Author: yotta@manage

India Enterprise Cloud Survey 2020

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The first edition of the India Enterprise Cloud Survey provides the latest trends and insights of Indian Enterprises journey on cloud adoption and usage. While the cloud has taken center stage today, it has been around for quite some time now. The COVID crisis has fast-tracked this and has been a serious reminder to design IT systems in a way that allows for agility, resilience, and efficiency amid disruption and fast reformation of organisational boundaries.

The external VUCA environment has been demanding an IT platform that supports businesses to innovate amid disruption, which has been relatively gradual. COVID has undoubtedly changed the pace. This research report provides exciting insights by leading CIOs and IT Heads of large and mid-sized enterprises across multiple industries.

Key Highlights of the research –

  • Cloud is mainstream today, catalysed in a big way by COVID as 77% of the enterprises plan to implement their enterprise cloud strategy over the next 12 to 18 months
  • 63% of the Indian enterprise see cloud as the key mode of infrastructure hosting in 2022 as compared to 37% in 2020
  • India Cloud Spending to grow at 15 to 17% in 2021, twice the rate of 7 to 9% at which the overall IT spending by enterprises is estimated to grow

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The India Enterprise Cloud Survey

The India Enterprise Cloud Survey reveals insights on cloud computing adoption by leading CIOs & IT Leaders across Industry.

A cloud-first approach to data protection

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The year 2020 saw a spike in cybercrimes across the world. Rising unemployment forced many to turn to criminal activities. Cyberattacks increased exponentially, especially business email compromise (BEC) attacks like phishing, spear phishing, and whaling – and ransomware attacks. These attacks have resulted in data and financial losses. With most employees working from home, the threat of data theft and data exfiltration looms high.

Today, the risk of storing data on-premise or on endpoints is higher than ever. That’s why organisations are taking a cloud-first approach to data protection. This article discusses the inadequacies of on-premise, legacy infrastructure for data protection and explains why more organisations are adopting modern cloud architectures.

Threat vectors looming large

According to a report by the Group-IB, there were more than 500 successful ransomware attacks in over 45 countries between late 2019 and H1 2020, which means at least one ransomware attack occurring every day, somewhere in the world.  By Group-IB’s conservative estimates, the total financial damage from ransomware operations amounted to over $1 billion ($1,005,186,000), but the actual damage is likely to be much higher.

Similarly, in the final week of the US Elections, healthcare institutions and hospitals in the US were impacted by Ryuk ransomware. The affected institutions could not access their systems and had to resort to pen and paper operations. Life was at risk as necessary surgeries and medical treatments were postponed; patient medical records were inaccessible. Healthcare is a regulated sector and hackers know healthcare data’s value: this includes X-ray scans, medical scans, diagnostic reports, medical prescriptions, ECG reports, and lab test reports.

Today, employees across industries work remotely and log in to enterprise servers to access data. In this scenario, data exfiltration is becoming a massive challenge for organisations. A study by IBM Security says the cost of a data breach has risen 12% over the past five years and now costs $3.92 million on an average.

The crux of the issue is that data exfiltration and data theft can severely tarnish an organisation’s reputation, erode its share price, breach customer and shareholder trust, and even result in customer churn. Stringent regulatory standards and acts like HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, Brazilian LGPD impose stiff fines and penalties that have historically made companies bankrupt or put them in the red.

Indian companies doing business with organizations in the US, Europe or elsewhere, will need to comply with the regulations defined by those nations, at an industry level. And if customer data is breached, they will be liable to pay the penalties imposed by those regulatory bodies.

India’s forthcoming Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 (which is close to being passed into law) is expected to impose similar fines as GDPR. The bill aims to protect the privacy of individuals relating to the flow and usage of their personal data.

Legacy infrastructure may not be able to comply with new regulations being introduced in an increasingly digital world. In fact, legacy could up the risk for data loss, and hence, organisations must move away from legacy infrastructure and take a cloud-first approach to data protection.

Legacy infrastructure is expensive, insecure

An organisation needs scale to succeed in today’s highly competitive business environment. Adding new customers, introducing new products and services, and timely response to market demand requires agility – to support all these the infrastructure should be able to scale up on demand.

Scaling infrastructure on-premise requires colossal investments and the TCO may not be viable in the long term. The shortage of in-house skills is another challenge. CIOs are under tremendous pressure to deliver value. The only way to scale is to embrace disruptive technologies like Cloud, Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Blockchain.

Traditional data protection tools offered by legacy infrastructure are inadequate to protect data in distributed environments, where employees work outside the perimeter, and to secure it from sophisticated attacks like ransomware.

At the same time, the introduction of new services and innovation by enterprises results in an exponential increase in data that gets generated from multiple sources like customers, partners, employees, supply chains, and other places. And much of this data is unstructured, which poses additional data governance and management challenges. Industry regulations mandate that this data be stored for a certain period, and copies of it need to be maintained.

Some governments insist that data must be stored on servers in their country (data residency). For instance, the Indian Personal Data Protection Bill will regulate how entities process personal data and create a framework for organisational and technical measures in processing of data, laying down norms for social media intermediary, cross-border transfer, accountability of entities processing personal data, remedies for unauthorised and harmful processing.

In such a scenario, it would be expensive for an organisation to store its growing data on-premise, as legacy infrastructure is inadequate to protect this data and comply with new data protection laws. Cloud environments are more suitable as cloud service providers ensure compliance.

For all these reasons, businesses want to break free from the shackles of captive data centers and embrace a cloud-first approach for rising data protection needs. To do that, they are moving away from the investment-heavy and legacy approach to a cloud-first approach for data storage and protection.

A cloud-first approach

Forrester predicts that 80 percent of organisations are extremely likely to adopt a cloud data protection solution, as more and more businesses are going in for cloud-first strategies. This is due to critical data loss with on-premises infrastructure, lack of security and scalability, and increased spending in legacy hardware and software altogether.

As enterprises face increasingly stringent compliance regulation, cloud data protection solutions help deliver enhanced privacy capabilities for them to keep pace with all of today’s dynamic business demands and needs.

For instance, enterprises scale up their operations globally, their infrastructure can extend to multiple clouds. This results in server sprawl and siloed data, posing additional data management solutions. This is where, they need to adopt Cloud Data Protection and Management solutions that can manage and protect these sprawling environments. These cloud solutions can also secure an increasingly remote workforce and bypass stalled supply chains and traditional data centers’ limitations considering the unprecedented pandemic situation.

The cloud also offers robust resiliency and business continuity – with backup and recovery tools. Storage-as-a-Service provides a flexible, scalable, and reliable storage environment based on various storage technologies like file, block, and object — with guaranteed SLAs. Furthermore, it allows end-users to subscribe to an appropriate combination of storage policies for availability, durability and security of data that can meet various expectations on data resiliency and retention.

Backup & Recovery as a service offers an end-to-end flexible, scalable, and reliable backup and recovery environment for all kinds of physical, virtual, file system, databases, and application data. This solution further extends the richness of backup capability by using agents to interface with and do data transfer or image-based method with a combination of full and incremental backups. This combination provides an extremely high level of protection against data loss as well as simplified recovery.

Today, organisations understand the value of cloud data protection solutions, which is much more secure than traditional hardware-based architectures. They are adopting platforms to protect data where it is being created — in the cloud — from anywhere with on-demand scalability (object storage), robust compliance capabilities, and industry-leading security standards.

While cloud migration efforts have been underway for several years, it has been dramatically accelerated this year. A remote workforce, growing ransomware threats, and questions about data governance have significantly accelerated the demand for a cloud-first approach to data protection.

How can CIOs drive digital transformation by maximizing the value of Cloud?

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The year 2020 will go down in history books for many reasons. One of those is that the business world is more distributed than ever — customers, partners, and employees work from their own locations (and rarely their offices) today. What does that mean for businesses? The consumer touchpoints are different today, wherein supply chains and delivery networks have changed. This is where organisations have to find new ways to deliver value and new experiences to customers.

In response to the pandemic, business organisations had to fundamentally change the way they operate. They had to transform processes, models, and supply chains for service delivery. To sustain business and remain competitive in a post-COVID world, they had to challenge the status quo and make a lot of changes.

Digital is no longer an option 

When the global pandemic gripped the world in March this year, organisations with three to five-year digital transformation plans were forced to execute plans in a few months or days. Either that or they would go out of business.

A new IBM study of global C-Suite executives revealed that nearly six in 10 organisations have accelerated their digital transformation journey due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, 66% of executives said they have completed initiatives that previously encountered resistance. In India, 55% of Indian executives plan to prioritise digital transformation efforts over the next two years.

This calls for new skills, strategies, and priorities. And the cloud and associated digital technologies will strongly influence business decisions in the post-COVID era. Organisations need to have a full-fledged cloud strategy and draw up a roadmap for cloud migration.

To achieve this, the leading-edge companies are aligning their business transformation efforts with the adoption of public and hybrid cloud platforms. For many sectors, remaining productive during lockdown depended on their cloud-readiness. Operating without relying too heavily on on-premise technology was key and will remain vital in the more digitally minded organisation of the future. In a way, we can say that with the right approach, strategy, vision, and platform, a modern cloud can ignite end-to-end digital transformation in ways that could only be imagined in the pre-Covid era.

To deliver new and innovative services and customer experiences, businesses – be it large corporates, MSMEs, or  start-ups – all are embracing disruptive technologies like cloud, IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, big data analytics, etc., to drive innovative and profitable business models.

For instance, introducing voice interfaces and chat bots for customer helpdesk is a compute intensive task that requires big data analytics and artificial intelligence in the cloud. This enables customers to just speak to a search bot if they need help in ordering products on an e-commerce website. They can also order the product just by speaking to voice bot like Siri or Alexa, for instance. The same is applicable for banking services. Voice based interfaces are enabling conversational banking, which also requires processing in the cloud. These services simplify and improve the customer experience and provide customer delight. But to introduce such innovative service requires an overhaul and transformation of traditional business processes – that’s digital transformation.

Solving infrastructure & cost challenges

Cloud computing has been around for ages, but CIOs still grapple with cloud challenges such as lack of central control, rising / unpredicted cost, complexity of infrastructure, security & compliance, and scaling. However, over the years, public cloud technology has evolved to address these challenges.

Central Control: Public cloud offers dashboards through which one can monitor and control cloud compute resources centrally irrespective where it is hosted (multicloud).

Managing Complexity: IT infrastructure is getting increasingly complex and CIOs have to deal with multiple vendors for cloud resources. Infrastructure is spread out over multiple clouds, usually from different vendors. And various best of breed solutions are selected and integrated into the infrastructure. As a result, the management of all these clouds and technologies poses a huge challenge. CIOs want to simply the management of infrastructure through a single window or single pane of glass. Cloud orchestration, APIs, dashboards, and other tools are available to do this.

Reducing Costs: Demands on IT resources are increasing but budgets remain the same and lack of billing transparency adds to it. Public cloud addresses both issues as it offers tremendous cost savings as you do not make upfront capital investments in infrastructure. There’s also a TCO benefit since you do not make additional investments to upgrade on-premise infrastructure – that’s because you rent the infrastructure and pay only for what you consume. The cloud service provider makes additional investments to grow the infrastructure. There are cost savings on energy, cooling, and real-estate as well.

And since usage of resources is metered, one can view the exact consumption and billing on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Usage information is provided through dashboards and real time reports, to ensure billing transparency.

Compliance & Regulation: Regulatory and compliance demands for data retention and protection may be taxing for your business.

Automated Scaling: Public cloud offers the ability to scale up or down to provision the exact capacity that your business needs, to avoid overprovisioning or under utilisation of deployed resources. Cloud service providers ensure that the resources are available on-demand, throughout the year, even when business peaks during festive seasons. And this scaling can happen automatically.

Global Reach: Apart from scale and cost savings, the cloud offers global reach, so that your customers can access your services from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, the cloud’s ability to explore the value of vast unstructured data sets is next to none, which in turn is essential for IoT and AI. Big Data can be processed using special analytics technologies in the cloud.

Agility: The cloud also makes your business agile because it allows you to quickly enhance services and applications – or a shorter time-to-market for launching new products and services.

Then there’s the benefit of control and management. A ‘self-service cloud portal’ offers complete management of your compute instances and cloud resources such as network, storage, and security.  The self-service nature offers agility, enabling organisations to quickly provision additional resources and introduce enhancements or new services.

With all these advantages, businesses clearly recognise the need for transformation and are gradually leaving legacy technologies behind in favour of next-generation technologies as they pursue competitive advantage. Public cloud is critical to this shift, thanks not only to the flexibility of the delivery model but also to the ease with which servers can be provisioned, reducing financial as well as business risks.

It will not be possible for most companies to transform their businesses digitally unless they move some of their IT applications and infrastructure into public or hybrid clouds.

Key considerations for cloud migration

Regulation and compliance are other vital considerations. What kind of compliance standards has your service provider adopted? There are industry-specific standards like HIPAA for data security and privacy. Besides, there are standards like PCI-DSS applicable across industries — and regionally specific standards like GDPR. Ask about compliance with all those standards.

Keep in mind that the onus of protecting data on the public cloud lies with both – the tenant and the cloud service provider. Hence, it would be a good idea to hire an external consultant’s services to ensure compliance and adherence to all the standards. This should be backed by annual audits and penetration testing to test the robustness and security of the infrastructure.

You also want to ensure resilience and business continuity. What kind of services and redundancy are available to ensure that?

Ask your cloud service provider for guarantees on uptime, availability, and response time. The other aspects to check are level of redundancy, restoration from failure, and frequency of backup. All this should be backed by service level agreements (SLAs) with penalty clauses for lapses in service delivery.

WAN optimization, load balancing and robust network design, with N+N redundancy for resources, and hyperscale data centres ensure high availability. But this should be backed by industry standard certifications such as ISO 20000, ISO, 9001, ISO 27001, PCI/DSS, Uptime Institute Tier Standard, ANI/BICSI, TIA, OIX-2, and other certifications. These certifications assure credibility, availability, and uptime.

Do you remember what happened when the city of Mumbai lost power on October 12 this year? Most data centres continued operations as they had backup power resources. And that’s why their customers’ businesses were not impacted by the power failure.

A key concern is transparency in accounting and billing. Ask about on-demand consumption billing with no hidden charges. How are charges for bandwidth consumption accounted for? Some service providers do not charge extra for inbound or outbound data transfer and this can result in tremendous cost savings. Do they offer hourly or monthly billing plans?

Public cloud for business leadership

Enterprises that still haven’t implemented cloud technologies will be impeded in their digital transformation journeys because of issues with legacy systems, slower change adaptability, longer speed to market and an inability to adapt to fast-changing customer expectations.

Companies are recognising the public cloud’s capabilities to generate new business models and promote sustainable competitive advantage. They also acknowledge the need for implementing agile systems and believe that cloud technology is critical to digital transformation.

However, the cloud does present specific challenges, and one needs to do due diligence and ask the right questions. Businesses need to decide which processes and applications need to be digitalised. Accordingly, IT team needs to select the right cloud service provider and model.

The careful selection of a cloud service provider is also crucial. Look at the service provider’s financial strength. Where is your business data being hosted? What kind of guarantees can they give in terms of uptime? What about compliance and security? These are vital questions to ask.

Switching from one cloud service provider to another is possible but not a wise choice due to many technical and business complexity., so look for long-term relationships. An experienced and knowledgeable service provider can ensure a smooth journey to cloud – and successful digital transformation.

Source: https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/view-how-can-cios-drive-digital-transformation-by-maximizing-the-value-of-cloud-8011661.htm

HPCaaS – know why it is better than setting up an On-Premise environment

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High Performance Computing (HPC) is transforming organisations across industries, from healthcare, manufacturing, finance to energy and telecom. As businesses in these sectors require dealing with complex problems and calculations, High Performance Computing solutions can work with huge quantities of data and enable high performance data analysis.

The gigantum computing prowess of High Performance Computing infrastructure aggregates the power of multiple high-end processors which is boosted with a GPU to provide quick and accurate results. Moreover, High Performance Computing supercharges digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics to deliver data insights faster and gives any business a competitive edge in the market.

Despite the growing demand, High Performance Computing has its own set of challenges. For instance, enterprises need to make huge investments to set up a High Performance Computing infrastructure and undergo long procurement timelines while opertionalising AI infrastructure. Further, High Performance Computing infrastructure requires extremely high maintenance and specific skill-sets to manage; and at the same time, scaling it is difficult if workloads increase. A cost benefit analysis also indicates that setting up and maintaining an on-site High Performance Computing cluster is increasingly difficult to achieve – the costs are disproportionate to meet unexpected demand and the hardware procurement cycle is never ending.

Why HPC-as-a-Service is a viable option?

Historically, on-premises solutions are perceived to be the proven investment, however, there are significant hidden costs to run and maintain on-premises High Performance Computing infrastructure. According to Hyperion Research, the demand for on-premises High Performance Computing resources often exceeds capacity by as much as 300%.

Looking at these roadblocks, the whole concept of High Performance Computing-as-a-Service (HPCaaS) has picked up lately, as it provides enterprises with simple and intuitive access to supercomputing infrastructure wherein they don’t have to buy and manage their own servers or set up data centers. For example, the workloads required for research, engineering, scientific computing or Big Data Analysis, which run on High Performance Computing systems, can also run on High Performance Computing-as-a-Service.

As per the forecasts from Allied Market Research, the global High Performance Computing-as-a-Service market size was valued at $6.28 billion in 2018, and is projected to reach $17.00 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 13.3% from 2019 to 2026.

In today’s dynamic environment, organisations that opt for High Performance Computing-as-a-Service are poised to gain competitive advantage and drive greater RoI. Enterprises must look at High Performance Computing-as-a-Service to avoid unexpected cost and performance issues, as compute-intensive processing can be done without making capital investment in hardware, skilled staff, or for developing a High Performance Computing platform. With the support of High Performance Computing-as-a-Service, organisations can also receive efficient database management services with reduced cost.

On-Prem vis-à-vis As-A-Service 

The biggest advantage of leveraging High Performance Computing-as-a-Service is the ‘cost’ factor – users who are looking to take advantage of High Performance Computing but cannot invest in the upfront capital and avoid prolonged procurement cycles of on-premises infrastructure implementation. With flexible pricing models, the enterprises just need to pay for the capacity they use.

For instance, on-premises High Performance Computing requires large capital investment in GPU servers, storage, network, security, and other supporting infrastructure which could run into tens of millions of Rupees, approximately INR 1-1.5 crore, depending on the scale of the infrastructure; whereas, High Performance Computing-as-a-Service offers zero Capex investment with flexible pricing along with ready-to-use pre-provisioned High Performance Computing infrastructure including switching routing infrastructure, internet bandwidth, firewall, load balancer, and intrusion protection system.

High Performance Computing-as-a-Service can also enable organisations to easily scale up their compute power as well as infrastructure. With this kind of scalability, the enterprise can flex their infrastructure to match the workloads instead of throttling workloads based on infrastructure.

Pay-as-you-consume model is also acting as a great enabler in democratising High Performance Computing, as it brings powerful computational capabilities for the scientific researchers, engineers, and organisations who lack access to on-premises infrastructure or need to hire expensive resources to manage their High Performance Computing infrastructure. The service providers offering High Performance Computing-as-a-Service manages the infrastructure maintenance so that enterprises can focus on their projects.

Additionally, businesses with a deep focus on innovation can do away with the periodic tech or infra refresh cycles, as on-premises High Performance Computing run the risk of becoming obsolete with changing technology or getting under-utilised with changing workloads. Organisations even have to incur additional expense while upgrading the infrastructure; on the contrary, service providers can easily handle upgrades and updates for optimum performance. With on-premises High Performance Computing, enterprises have to deal with unreliable power, whereas, adopting High Performance Computing-as-a-Service provides fail-safe power infrastructure, thus ensuring 100% uptime.

Making the right choice 

By now, it is evident that High Performance Computing-as-a-Service can provide for speedier data processing with high accuracy and due to the low investment costs, it has emerged as an alternative to on-premises clusters for High Performance Computing. However, despite all the advantages associated with adopting High Performance Computing-as-a-Service, there are certain perceived barriers preventing enterprises from realising its true potential.

For organisations to lean on High Performance Computing-as-a-Service to grow their business and accelerate product and service development, they need to be constantly showcased or educated on its benefits and in turn, breakdown the common roadblocks. All the benefits of High Performance Computing-as-a-Service clearly suggest that there’s substantial headroom for growth.

Advantages of High Performance Computing-as-a-Service at a glance

* The cost factor - no need to for upfront capital investment

* Access to supercomputing infrastructure without buying or managing servers

* Pay only for capacity utilised

* Organisations can opt for flexible pricing models

* Avoid unexpected cost and performance issues

* Upgrades and updates managed by the service provider

* Fail-safe power infrastructure, ensuring 100% uptime

7 key factors to be considered for SAP upgrade

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Over the last few years, we have witnessed democratisation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and the emergence of SAP. Businesses looking to scale-up their operations today are likely to have experienced an ERP or a similar system that connects disparate functions within the organisation. However, as customer preferences and market dynamics evolve over time, legacy ERP systems begin to lag, and so it comes as no surprise that a recent survey by Deloitte revealed that 64% of the CIOs are either rolling-out next-generation ERP solutions such as SAP or are modernising legacy systems.

Having said that, it is a known fact that deploying a new or rewiring an existing SAP system can be a mammoth task, both in terms of effort and financial resources. Hence, before undertaking an upgrade, CIOs need to have an absolute clarity of thought and purpose in light of the emerging technologies and business realities. Here’s a checklist to get you started:

Need-Gap Analysis: Elementary as it may sound, the performance evaluation of an SAP system often tends to  focus on technology and hardware. To get a  clear picture, it is equally important to perform an assessment with the objective of identifying the functional and business gaps that it is unable to fulfill effectively. For example, a legacy system that does not support smart manufacturing or digital channels of sales places the business at a distinct disadvantage in the digital world we operate in today.

IT Infrastructure: A large number of SAP users still rely on IT infrastructure located on-premise.  However, there are risk factors associated with on-premise infrastructure including physical damage due to fire, flooding or other natural calamities, or like a situation resulting from the ongoing pandemic. In any case, if users are unable to log-in to or access their data, the SAP and all the investment are rendered useless. When considering an upgrade, it is advisable do consider SAP on the cloud or at least co-location of your IT infrastructure to ensure business continuity and reduced IT infrastructure costs.

Technology Upgrade: The fast-paced technology landscape often renders legacy systems inoperable or incompatible with newer hardware or software before OEMs eventually discontinue those products. Additionally, application upgrades also offer definite business and technology benefits. While considering an SAP upgrade, it is therefore crucial to check for technology obsolescence, availability of upgrades and continued support across all systems and modules.

Scalability: As businesses grow, existing systems need to process and store higher volumes of data. Additionally, it also leads to a number of other changes including new methods of production and business models, all of which require a robust and flexible infrastructure. It is, therefore, recommended to select a system that offers scalability and can keep pace with the changing business needs while being financially viable.

Functionality: There are a number of functions and attributes in current businesses that were not as prominent or critical earlier – big data and analytics for example. Such functions are mission-critical to modern businesses and if your existing ERP system does not allow you to support such functions, it is time for a change.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): A primary factor to consider while deciding TCO includes the capital expenditure required for the new infrastructure as well as operational expenses such as license fees, ERP customisations, the training expenses to bring employees up to speed, the cost of maintenance, and ongoing support. While the objective should be to minimise the TCO, it should be done keeping in mind the potential benefits and the ROI.

Return on Investment (ROI): As with most business decisions, the choice of whether or not to upgrade an SAP system is also driven financially. While we have covered the TCO, a decision whether to modernise or not boils down to the kind and quantum of returns the upgrade would yield. And while calculating the ROI, efforts should also be made to quantify intangible benefits such as increased productivity and enhanced customer experience that add business value and contribute to the topline.

There is little doubt that the business landscape and the macroeconomic factors are changing faster than ever before. This is not only reshaping the markets but also influencing customer behavior and decision-making in many ways. And this is reflected in the increased jostle for customer’s attention and the hyper-competitive environment that businesses need to survive in today’s day and age.

In such a scenario, a state-of-the-art SAP solution could be a key differentiator and help organisations unlock latent business value that exists within the organisation and its ecosystem. The more integrated an organisation is – from sourcing inputs all the way to post-sale customer experience, the more agile and competitive it becomes. And that’s why it is critical to conduct periodic checks to evaluate if your existing SAP system is keeping pace with your business needs.

Posted in SAP

Is edge computing better for the future or the cloud? Answers EVP & CIO, Yotta Infrastructure

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At times, considered as a conflicting concept to an IT infrastructure, edge computing and cloud computing effectively complement each other’s functions. Even though they function in different ways, utilising one does not prevent the use of the other.

Cloud computing is a more common term than Edge and has been used by businesses for a long time. Businesses have favoured it due to the flexibility it provides to manage a workload on a dedicated platform in a virtual environment. However, the time it takes to communicate a task from the primary server to the client is noticeably huge when compared to edge computing. Hence, the former requires more bandwidth if connected to IoT devices.

Benefits of Cloud computing
The primary role of cloud evolves from that of an infrastructure utility to serve as a platform for the next generation of organisational innovation and evolution. Cloud computing not only allows companies to scale their operations but also provides them with the best-suited service model depending on specific requirements such as PaaS, IaaS or SaaS.

While the organisations have deployment models to choose from such as Public, Private, and Hybrid clouds, they can keep a check on the capital and operating expenses by using cloud computing. By adopting cloud strategies, enterprises have seen significant improvement in efficiency, reduction of costs, and decreased downtimes. With the recent disruption and large-scale lockdown measures due to COVID-19, the mobility, security, and scalability of cloud data platforms further highlighted its value to the businesses. The current pandemic has pushed companies to migrate to cloud environments to deal with the lockdown crisis and promote their geographically scattered teams with regular data access, sharing, and collaboration.

The relevance of Edge Computing
While cloud computing has its benefits, for improved performance and meeting more efficient computational needs, businesses are inclined towards using edge technologies. It provides a distributed communication path that works on a decentralised IT infrastructure. When transferring large quantities of data, it is essential to optimise data and complete the process in milliseconds.

Edge computing allows organisations to process, analyse, and perform necessary tasks locally on the data collected. This brings analysis closer to the data generation site eliminating intermediaries and makes it an affordable option for better asset performance. Edge computing makes it possible to utilise the full potential of the latest IoT devices which have data storage and processing power. A few areas where Edge computing has demonstrated incredible success are autonomous vehicles, streaming services, and smart homes. As new technologies like 5G networks, smart cities, and autonomous cars become common, they will integrate with, operate on, and be more dependent on edge computing resources.

Edge vs Cloud Computing
While edge computing and cloud computing are very different from each other, it is not advised to replace cloud computing with Edge. Both have different uses and purposes. Edge computing can be used for extreme latency operations and programming with varying times of run whereas cloud computing is suitable for programmes that require massive storage and provides a targeted platform. The former needs a robust and sophisticated plan for security with advanced authentication while it is easy to secure and control the latter along with remote access.

With the rise in the adoption of digital technologies, the data generated, as a result, continues to increase. And while processing these data, many organisations have started realising that there are shortfalls such as latency, cost and bandwidth in cloud computing. To help eliminate these drawbacks, enterprises are now gradually moving towards edge computing, an alternative approach to the cloud environment. Edge computing not only lowers the dependency on the cloud but simultaneously improves the speed of data processing as a result.

As IoT devices are becoming more widespread, businesses are in need to put in effect edge computing architectures to leverage the potential of this technology. Nowadays, companies are integrating edge capabilities with centralised cloud computing, and this integrated network infrastructure is called fog computing. Fog computing helps in enhancing efficiency as well as data computing competencies for cloud computing.

It is not possible to rely only on the Edge or on the cloud for your IT infrastructure but rather an amalgamation of the two that is best suited to the company’s operations. As these models become more mainstream, companies can strategise to find various hybrid structures to reduce costs and enhance their full potential.

Source: https://content.techgig.com/is-edge-computing-better-for-the-future-or-the-cloud-answers-evp-cio-yotta-infrastructure/articleshow/78874732.cms

HPC-powered AI to take manufacturing efficiencies to a new level

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Today, enterprises are leveraging the self-learning power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and parallel process systems of a High-Performance Computing (HPC) architecture to customise business processes and get more done in less time. In the current unprecedented scenario, industries across verticals had to fast-track digitisation and are testing HPC-enabled AI to synchronise data and build new products and services.

MarketWatch predicts that HPC-based AI revenues will grow 29.5% annually as enterprises continue to integrate AI in their operations. Moreover, with the growth of AI, Big Data, as well as the need for larger-scale traditional modelling and simulation jobs, HPC user base is getting expanded to include high growth sectors like automotive, manufacturing, healthcare, and BFSI among others. These verticals are adopting HPC technology to manage large data sets and scale-out their current applications.

The manufacturing companies, especially, can reap the benefits of HPC as they strive to enhance their operations – right from design process, supply chain, to delivery of products. A study by Hyperion Research indicates that each $1 invested in HPC in manufacturing, $83 in revenue is generated with $20 of profit.

Similarly, they are leveraging Artificial intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate innovation, gain market insights and develop new products and services. Manufacturing organisations have been able to introduce AI into three aspects of their business, including operational procedures, production stage, and post-production. According to a report by Mckinsey’s Global Institute, manufacturing industry investing in AI are expected to make an 18% estimated annual revenue growth than all other industries analysed.

Optimising processes together with HPC & AI

As manufacturers aim to achieve optimal performance and quality output, their focus is to implement HPC-fuelled AI applications to proactively identify issues and enhance the entire product development process, thereby improving end-to-end supply chain management.

At the same time, M2M communication and telematics solutions in the manufacturing sector have increased the number of data points in the value chain. Usage of HPC drives sophisticated and fast data analyses to ensure accurate insights are derived from large data sets. Combining HPC with AI applications allows network systems to automate real-time adjustments in the value chain and reduce the breakdown time. This results in enhanced product quality, accelerate time-to-market, and make the production process more agile.

Substantial use of computer vision cameras in the inspection of machinery, adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and use of big data in the manufacturing industry are some of the factors adding to the growth of the AI in the manufacturing market for predictive maintenance and machinery inspection application.

Enterprises in the manufacturing industry can use the power of AI with HPC capabilities to deploy predictive analytics. This will not only help them optimise their supply chain performance but also help design demand forecast models and use deep learning techniques to enhance product development. There will, thus, be a need for high-speed networking architecture and systems storage to roll out and power the AI-based programs.

On the other hand, the manufacturing companies are increasingly leveraging HPC systems with Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) software for performing high-level modelling and simulation. And there is a significant inter-dependability between HPC-powered CAE and AI, where simulations generate huge sets of data and AI models apply data analytics repetitively for even higher quality simulations. By now it is evident that the integration of CAE and AI will accelerate product development and improve quality; however, the scalability required to address the Big Data and compute challenges can only be managed by an HPC infrastructure.

Cloud-enabled approach to HPC

More data means more modelling, and, therefore, a more intensive machine learning solution. It is also important to invest in an HPC-Cloud for faster delivery of results by AI/ML models. A cloud-enabled HPC will help companies scale up their computing capabilities, as many AI workloads run in the cloud today. HPC applications built on cloud, allows companies to innovate by incorporating AI and enhance operations. AI workflows require continuous access to data for training; however, it can be a task to do so on-premise.

Today, manufacturing companies can choose from hybrid and multi-cloud options to provide a continuous and smooth computing HPC environment for on-premise hardware and cloud resources.

The power of one 

The manufacturing industry stands to benefit most from the convergence of HPC & AI technologies. Instead of using AI and HPC as different technologies, the organisations in this sector is unifying the two clusters to reduce OPEX cost and optimise resources. Just to reiterate, the powerful combination of HPC and AI tools are helping manufacturing companies in high-quality product development, improvement of supply chain management capabilities, analysis of growing datasets, reduction in forecasting errors, and optimal IT performance.

By combining AI and HPC capabilities, the manufacturing sector has found multiple ways to deliver the right products and services, accelerate time to market, and drive efficiencies at each stage of development.

Source : https://www.dqindia.com/hpc-powered-artificial-intelligence-take-manufacturing-efficiencies-new-level/

Leveraging High Performance Computing to drive AI/ML workloads

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The convergence of High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) has ushered in a new era of computational capability and potential. AI and ML algorithms demand substantial computational power to train and execute complex models, and HPC systems are well-suited to meet these demands.

Elevating AI/ML With High-Performance Computing

High-Performance Computing (HPC) harnesses the power of numerous interconnected processors or nodes that operate in parallel, enabling the rapid execution of complex calculations and data-intensive tasks. These systems are renowned for their parallel processing capabilities, high-speed interconnects, and expansive memory, rendering them ideal for data-intensive tasks. HPC is the cornerstone for driving progress in the world of scientific research and industrial innovation.

AI and ML rely on data and necessitate extensive computations for model training and deployment. As AI/ML applications burgeon in complexity and magnitude, the requirement for computational resources escalates. HPC is the essential foundation for AI and ML, enabling rapid training of complex models, efficient processing of massive datasets, parallel computation for speed, scalability to adapt to changing workloads, and application in various fields, driving transformative advancements. HPC services offers the following advantages:

  • Parallel Processing: HPC clusters encompass numerous interconnected nodes, each equipped with multiple CPU cores and GPUs. This parallel architecture enables the distribution of AI/ML tasks across nodes, resulting in a substantial reduction in training times.
  • Ample Memory Capacity: AI/ML often grapple with extremely large datasets. HPC systems have generous memory capacity, empowering researchers to work with extensive data without the need for cumbersome data shuffling, a bottleneck in traditional computing environments.
  • Scalability: HPC clusters are profoundly scalable, enabling enterprises to adapt to evolving AI/ML workloads. As project demands surge, additional nodes can be seamlessly integrated into the cluster for optimal performance levels.

Use Cases of HPC in AI/ML

  • Medical Imaging: AI/ML is harnessed for the analysis of medical images in disease diagnosis. HPC expedites the training of deep learning models, enhancing the precision and speed of diagnosing conditions like cancer from MRI or CT scans.
  • Finance: In the financial sector, the synergy of HPC and AI/ML underpins high-frequency trading, risk assessment, and fraud detection. Real-time analysis and prediction necessitate the computational prowess of HPC.
  • Sensory Data Processing: Self-driving cars generate massive amounts of sensor data. HPC systems process this data in real-time, allowing autonomous vehicles to make split-second decisions for safe navigation.
  • Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: HPC enables the deployment of sophisticated chatbots and virtual assistants that can understand and generate human-like text responses, improving customer support and engagement.
  • Online Deep Learning Services: HPC solution supports online deep learning services, enabling tasks like image recognition, content identification, and voice recognition by providing the necessary computational power for accelerated model training and real-time inference.

Yotta HPCaaS – Your Gateway to Computational Excellence

In this landscape, Yotta HPCaaS offers a convenient solution, providing instant access to the HPC environment without hardware investments, complemented by round-the-clock support. Users benefit from virtual, private, and secured access to their infrastructure, fortified by essential security measures and the added assurance of a fail-safe power infrastructure ensuring 100% uptime. Yotta HPCaaS further supports SQL analytics for Big Data and advanced analytics, as well as AI/ML frameworks, augmenting its versatility and utility in the dynamic world of high-performance computing and AI/ML.

Evaluating SAP infrastructure provider? Consider these 5 things before signing up!

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By its very definition, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is at the core of a business. Whether you are looking to upgrade an existing SAP or planning a switch to SAP platform, ensuring a smooth implementation becomes a top priority by default. Yet a study by Gartner reveals that despite all the effort and financial resources companies invest in, an estimated 55% to 75% of all ERP projects fail to meet the expected objectives.

For a system that is so central to any business, the range of failed or partially successful ERP implementations is exceptionally high. This further highlights the need to select an appropriate SAP solution and a service provider that also offers an SAP-compliant infrastructure. To help you navigate through this complex journey, we have curated a list of five mission-critical aspects to be considered while evaluating a potential SAP service provider.

Tier IV SAP infrastructure

Tier IV SAP infrastructure

There is no point in having the most advanced ERP solution if an infrastructure breakdown due to cyclones, floods, fires or other calamities prevent you or your customers its access.  This has become even more important in a post-pandemic world because of the distributed workforce and the increasing shift towards the cloud.

The primary criterion has to be the infrastructure that a service provider uses to host the ERP solution and the resilience it offers. One way to gauge this is the Tier grading of the data centers that your SAP provider provides. The most current and advanced providers offer Tier IV certified data centers, which are designed for high levels of fault tolerance across systems and components. This allows the infrastructure to remain operational even under challenging conditions. In addition to this, ensure that your service provider has a low-latency network that can handle high-volume data and provide always-on connectivity along with the solutions like work area recovery, which can be offered on a pay-per-use model.

Reliable storage and access to data

Yotta SAP - Reliable storage and access to data

In the age of Industry 4.0, data is increasingly becoming the single-most valuable asset for businesses. With technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming mainstream, the volume of data generated and its utilisation across business functions has grown exponentially in the last few years. Additionally, there’s an increasing trend towards using real-time data for automation and decision-making. Fulfilling these business needs requires a solution that offers reliable storage facilities and failsafe access to data at all times.

While evaluating potential partners, look for vendors that offer a comprehensive suite of data storage, protection and recovery solutions. Enterprises must look for storage systems that are always-on and provide nearly 100% access to data and hybrid systems that allow businesses to make most of the legacy and new data, both on-premise and the cloud. The efficacy of a new ERP platform can be measured in two ways – one, the SLAs across key metrics that are critical to your business needs, and two, its ability to reduce complexity and risk in critical operations.

Security against vulnerabilities

Yotta SAP - Security against vulnerabilities

The democratisation of technology has dramatically increased the number of people who are connected to and use an enterprise’s central system. This, in conjunction with the COVID-19 induced work-from-home phenomenon, has increased the exposure of businesses to security vulnerabilities due to the manifold increase in access points into the system. And based on initial reports, a lot of these changes are unlikely to be reversed.  Hence, if you are investing in an ERP for the future, be sure to invest in a secure platform.

The primary object of data security is to avoid unauthorised access to data, both from the outside and within. Hence, look for service providers that offer a multi-layered managed security environment that helps keep your data safe and maintain operations. It is also worthwhile to consider vendors who offer advanced solutions and tools to derive insights and intelligence that help your business stay ahead of potential threats.

Flexibility and scalability of use

Yotta SAP - Flexibility and scalability of use

One of the biggest challenges for organisations, particularly those that operate in a high-growth sector, is the ability of the ERP solution to scale-up or scale-down based on the business requirements. This becomes even more important during volatile periods like we are experiencing today. Here, the ability of your service provider to offer such flexibility gives your business a definite edge.

Some of the key parameters to assess the flexibility offered by a potential ERP vendor include:

  • Scalability in the use of cloud services to scale up or scale down the utilisation based on changing workloads
  • Ability to upgrade the available infrastructure or add new / integrate software capabilities to keep pace with the advances in technology
  • Ability to adapt and add functionalities in response to changing demands and trends in the business landscape

Transparency in pricing

Yotta SAP - Transparency in pricing

Implementing SAP can be quite a complex task, owing to the number of variables customers need to weigh while evaluating a potential solution. Then there is the implementation and migration cost. After all of this, comes an area that often goes unnoticed – operating cost – and this is also where several ERP solutions fail. Hidden costs and unplanned operating expenses often make the solution financially unviable. In such a scenario, it is extremely crucial to be financially prudent and pick a vendor that offers a transparent OPEX based pricing.

Following are some of the factors to keep in mind and traits to look out for:

  • While the first step is to figure and anticipate the number of users who will need access, it is essential to get a clear indication of the number of users the solution has been licensed for
  • Look for granular costing and a modular offering that allows you to pick-and-choose capabilities based on your needs, for example, cloud usage, data storage and disaster recovery, migration, and relocation among others
  • Evaluate the pricing in light of the infrastructure the service provider offers, for instance, an SAP solution hosted on a fault-tolerant infrastructure drastically improves reliability and almost eliminates the costs associated with system breakdowns

Bottom line

From faster and better computing to the amount of data we generate and consume as well as the widespread application of digital tools in various spheres, technology is evolving at a breakneck speed today. While this is what adds complexity to the decision-making process, particularly for core functions like ERP, it is also a strong call-to-action. And it cannot be denied that a robust ERP solution can help organisations enhance productivity across operations and functions, which allows them to stay in lockstep with the changing consumer demands.

How can an MSP Manage your SAP Better?

Posted on by yotta@manage

SAP adoption is on the rise. Data has become the key to businesses, and SAP is right in the middle of it all. But like most things in life, this too comes with its own set of challenges. Issues like managing all the tools in the SAP ecosystem, constantly upgrading the database, application, platform and more and then, of course, there is cost! So, what can one do to get an unencumbered, seamless, and low-cost SAP environment?

Get an SAP managed service provider (MSP), of course!

What is an Managed Service Provider for SAP?

An MSP is a company that supports services for SAP on an outsourced basis. This usually means delivering SAP infrastructure services on-cloud, data storage, backup and disaster recovery and the whole gamut of other IT related services for SAP. In any case, the point of an MSP is to take care of your SAP environment so that you are free to focus on your business.

Given the depth and width of the SAP solution set, there are many offerings that an SAP MSP provides. Some focus on technical or functional work or a combination of the two. While others offer software and UI development for SAP.

The biggest impact of an MSP

What is that one thing that an SAP MSP does that makes him a must-have for your company? It helps you save costs. It does, it really does. If you do not have a MSP on-board, you will end up managing various service providers that will take care of your support contract and you end up managing all the critical SAP tools on your own. This will require an entire team of professionals on your IT payroll.

Also, not only do all these service providers have their separate contracts to manage, the costs associated with the tools are hefty. We will not even go into the cost involved in the ongoing maintenance that is required.

Ensuring that all the products your team has in place are continuously up to date, licensing for example and best in breed to support your SAP environment like back up products, security products, monitoring tools, etc. is a major cost intensive and inducing task. The value of working with an MSP is access to all these industry-leading tools without the cost and headache of ongoing maintenance.

What to look for in an MSP for your SAP?

SAP Basis Support: While there are many aspects that one needs to look into an SAP MSP, one of the most important is to make sure that your MSP offers SAP Basis as a managed service. As the name suggests, SAP Basis is the foundational level of SAP support that ensures SAP landscapes run smooth and you get business continuity. SAP Basis is supercritical for an MSP to know and offer.

Pay-as-you-go Billing: Another thing to look for is a pay-as-you-use approach. Does the MSP offer SAP services on a pay-as-you-go model? With SAP cloud managed services, things like multiple commercial relationships for responsibilities like SAP maintenance, support and hosting are taken out your hand and handled by the MSP. At the same time, you get the added advantage of value-added services by the MSP.

AMS Support: The last but not the least is the AMS support than an MSP provides. AMS for SAP is a flexible structure that enable businesses to support their IT and business objectives. Look out for SAP MSPs that provide on-site, off-site and hybrid on-demand AMS support.

Yotta Advantage

At Yotta, we are not just an MSP but also your SAP consultation partners. We help optimize your SAP solution and build upon your existing SAP investment. We ensure that your SAP infrastructure is scalable with 99.999% up-time guarantee.

With our stringent SLA’s and support, rest assured that your business continuity would never be impacted. We also take complete accountability of all cloud service operations BASIS, OS, Backup, a local Helpdesk, and more as well as a comprehensive SAP AMS support.

Our SAP experts and support staff ensure that your critical applications are always performing optimally, the technical updates are on-time, and the 24X7x365 support is always on.

So now that you know why you need an MSP and more so Yotta as your MSP, also know that we can be your most agile partners. With our pay-as-you-go model, Tier IV infrastructure for SAP hosting and SAP supported compute, Yotta is the single window for all things related to SAP.

To know more about Yotta’s Single-window SAP services, Click Here

Contact our experts for a free consultation on your requirement services related to SAP

Posted in SAP