Technology Gets Smarter

With technology getting smarter and capabilities increasing, IT service providers and practitioners will be expected to develop these smart technologies into business opportunities. 

Given that the business environment is expected to remain volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous businesses will be under pressure to reinvent the way they work, the compute and the core business processes. The top most priority for IT will be to help businesses transform work and compute. Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, India subcontinent, Citrix says, “IT service providers and practitioners will be expected to drive business transformation initiatives which help organisations optimize cost and increase productivity. 

The changing role of IT organization 

Gone are the days when companies used to lock down computers allowing their workers to only use monolithic products through a wired network in an office environment. Today employees are getting empowered thanks to the emergence of devices and applications. 

Manu Bansal, Vice President, Advanced Technology, Channels, Cisco India, says, " IT is something which would never lose its importance. In fact, it is going to gain more and more significance in the near future as the dependency on IT will increase. As technology has become an integral part of our daily life and business, all the small and big firms are embracing technology for making their operations run better. One major reason that today all the companies are adopting IT is because it helps them in increasing efficiency in their organization, gain scalability and provide resilience to their operations.” 

Today, there is a fundamental structural shift happening in the way we work. Compared to the old PC era wherein companies locked down computers allowing employees to only use monolithic products through a wired network in an office environment, today’s workers are driving change because of the empowerment they’re getting from powerful consumer devices and self-service cloud applications. 

So in effect, the set of assumption for IT has now been turned on its head and IT must get into service delivery. The role of IT has now transformed to respond to and for the way people need to consume “it” – the services, apps, data and information. In order to solve this problem, the only thing that will work is a holistic solution with many piece parts working together well, seamlessly to solve the problem. You can’t just solve a single-sign-on problem or a mobile device problem as an island. These narrowly defined problems are now being stacked on top of each other and are much more interrelated and need to be solved inter-relatedly. The other way in which the role of an IT organization has changed is that they need to think of themselves as "internal service providers" - and having to "compete" against commercially-available apps/products. The "IT-as-a-Service" trend extends to service-providers, who are able to provide Windows and Desktops more efficiently than the IT organization itself – and IT shops are compelled to source desktops from outside their walls. IT's security/control/compliance models shift from the "locked-down" device, to the virtually-issued and controlled device.

IT will consider business transformation initiatives like: a) Workshifting: IT will drive programs like work from home or move work to a more optimized location and cut real estate cost and delight employees, b) Executive Mobility: IT will enable employees to work with people, apps and data from any device and any location thus increasing the productivity of employees.

Sanjay Deshmukh Area Vice President, India subcontinent, Citrix	Manu Bansal Vice President, Advanced Technology, Channels, Cisco India	Sunil Sharma VP Sales, India & SAARC at Cyberoam	Shantanu Ghosh VP and MD, India Product Operations, Symantec

Innovation is the Key

If there is one constant in the Technology world, it is innovation. Advancements in technology—whether software, hardware, or both—have resulted in the growing opportunities for everyone –customer, vendors and channel partners. 

Sunil Sharma - VP Sales, India & SAARC at Cyberoam says, “Innovation is a part of Cyberoam’s DNA; hence Cyberoam attributes its proactive product development, to its ability to innovate by understanding market needs. Cyberoam ensures that required infrastructure for research, analysis and re-creating or simulating the needed scenario, is available. Cyberoam’s R&D process enables us to deliver a product of global quality that helps us address our customers’ needs and challenges efficiently and pro-actively.”

Looking at the ongoing trends of the malware, and other cyber-attacks, Innovation on the part of a security company becomes all the more important.  eScan, a leading IT Security company has innovated eScan Security Network, which adds another layer in anti-virus protection. eScan says says, “This additional layer of protection ensures a prompt response and an unprecedented detection level that enhances the overall protection.” He adds, “eScan Security Network falls in as one of the most prominent feature within our SOHO products, continuously monitoring and providing analysis of real-life threats on a global scale, thus protecting all connected eScan users against new and emerging malware.”

This has enabled the customers to be one step ahead of the cyber-villains. 

Vishak Raman Senior Regional Director, India & SAARC, Fortinet;	Syed Asim COO - India South Asia, Middle East & Africa, Dion Global Solutions	Bala Variyam Vice-President, Collabera Labs.	K P Unnikrishnan APAC Marketing Director of Brocade Communications

Shantanu Ghosh, VP and MD, India Product Operations, Symantec says, “With a paradigm shift in the adoption of Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Mobility and the way consumers and businesses access data, Symantec engineers globally focus on innovations that enable customers to confidently protect their information driven world.”

One of the key innovations that Symantec has developed to protect information is Insight, which is an important part of our latest Symantec Endpoint Protection 12. Insight, Symantec’s award-winning community and cloud-based reputation technology, detects and blocks new threats earlier and more accurately than any other security product. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also leverages Insight to reduce the overhead of virus scanning by as much as 70 percent by automatically identifying and whitelisting Symantec-trusted high-reputation files, eliminating significant scanning activity from each endpoint. This also has significant benefits in virtual environments, since SEP 12 reduces scanning overhead rather than taking the security out of the instance. For instance, SEP 12 comes with virtual image exception that whitelists files from the standard virtual machine image to optimize scanning; resource leveling that randomizes scans and updates schedules to prevent resource utilization spikes; and shared Insight cache, which shares Insight cloud lookups locally or redirects to a local server to reduce bandwidth and latency.

“Technological innovation through R&D is at the heart of Fortinet’s strategy to address the stringent security requirements of its customers,” says Vishak Raman, Senior Regional Director, India & SAARC, Fortinet. He adds, “Fortinet’s solutions are continuously enhanced with the latest innovations and technologies to remain at the forefront of performance in the industry.”

Fortinet has been awarded more than 80 patents, with 115 patents pending, and has more product certifications than any other security appliance company. Fortinet is the only vendor to have earned certifications across all core security technologies. These independent certifications demonstrate the company’s ability to consolidate multiple security technologies into a single device while still meeting the highest standards of performance and accuracy. We have multiple ICSA Labs, NSS Labs, BreakingPoint, IPv6 and EAL4+ certifications.

Fortinet’s high-performance unified threat management solutions provide the visibility corporations need to detect hidden threats within legitimate content, even from trusted  sources and authorized applications. This unmatched protection means they can allow new applications into their network, but automatically block any malicious content or behavior.

At the core of its multi-threat security solutions, Fortinet developed a unique technology platform to specifically provide high security performance, simplified management and maximum scalability. 

Fortinet’s FortiOS is a proprietary security-hardened, purpose-built operating system, which, coupled with Fortinet’s FortiASIC processors, is designed to help customers achieve extremely high throughput and exceptionally low latency. 

Emerging Technologies 

Emerging technologies are impacting the way IT drives business – include social, cloud and mobile. The boundaries between these three areas are blurring, with innovation in each of these technologies feeding off of one another. Impact of social media on topics ranging from commerce to analytics is going to be huge. “As the dust settles down on cloud computing, service integration and brokerage of processes that leverage cloud services will be a key trend to watch out for in the future. Mobility continues to drive innovation and is becoming all pervasive when it comes to usage across industry verticals. All these three areas are some of the trends that we will be focusing on over the next 12-18 months,” says Bala Variyam, Vice President - Collabera Labs. 

We will continue to invest in emerging technologies in order to distinguish 'stuff from fluff'. Some of the technologies, trends – that we believe will have enormous impact in the way IT drives business – include social, cloud and mobile. The boundaries between these three areas are blurring, with innovation in each of these technologies feeding off of one another. Impact of social media on topics ranging from commerce to analytics is going to be huge. As the dust settles down on cloud computing, service integration and brokerage of processes that leverage cloud services will be a key trend to watch out for in the future. Mobility continues to drive innovation and is becoming all pervasive when it comes to usage across industry verticals. All these three areas are some of the trends that we will be focusing on over the next 12-18 months.

Mobility

Mobile technology is a huge area that is still highly under-utilized in India. Mobile phones have reached nearly every household in India, which opens a huge new market for mobile applications. 

Syed Asim, COO – India South Asia, Middle East & Africa, Dion Global Solutions, says, "With smart phones and androids being a huge success in the Indian market, we see a rapid increase in intelligent applications that will give consumers the real power of mobility."

The purview and definition of mobility will undergo a change as organizations will now need to consider how they will deliver all these apps to any user at any time regardless of the device,” says  Sanjay of Citrix.  Mobility will not be just about user mobility but app mobility and moving apps around from datacenter to datacenter to cloud. An application may be delivered from two different locations to a user that could be anywhere. In the context of these newer realities, mobility won’t really be about the device that enables it but being able to do what we want, where we want and when we want.

Virtualisation 

With the passage of time virtualization is all set to play a bigger role as IT organizations morph into more and more of a services management framework. Many companies are quickly realizing the value in moving to virtualisation. 

Virtualization has been commoditizated. Fast becoming a natural way of doing business, today it is less about the process and more about the business enablement of what virtualization allows the clients to do that they couldn’t do before.  

Virtualization facilitates consolidation of infrastructure and hardware by replacing physical servers with virtual machines, and by combining applications on virtual servers. Hence, it leads to reduced space and cost of IT infrastructure. Over the years, there have been many security concerns within a virtual environment. "Many incorrectly believe that just because the environment is virtual, it must be inherently secure. However, the fact is that virt ual environment for the most part suffers from the same security concerns as does the physical environment," says Govind Rammurthy, MD & CEO, eScan.

BYOD’ (Bring Your Own Device) changes IT procurement 

The company PC is becoming a thing of the past, as businesses increasingly allow, and even encourage, employees to bring their domestic, consumer devices into the workplace and access corporate applications.  This will allow application availability at anytime, from anywhere, and will help business slash procurement costs. K P Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director of Brocade Communications, says, “The smartphone/tablet phenomenon will fuel this trend, and will drive uptake of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), wireless networking and end-point security solutions in the corporate arena.”  However, it will create many problems for IT departments as they attempt to mitigate risk, and signals a tough future for PC and laptop manufacturers.  Unnikrishnan says, “It is possible that in the imminent future we will see at least one high profile security disaster as a result of this trend, and that will be act as a wake-up call for companies to get proper security processes in place before unlocking their networks to all and sundry.” 

edit@varindia.com