Data center is one of the critical aspects of seamless movement and a converged platform to manage data

Recently VARINDIA hosted a CIO roundtable with industry veterans on the topic ‘Storage platform to be Proven, Powerful and Predictable’. The session was moderated by Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-Chief, VARINDIA. The session started with a presentation from Deepak Sar, Distribution & Alliance Director, Hitachi Vantara.

While presenting the company profile and talking about digital transformation, Deepak Sar, Distribution & Alliance Director, Hitachi Vantara, said, “The positive side of the pandemic is, it has started the exploration of our businesses into direction, which all of us at some point in time were looking at from the business standpoint on the drawing board in a boardroom. All that has started to accelerate just because of what happened in reality in the year 2021. The year completely, has really given us that acceleration and that one buzzword which was still in the project phase - which was still in the phase of the boardroom discussions, which was called as digital transformation, and which is becoming a reality today. Digital transformation is something that everybody is looking at doing; it is not a project any longer. A business transformation is led through digital transformation. I have panelists today who are champions of this digital transformation, somebody who advises on the digital revolution, somebody who is implementing digital transformation and someone’s business because of the digital transformation that happened. Basically, we are talking about making sure that your business is digital ready for tomorrow and looking at accelerating your digital innovation. All these begin by modernizing your current digital infrastructure. It all begins using technologies like AI and ML. That is step number one when you are looking at getting into the digital arena - that is modernizing your digital infrastructure. We move ahead from that, and we get into an area where we become a data driven organization. When we say that we become a data driven organization what it means is that we are able to monetize the data that we have. We are able to transform the data that is stored, and are able to adhere to the policies.”

Moderating the panel discussion Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-Chief, VARINDIA, said, “It is high time to update Data Center Security Infrastructure, as the Cyber attacks are more prevalent than ever before. Businesses and individualsonstant threat of having sensitive information stolen. The sophistication of malware today, compared to that of even 3 years ago, is dramatically improved. These security threats must be addressed by data centers or they are severely exposed to a cyberattack or other security issue. As security is an important component of remaining compliant, all data centers should be focusing on investing in modern infrastructure that improves security.”

Sanjeev Sinha, President- Digital Transformation, India Power Corporation, quoted, “As a user organization what we always look for is data center infrastructure. It needs to be completely aligned with the business. The whole strategy emerges not as an ideal strategy, but as a business strategy, where IT strategy forms a basis, the business objectives must drive the data center strategy. It is a top down approach, which looks at important parameters like risk tolerance, technology requirements, and even the future visibility of various things which will determine the organization decision. To understand the implications and possible consolidation; the savings over time form the core components of determining this strategy here with future projected capabilities, and also aligning and checking out the ROI of technology and facilities from a CapEx and OpEx point of view. That is why I mentioned that SaaS has to be aligned with the business. The entire industry is actually undergoing a digital transformation. And the operations are going to be digitally controlled and more and more with that comes the risk associated with it and security becomes more important for us and many others.”

Deepak Sar, Distribution & Alliance Director, Hitachi Vantara, commented, “I am glad that my company is aligned to all the mentioned business needs currently. The need of requirements in the industry is something which should match as right up front that it is no longer something which has to be business related. The strategy should begin from the perspective that there is a vision of the business to drive that digital transformation into the digital journey. If there is no business vision, there will be nothing that we just addressed about that. When I talked about marrying business outcomes to technology is something that we also look at doing from that standpoint. So I think all the points that have been mentioned that suffice me to say that this is something that we realized some two or three years back, and we as Hitachi Vantara went ahead and acquired a company based out of Pune specifically to help our customers go on the multi cloud journey. The company helps businesses transform their apps and make that cloud ready.”

Dr. Deepak Kalambkar, VP InfoSec and Infrastructure, Safexpay, said, “In the payment industry for data centers, we already had so much more storage upgrades. There should be an on the go upgrade for storage as well as the RAM side. As Hitachi Vantara has now on the go update and hybrid solutions for data,  that would be rather good to keep our data backups because as per compliance we have to keep seven years data. So currently we are keeping it in house. The data is backed up in house. But here also we faced many compliance related things that we should not store card data. We have to purge the card data when you take the backups. We are in front of the auditor only. If it is on the go to upgrade some of the things on the cloud only then we can store the data on cloud only and keep all the compliance regulations.”

Neeraj Bhople, CTO, ANDD TECH SERVICES, commented, “Since I work both on the user side across from multinationals and on the services side what I have realized is that from datacenter infrastructure strategy perspective, it has to be driven by the business. It is not an IT driven thing. It is certainly driven by the business. But at the same time, while it is being driven by the business, there are a lot of technical or IT related aspects that come into picture which become critical from the user perspective, as well as from the services industry's perspective. One of the things that were mentioned earlier during the presentation was that Hitachi Vantara currently provides a seamless movement driving across the various types of drives, storage drives, which are available that is one of the critical aspects of seamless movement and a converged platform to manage the data, the storage that is available. It is important even though having modular things in place helps where you can just pick and choose the different modules maybe from different tools, different providers, different vendors to manage it, having all of those features available through a single partner that makes it much easier for the organizations who want to take a call on which vendor to go with and to manage it easily.”

Amarjeet S Manchanda, Vice President - Data Centre and Cloud Business, iValue InfoSolutions, added, “In the 30 years of IT industry that have seen evolving and transforming itself, I have seen IT industry transforming itself. From the days when IT used to be a key fulfillment for the business because you have to cut some invoices, to do the file files, tax returns and you have to provide the personal productivity tools to the staff and so on and so forth, it became IT enablers.  Today it is the key driver. There are organizations whose business is run on the datacenter; cloud is just a way of how we render compute and storage to the user. When I say datacenter there are businesses which have run out of datacenters. There are large companies who have undertaken a journey to digital innovators and they are somewhere on the way. They are actually undertaking various means and they are acquiring various companies, which could enable them to turn into a digital transformation company.”