It is becoming imperative for the Indian CIO to invest in IT transformation to help accommodate massive growth in structured and unstructured data, maintain the performance and reliability of key business applications, support increasingly complex workflows, thereby driving digital initiatives.
What are the main points that CIOs today look at when making investment in DC modernization?
With businesses undergoing digital transformation, it is important for them to stay competitive and ahead of changing customer expectations. Therefore, CIOs must adopt the technology systems and processes that will transform their internal operations, to meet the demands of fast moving businesses. This requires building agile infrastructures. Hence, here are the few things that CIOs need to keep in mind before making a decision to modernize their datacenters:
- High costs to operate: As companies expand into new markets, simultaneously they also gain or build datacenters along the way. Each data center operated with its own set of practices and on its own hardware. Managing across these disparate systems and inconsistent processes is not at all cost-effective.
- Aging technology: Enterprises have continued to operate using traditional datacenters that weren’t up to modern standards — utilization and virtualization rates were low, automation was non-existent, etc. Over the time, this practice has not only contributed to high operating costs, which will not lead to many inefficiencies, making it nearly impossible for IT to meet the basic demands of the business.
- High risk due to lack of redundancy: The organization’s fast growth and lack of standardization have always led to a gap in disaster recovery protection. Many applications — including key business systems — had zero redundancy. Hence, to reduce the redundancies, firms need to quickly modernize their operations as this risk to the business is too great to ignore.
- Time lag in modernization: There is a huge time cost which is involved while migrating towards the new-age datacenters. Without the right partner, an organization will easily dedicate twice as much time than it usually will take.
- Resource cost avoidance: Alternative to choosing the right partner is running the migration project in-house. This would require bringing in contractors, experts and IT admins, which will involve an exorbitant cost. Hence, conducting the project on its own will not only lead to significant resource requirement but there are greater chances that the project may get extended.
- Time to respond back to business (agility): With changing times, it becomes essential for organisations to respond back to the business & customers in real-time. Here, agility plays an important role for businesses to stay one step ahead of their competition. By embracing All-Flash technology, businesses will be able to transform their IT infrastructure, making it possible for them to respond to business requests and complete projects much quicker than their counterparts.
With DC modernization and cloud services the norm, how is the Enterprise storage market evolving of late?
The storage market in India is dynamic in natured. Currently, IDC pegs the growth of India’s external storage market at USD 70.0 million in Q2 2017 with 8.6 percent year on year (YoY). Presently, India is investing heavily in digital projects and emerging technologies. Internet of things (IoT) for example, is gaining immense popularity in Indian ecosystem, forcing businesses to modernize, transform and automate themselves to keep pace with the ongoing disruption.
Thus, to stay ahead in this fierce competitive ecosystem, it is becoming imperative for the India companies to invest in IT transformation which will help enterprises accommodate massive growth in structured and unstructured data, maintain the performance and reliability of key business applications, support increasingly complex workflows, thereby driving digital initiatives. Hence, overall, the enterprise storage market is bound to witness an unprecedented growth as India prepares itself for its digital journey.
How big is the Enterprise All-flash technology market in India?
The adoption of All-Flash technology in India is one of the hottest trends to look forward to in near future. As per IDC, the uptake of All-Flash arrays has witnessed an increased trend in the Q2 2017. External storage market in India is at the brink of witnessing an explosion due to adoption of emerging technologies such as real time business analytics, augmented reality and IoT etc. This will result in huge amounts of structured as well as unstructured data. In India, businesses are not yet equipped to deal with such enormous data as they continue to function on legacy storage solutions/legacy IT infrastructure. Therefore, along with adopting new-age technologies, modernizing IT infrastructure and reducing infrastructure footprint will become the key priorities across organisations.
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“To successfully manage business transitions in the digital age, CIOs require a deep understanding of business imperatives as well as the ability to enable business agility and accelerate performance.”
Niladri Saha
General Manager
Modern Infrastructure Team
India, Dell EMC
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This is where the All-Flash technology will come into the picture. All-Flash technology serves as a foundation that drives modern infrastructure. This will not only mitigate the rising need of efficient storage requirement, but will also boost agility and optimize application performance, helping businesses to prepare for future.
Hence, as blue print of digitization begin to take shape across businesses, All-Flash storage will take its rightful place in the technical infrastructure that will be the underpinning of these massive digital undertakings.
Which verticals have been the early adopters of All-flash? What has been the traction in Government enterprises?
The key sectors in Indian economy that are driving the growth for All-Flash storage are banking & financial services and telecom. Banking & financial service sector have always looked out for new ways to speed transaction processing and enhance the customer experience. Completion of transactions faster, is the key to better revenue outcomes. Hence, banks require a smart storage option like All-Flash, which will build a critical foundational pillar of IT for digital banking and wealth management.
Moreover, All-Flash storage solutions have been at the core of the mobility revolution. Due to the power of All-Flash storage, mobile transformation took place i.e. mobile phones transformed into sleek and powerful devices. The database of the digital customer base is ever growing and mobile payments and deposits has led to millions of transactions daily, which results in widespread adoption of All-Flash solutions in the coming years.
What are the challenges being faced by CIOs in this regard? What is the right approach?
Datacenters are the modern bedrock of digital transformation. They play an essential role for organizations to deal with their day-to-day operations seamlessly, without any disruptions. Keeping the above mentioned hurdles in mind, the right approach to deal with such challenges is to choose the right partner in the digital transformation journey.
A right partner not only just brings knowledge and expertise to complete migration but also more importantly, contribute to a transformation that would deliver an optimized datacenter. Dell EMC provides a holistic portfolio of data centre modernization and migration services that help its customers navigate these complex events, providing the required rigor and expertise for a successful outcome. Some of the benefits that Dell EMC’s DC modernization and migration services provide are improved agility and performance, reduced risk of unplanned downtime, huge cost savings, optimized resource efficiency etc.
What is your advice to CIOs in the process of planning DC modernization?
To address organisational and CEO challenges, CIOs and IT, need to look into new technology capabilities and solutions to optimise, redefine and/or transform current processes and operating models. To successfully manage these business transitions in the new digital age, CIOs require a deep understanding of business imperatives as well as the ability to enable business agility and accelerate business performance.
Therefore, data center modernization is very critical in a life of any business. But, choosing the right partner in this journey stands equally critical, as these transformations, if not executed properly can put businesses at risk.
