IoT etc. 
We have categorization of millennials, gen Z and X, the organizations that are today Cloud and digital native for them Cloud makes a lot of sense. They do not have traditional applications, infrastructure, mammoth unique systems etc. So for them the cost of entry is potentially low. Today we talk about Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Blockchain etc. and to propagate this to everyone you need Cloud which is the rider on which these technologies will be actually given to people.

Rajeev Mamidanna
MD- Synoptiq Infosolutions

India-based Clouds to flourish in future
I will just point out two major aspects, if the cloud provider is a foreign-based entity and the customers are in India then it is certainly going to be pretty important to watch how the Indian companies who have sensitive data or working in sensitive sectors are going to collaborate. As I have been looking at some of the companies in India who are not using Cloud like, Oil and Gas, Power sector etc. They are using the India-based Clouds and that is what would be there going forward.

Smith Gonsalves
 Director - Cyber Smith SECURE

Cloud has a bright future
The future of Cloud is very bright. It is not about Cloud or Data Center, it is about organizations - how they wanted to use Cloud for themselves. When I talk to our customers, the majority of them are still using on-premises and that is where the money lies for all of us. Moving to AWS, Azure, GCPs is like once you get in, you cannot get out.

Ashish Sharma
Head of Strategy- Web werks Data Centers India

“In BFSI we will witness close to 25-30% of growth rate for Cloud”
When it comes to BFSI all traditional activities will be migrated to three parameters - identity, information and experience. I will just change the verdict a little bit, as on date it is identity, information and experience which has been changed to speed, intelligence and experience. So any of my business outcomes is categorized or parametric to speed, intelligence and experience. If I am able to achieve these three attributes then I am good to go. I am doing well on my on-premise but there has been buzz and things then I have to go to Cloud. We have an ecosystem of Cloud which is close to $8 billion and we are growing at a rate of 35%.        

      
R K Shastri
DB & NB Deptt. - SBI

Moving to cloud is inevitable
Cloud is inevitable; we are already hooked to it. With cloud there comes compliance, regulations and security. The reason why we moved to cloud is cost and moving back from cloud is cost. You cannot repatriate wholly from cloud as there was humongous amount of data lying over cloud. As we are standing in 2023 we cannot move from the cloud, it is inevitable.

Dinesh O’ Bareja, 
Cybersecurity GRC Specialist- Open Security Alliance

The complexities around data keeps increasing

We need to be wary of the fact that there is a complexity around data today. So what is the scale of data that we have, what is the context of the data, what data is important to us and what not, for what we need ransomware protection and for what we do not need, for how much data we are paying to the cloud vendor, when we have data then how can I get all my stakeholders like HR, Finance, Operations onboard on this. So this is all possible today because way back 50 years ago we came up with an open internet called TCP/IP. Then it progressed very fast from web to web applications then to cloud but there is only one thing which bothers is that the open internet is available to the bad guys also. So whatever advancements we are making, the bad guys are also making the same advancements and they are after us. This complexity has further increased during the ransomware time which is growing in leaps and bounds. So what is the future? I think Quantum Computing is around the corner, Artificial Intelligence is really going to get into our lives in such a way that we will not be able to separate ourselves from that. Metaverse is soon going to play a big role.           
Aman Thareja  
M.D., Forcepoint India & SAARC

Fire side Chat

Amarish Karnik, Director, Channel Sales, Alliance & Cloud and Service Provider - India & SAARC, Veeam Software  

Veeam makes organizations 100% Ramsomware proof

When applying a hybrid IT model, disaster recovery and business continuity are critical. What should be the key things to consider while putting together a BCDR strategy in a Hybrid IT environment?

From a customer standpoint, hybrid IT is a framework and they need to adopt it. A lot of things are on-premises and public cloud. I will adopt what is best for me. If I have to build a test and develop then I may adopt a public cloud because I may not be getting the hardware immediately and hence temporarily might go there but at the same time as I move to a public cloud how do I come back whenever I get my hardware. So it is all about the framework every organization needs to adopt and that is where data protection becomes really important. Also, thanks to the pandemic that the proliferation of SaaS workload has increased tremendously. Now these are the things where my applications are residing. How do I protect the data, because wherever the data is whether on a public cloud or on-premises or SaaS Cloud, protection of data or data to be managed by the customer and not by anybody else. That is where Veeam plays the most important role, that is how I have a framework or one single pane of glass to start managing the data which resides anywhere.

Ransomware was the number one threat in 2022. Where do business continuity plans fit in a Ransomware attack?

We did a survey from India CIO standpoint and 85% have agreed that they have experienced atleast two ransomware attacks in over the last one year of time, 15% agreeing or they did not even realize that there was a ransomware attack. So today if I go and talk to any customer it is a boardroom level discussion. It is a serious threat. Some of the customers have also agreed that they have paid the money but have not got the data back. My personal view is that backup is the last line of defense when it comes to ransomware. It is there and will be there because as we embark the digitization journey that is going to be a bigger threat for everybody. There are a lot of solutions but our view is anybody who goes and talks about the protection it is all about the appliance story. But we are the disruptor over there and will continue to disrupt the market with a single thing, if I make anything immutable then I am 100% giving you guarantee that we will be ramsomware proof. It is a very bold statement but it is a reality. When I am saying I will make it immutable then it is not only on-premise, I can make it on public cloud also.