"The need for more realistic disaster recovery capabilities is fuelling the demand for DRaaS leading to growth in data center demand"

Data center growth in India: The demand for co-location data centers has been on the rise ever since the question of data nativity became inevitable, even as the need for data driven intelligence and ability to use the power of cloud native AI/ML services is leading to hybrid architectures.

Second, the significant increase in Social Media/OTT content and the need for keeping it closer to the consumers and the philosophy of edge computing has also been contributing to the growth in demand for local Data Centers leading to the idea of Distributed Data Centers which is a combination of hyperscale, colocation and edge locations.

The new reality post pandemic has sensitized businesses to relook at their IT Resiliency and business continuity readiness from a whole new perspective. The need for more realistic disaster recovery capabilities is fuelling the demand for DRaaS leading to growth in data center demand. This must be further looked into from a compliance perspective where the DR site has to be in a different seismic zone and also in today’s reality where hyperscalers are not available in India in multiple regions.

To meet these emerging demands and help reduce the overall cost, rationalize IT spends, and rearchitect the underlying technology to bring in more agility and flexibility, service providers are investing to increase Data Center infrastructure availability. 

Security & Data center: The perspective of security architecture is changing dramatically with the mobile first and cloud first world, where the security architecture must seamlessly cover the distributed Data Center scenario. The other trend of dissolution of security perimeter with Cloud becoming the Data Center coupled with various SaaS services has resulted in a perspective of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Cloud Access Security Brokerage (CASB). These very measures have been of great help to seamlessly enable Work-from-Home access without any disruption and with all the confidence.

Achieving 100% uptime for the data center is easy, but maintaining it continuously is only possible with a sustainable model that includes strong process management and automation supporting process strengthening.

As for managed security services, Sify broadly offers three categories- Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Access Security Management and Cloud Workload Protection Management.  

Readiness to meet the demand: The fundamental enabler to be ready for emerging business models is the full spectrum of Cloud@Core services comprising of Cloud Enabling, Cloud Inspired, Cloud Pure and Cloud Enhanced services.  Our network transformation capabilities, Cloud connect services and Network presence with over 3100 PoPs across 1600 cities and towns can enable 5G.

As for keeping ahead of the curve to offer the latest and greatest compute resources available, we leverage our Cloud Adjacent Data Centers to provide maximum agility, flexibility and choices to our customers. Our very low network latency access to hyperscalers make it compelling to leverage the rich set of storage services very easily.   

GAUTAM BAKHRU, AVP Data Center Services, Sify Technologies