Author: yotta@manage

Significance Of Interconnect Technology and Cross Connects In Data Center Connectivity

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As the world becomes increasingly reliant on data-driven technologies, data centers play a pivotal role in ensuring a seamless flow of information. Connectivity is a critical factor to consider at a data center as it determines the efficiency of data transfer, seamless communication between systems, and accessibility to resources. Robust connectivity ensures scalability, resilience, and the ability to adapt to changing business needs, supporting the growth and evolution of the data center infrastructure.

If you are thinking about hosting IT equipment and data at a colocation facility in a data center, then interconnect and cross connects are important connectivity services to get familiar with. They enable efficient communication among various components and are significant in establishing reliable and high-performance networks.

Overview Of Data Center Interconnect Solution:

What Is Data Center Interconnect?

Data Center Interconnect (DCI) is a crucial aspect of data centers that facilitates seamless communication between various components and systems. It involves the establishment of reliable and high-speed connections between multiple data centers in India. DCI plays a vital role in supporting critical functions such as disaster recovery, data backup & replication, load balancing, etc. across data center locations.

To understand how Data Center Interconnect Solutions work, consider this example: Company X, a large multinational corporation, has housed its primary site with critical applications, transactional data, and customer information in Data Center A at location 1 as well as Data Center B at location 2. The two locations are geographically separated. For data consistency, there is heavy reliance on connectivity between the two data centers. By using the Interconnect solution, Company X benefitted from seamless real-time data synchronisation between the two data centers.

Benefits Of Data Center Interconnect Solution

In today’s fast-paced world, where vast amounts of information traverse the globe instantly and transactions occur at lightning speed, interconnection serves as the driving force behind the success of digital enterprises. It is a fundamental requirement for organisations seeking uninterrupted service delivery and optimal performance across different data center locations.

With Data Center Interconnect Solutions, hyperscalers and enterprises get access to an extensive network footprint and interconnectivity options. By establishing connections between their data centers and colocation facilities located in different regions, they can achieve low-latency connections and improved user experience.

Data Center Interconnect Solutions also enable hyperscalers to seamlessly scale their infrastructure by interconnecting multiple data centers. They can expand computing and storage capabilities as required without being constrained by the capacity restrictions of a single data center.

With the readily available Data Center Interconnect infrastructure, the time to go live is reduced drastically with good cost efficiency. The scalability and reliability that customers get without much capex investment are real advantages.

Yotta Data Center Interconnect (DCI) Solution 

Yotta Data Center Interconnect Solution revolutionises the way data centers are connected, offering hyperscalers and enterprises a more scalable and secure approach for connecting public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Leveraging high-speed packet-optical connectivity, this solution establishes connections between two or more data centers.

Enterprises can benefit from a higher designed uptime of 99.99%, ensuring maximum availability for critical operations.  It is purpose-built to meet the stringent requirements of federal enterprise workloads, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Moreover, Yotta Data Center Interconnect Solution enables scalability and extendibility in a simplified manner, allowing organisations to easily meet their disaster recovery (DR), business continuity planning (BCP), and regulatory requirements.

Overview Of Cross Connects In Data Center

What Are Cross Connects?

Cross connects refer to the physical cabling connection between two equipment/networks. It is frequently used to create a direct, dedicated connection between various network components, servers, switches, routers, storage units, etc. A cross connect can be a copper or fiber patch cable or a physical cable between the cross connect panels.

To understand how this works, consider this example: ABC Enterprise recently expanded its operations and decided to colocate its servers in a data center facility for optimal performance and reliability. The company recognised the need to connect its colocation rack to their existing MPLS service provider. To address this need, ABC Enterprise opted for a cross connect, which is a direct cable connection, between their colocation rack and the desired service provider within the data center facility.

Benefits Of Cross Connects

By using this, connected elements can communicate quickly and directly, resulting in minimal latency and rapid data transfer. Cross connects are used to link client equipment, establish connections with service providers, and make it easier to connect various network segments or systems together.

Yotta Cross Connects  

Yotta Cross Connects, which are point-to-point secure cable links, offer a convenient way for direct connection between different termination locations within the data center. They enable colocation and cloud customers to establish dedicated connectivity to one another with high-performance reliability and low latency. Clients can choose from three plans, namely Cross Connects Copper, Cross Connects Single Mode Fibre and Cross Connects Multimode Fibre.

Conclusion

Interconnect and cross connect are vital elements in data centers that enable efficient communication, reliable network connections, and optimal performance. It facilitates the seamless flow of data and supports critical functions, such as achieving high-performance computing. Enterprises must prioritise the inclusion of cross connect and interconnect facilities when selecting colocation and cloud services in a data center to effectively handle data traffic and meet the demands of businesses. Yotta’s multi-carrier neutral connectivity services empower businesses to achieve agility by providing flexible access solutions, including private, public, and hosted options. Yotta’s network is powered by a diverse ecosystem of multiple ISPs, IXs, and carriers, ensuring reliable and robust connectivity for clients.

Getting the Best of All with Hybrid Network Infrastructure

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In today’s digital era, hybrid network infrastructure can provide a greater advantage for businesses looking to maximise utilisation of data center network connectivity and improve the management of networks. With hybrid network services, organisations can combine both physical and virtual elements to create a more agile, scalable and secure architecture that addresses business specific needs.

This article explores the benefits and challenges associated with implementing hybrid network infrastructure. So, if you are considering hybrid network connectivity services for your organisation, read on to better understand how hybrid networks can help you achieve greater success in the long run.

What is Hybrid Network Infrastructure & What Does it Bring to the Table?

Any network infrastructure that comprises of multiple networks residing at distributed locations is essentially a hybrid network infrastructure. With a strong uptake of hybrid IT infrastructure among enterprises, hybrid networking is becoming more pervasive. Customers are moving towards borderless data centers, where network plays a crucial role. Similar to the distributed nature of hybrid IT infrastructure, where data resides on a combination of on-premise data centers, private and public cloud platforms, a hybrid network infrastructure combines networking infrastructure of every IT infrastructure platform to build a seamless, integrated network environment.

There are various benefits that enterprises can derive from hybrid network infrastructure. Since hybrid networks are designed to leverage both on-premises and cloud resources, businesses can benefit from access to a wide range of data center network connectivity services and optimal performance and scalability. Mentioned below are the major benefits of hybrid network infrastructure:

Also Read: Decluttering Network & Connectivity with Internet Peering

  • Improved Scalability & Flexibility: One of the imperatives of hybrid networks is improved scalability and flexibility. With hybrid networks, businesses gain access to a host of technologies that can be leveraged to create a network infrastructure that can scale according to the evolving business needs. By using hybrid network infrastructure, businesses can leverage cloud computing resources such as virtualization, storage and networking capabilities to provide optimal performance with high levels of availability and reliability.
  • Cost Savings: Hybrid networks are cost-effective as they help businesses reduce the hardware and resources needed to maintain on-premises infrastructure, thereby reducing expenditure. Additionally, in an age where enterprises are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud model, a hybrid network infrastructure makes it easier to connect to different cloud platforms in an integrated manner – thereby enabling seamless access to a wide range of cloud services. Further with connectivity solutions like Yotta Global Cloud Konnect, enterprises benefit from single-hop connectivity to multiple cloud platforms, thus strengthening and complementing their hybrid network infrastructure, while reducing costs and complexity.

Also Read: Why adopting Hybrid Cloud architecture is becoming a norm in the enterprise world

  • Enhanced Security: A hybrid network infrastructure provides enhanced security for data center networks. It combines elements from both on-premises and cloud-based network connectivity services. It helps create a secure connection between the two while allowing seamless access to various applications and data. Additionally, hybrid infrastructure enables organisations to have better control over data access and management.
  • Seamless Data Exchange: The most significant benefit of hybrid networking is that it allows businesses to combine existing public networks, such as the internet or virtual private networks (VPNs) with their own internal networks, creating a hybrid environment where data traffic can move freely and securely. This hybrid environment enables secure transfer of large amounts of data quickly and easily over long distances without sacrificing performance, speed or security.

Addressing the Most Common Implementation Challenges
While the benefits of a hybrid network architecture significantly outweigh the challenges, enterprises must factor in some key considerations and challenges, which can be conveniently overcome with best practices and measures.

Integration & Compatibility
One of the common challenges that hybrid network infrastructure presents is the integration of physical and virtual components into a seamless, unified solution. This requires that data center network connectivity hardware, such as switches and routers, can integrate with cloud’s software defined networks. Additionally, hybrid networks must be compatible with various services that your cloud provider or third-party providers may provide for network connectivity.

  • Solution: The best way to ensure successful integration and compatibility is to work closely with the network service provider, software developer (API and orchestration) and respective OEMs . They will often have specific experience in hybrid environments and be knowledgeable about solutions that are most suited to your applications’ needs.

Management & Maintenance
A hybrid network infrastructure often requires significant effort to manage and maintain. This is especially true when data center network connectivity and other hybrid network services must be managed simultaneously. Additionally, if the hybrid network spans multiple geographical locations or involves numerous vendors, it can create a complex operational landscape that may prove challenging to manage.

  • Solution: To address these issues, one needs to ensure the availability of automated tools, skilled manpower and robust process. It is important to have an experienced IT team in place, with clear processes and procedures for monitoring and managing the hybrid network infrastructure. Furthermore, they should leverage automation tools to facilitate simplified management of the hybrid environment across geographies.

Security Concerns
Security could be primary concern in hybrid networks due to complexity. For instance, connecting various cloud-based systems with your on-premise resources.

  • Solution: This use case must be carefully monitored and managed to protect your data from malicious actors or cyber threats. Enterprises must have a logical network segregation between various environments to eliminate security threats. Additionally, organisations must ensure that proper access control measures are in place for users across all network infrastructure components.

Transforming Success with Hybrid Networks
Implementing a hybrid network infrastructure has many benefits, from improved performance and scalability to greater flexibility. To reap the maximum advantages that come with a hybrid approach, organisations must also evaluate their existing network infrastructure, consider specific areas to address and devise the most appropriate implementation roadmap. Moreover, choosing the right service provider, with deep domain expertise, and with multiple product offerings, is a critical step to yielding maximised benefits.

Click here to explore Yotta’s Network & Connectivity Solutions.

What Is Enterprise Asset Management And Why It Matters?

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Keeping a track of assets manually for any organisation is an ordeal, especially in high-value industries where the asset footprint is vast and complex. Siloed management asset lifecycle brings the challenges of lack of visibility and control, adding to the complexities. Thankfully, Enterprise Asset Management software addresses this concern. Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) combines systems and software that help enterprises manage their physical assets like equipment, vehicles, machinery, etc. and non-physical assets such as software and intellectual property. With EAM software, companies can track the complete lifecycle of their assets, from purchase to disposal. According to IDC, businesses that adopted a modern EAM system witnessed a 15–20% boost in workforce productivity, a decrease in spare part inventory stock by 20–30%, and an increase in mechanical efficiencies of 5–10 percentage points. In this article, we will explore what EAM is and what makes it essential for enterprises.

What is Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)?

Enterprise Asset Management involves using specialised software to manage an asset’s lifecycle. Asset-intensive companies use it to keep a check on their property and ensure everything is functioning as expected. Industries heavily reliant on enterprise asset management solutions include mining, energy, engineering, construction, logistics and transport, manufacturing, healthcare, government, aerospace, and defence, among others.

Besides asset tracking, the software can be used for maintenance management, work order management, inventory management, and reporting and analytics. With enterprise asset tracking solutions, companies can monitor the location and status of their assets in real-time, while maintenance management enables them to schedule preventative maintenance and repairs, thereby reducing downtime and extending the asset lifespan.

Work order management helps enterprises assign tasks to technicians and other concerned personnel, while inventory management ensures that organisations have the necessary parts and supplies to keep assets operating smoothly. Reporting and analytics offer insights into asset performance, expenses, and other metrics, thus enabling enterprises to take data-driven decisions.

Key Capabilities of Enterprise Asset Management System

  • Asset Inventory: Maintaining accurate and up-to-date information on assets is vital to effectively manage maintenance and repairs and forecast needs that can arise. An EAM software streamlines asset inventory management. It will identify and catalogue all assets, including equipment, machinery, and infrastructure.
  • Asset Tracking: Companies can track asset location, usage, and condition with EAM software. They can optimise asset utilisation, reduce downtime, and track asset performance. EAM systems help ensure that assets are used effectively, and they’re in good condition.
  • Maintenance Management: An EAM system contains tools for managing preventive maintenance and corrective repairs. The maintenance teams can schedule and track maintenance tasks, identify needs, and automate the work order process. It also helps track the maintenance history.
  • Depreciation Management: EAM systems can help track the depreciation of fixed assets over time and manage related costs. It provides information on when assets need to be replaced or retired.

How Can EAM Solutions Benefit Your Enterprise?

Organisations of all sizes across every industry own assets in a variety of forms. With Enterprise Asset Management software, they can effectively manage assets as they gain a centralised view of asset information. Here are some ways in which industries stand to benefit from EAM:

  • EAM in Manufacturing
    Manufacturing businesses are under significant pressure to bring down costs, meet production targets, and maximise returns. Machinery failures must be avoided at all costs. With EAM software, manufacturers can track maintenance schedules, manage work orders, monitor asset performance, and identify potential issues before they become problems.
  • EAM in Oil and Gas Industry
    EAM software can help to ensure the safety, reliability, and efficiency of pipelines, offshore platforms, and refineries. EAM software affords enterprises the opportunity to monitor asset health, access and analyse deficiencies, and identify potential risks. With predictive maintenance, unplanned downtime can be avoided.
  • EAM in Transportation and Logistics
    EAM can be used to manage the maintenance of vehicles, aircraft, and other assets, ensuring they are available when needed. Fleet managers can track asset performance, schedule maintenance activities, and monitor fuel consumption with EAM software.
  • EAM in Construction
    EAM can be used to manage the maintenance of heavy equipment, like excavators, bulldozers, and cranes. Companies can track equipment utilisation, schedule maintenance activities, and monitor asset health. EAM software can be used to track the location of assets, thereby reducing the risk of theft, and the availability of spare parts for construction activities.
  • EAM in Healthcare
    It’s essential that every medical equipment stays in top condition so that healthcare professionals can perform their duties and functions smoothly. With EAM software, the maintenance of medical equipment, HVAC systems, and building infrastructure can be managed. It can be used to track inventory and reduce the risk of equipment downtime and delays in patient care.

The Bottom Line: EAM Software Maximises Asset Value

Enterprise Asset Management is a critical tool that organisations should use to manage their assets effectively. As seen above, EAM software goes a long way in optimising the performance of assets and reducing costs. By providing a comprehensive view of an enterprise’s assets, EAM helps companies make informed decisions about any repair and/or replacement of assets. They can track their asset performance, identify potential problems early, and take proactive measures to prevent downtime.

Hardcat EAM, powered by Yotta, is a market-leading Enterprise Asset Management software serving the asset lifecycle management needs across industries. Deployed on cloud and delivered as a service, it includes an accurate asset register, maintenance management, asset accountability, and more. The solution enables companies to access real-time data and analytics, identify potential safety hazards, manage assets anytime and anywhere, etc. Overall, organisations have much to gain from EAM software, and utilising it can achieve operational excellence, reduced costs, and improved overall business performance.

Striking the Right Balance: Hybrid Infrastructure Optimises Cost, Performance, and Security

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Cloud technology is a force to reckon with. It provides companies with the flexibility to scale their computing and storage capabilities as needed. Organisations in almost every industry are migrating applications and data to the cloud. However, not all of them can move entirely to the cloud, for reasons that include specific regulatory requirements, owning legacy systems, etc. With hybrid IT infrastructure, businesses can reap the benefit of cloud services, without migrating completely.

What Is Hybrid Infrastructure?

Hybrid infrastructure is a digital infrastructure platform that blends the company’s on-premises data center and one or more private and/or public clouds. Many companies utilise this infrastructure to store sensitive or critical data on their on-premises servers, colocation facility, and/or private cloud while hosting key applications on the public cloud.

Hybrid IT infrastructure can look like any of the following:

On-premises infrastructure with cloudAn enterprise will have its data center with servers, storage, and networking on-premises and use cloud solutions for email, file storage, customer relationship management, etc.
On-premises infrastructure with colocationAn enterprise will have a captive data center and use colocation facilities at a secondary site for disaster recovery and redundancy.
Multi-cloud with colocationAn enterprise will use different cloud providers for other services, and a colocation facility for its equipment.
Hybrid cloud with colocationAn enterprise will use public cloud, private cloud, and colocation facilities. The public cloud may be used for non-sensitive data, the private cloud for critical data, and colocation for its own equipment.
EdgeAn enterprise will use edge computing to process data closer to the source and a combination of cloud-based and on-premises infrastructure to collect, process, and analyse data in real-time.

Hybrid Infrastructure: Optimal Balance Of Cost, Performance, And Security

Reduce Cost With Hybrid Infrastructure

  • Pay-as-you-go pricing – Enterprises that have implemented a Hybrid IT infrastructure can take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model offered by cloud providers. They pay only for the computing power they use, thereby reducing the need for large capital expenditures. When a company experiences peak demand for computing resources, it can use cloud solutions to scale up its infrastructure, and then scale back down when demand subsides. Moving certain specific applications to the cloud can avoid the cost of maintaining a large and extensive internal on-premises infrastructure. The pay-as-you-go pricing model especially benefits enterprises with fluctuating IT resource needs.
  • Lower capital expense – On-premises systems often require significant capital expenditure for hardware and software. By setting up hybrid IT, enterprises can lower their capital expenditure by outsourcing some IT operations to cloud providers.
  • Cost-efficient resource allocation – Hybrid infrastructure benefits enterprises from cost-effective resource allocation. They can use on-premises infrastructure for workloads requiring high levels of security or peak workload and cloud resources for a more stable workload. This is more cost-effective than maintaining on-premises infrastructure for both types of workloads.

Enhance Performance With Hybrid Infrastructure

  • Load balancing – A key feature of hybrid IT, load balancing helps enhance performance by distributing workloads across cloud and on-premises resources, thereby preventing overburdening of a single server. By distributing traffic, the resilience of IT infrastructure is improved. This helps to prevent downtime and maintain service continuity.
  • Improved agility: Hybrid infrastructure enables enterprises to be more agile in responding to changing market demands. Cloud offers the benefit of flexibility and agility, while on-premises infrastructure provides better control and security. When the two are combined, enterprises are better positioned to respond swiftly to changes in the business environment.

Improve Security With Hybrid Infrastructure

  • More control over data: Enterprises can separate sensitive data and critical applications from less critical ones with hybrid IT. This makes it easier to apply appropriate security controls to different parts of the infrastructure.
  • Enhanced monitoring: With cloud-based services that are purpose-built for security, companies can monitor on a real-time basis, thus helping them detect and mitigate security incidents.

Implementing A Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Before building a hybrid IT environment, an enterprise must assess the costs of its on-premises data center in order to get an understanding of the return on investment. Next, the enterprise must consider what approach to take in determining which applications move to the cloud. For instance, it could move operations of specific business departments to the cloud or consider the age of the hardware and accordingly shift parts of the infrastructure to the cloud.

While devising the strategy to move to hybrid IT, the focus should be on reducing costs, increasing agility, improving scalability, and enhancing security. Colocation services allow enterprises to take advantage of scalability without taking on capital expenditures. This can be more reliable than a captive data center, which may be more susceptible to power outages, security breaches, and equipment failures. Combining colocation with cloud services makes for the perfect hybrid IT strategy since it is cost-effective and provides high-performance connectivity between servers and cloud resources, thereby reducing latency.

If the data and applications are highly sensitive or the organisation operates in a heavily regulated industry, then private cloud and/or colocation services may be suitable options. Public cloud, on the other hand, is more cost-effective, as enterprises only pay for the resources they use. A migration plan must be devised outlining how the workloads will be moved to the cloud. This should include a timeline, and risk management strategies. To avoid any disaster, it is vital to have data backup and recovery solutions in place to minimise downtime and risks in data migration.

Hybrid Infrastructure: A Winning Solution

There are many benefits to adopting a hybrid IT infrastructure when compared with 100% cloud or 100% on-premises infrastructure. Organizations can optimise their IT resources, enhance security, and ensure business continuity through this infrastructure. It creates a well-built IT environment where public cloud, private cloud colocation, edge, etc. can be used together in harmony, each for the use cases they are best suited for.

Decluttering Network & Connectivity with Internet Peering

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As the internet and online applications continue to grow, networks have become increasingly complex, resulting in more clutter than ever – affecting their speed and reliability. Enterprises rely on multiple networks and robust connectivity for their operations and processes – even more so in a hyperconnected business ecosystem – thus making it crucial for businesses to have reliable, fast, and efficient connectivity to support their growing needs.

When business expansion becomes a priority, ensuring seamless service delivery across regions becomes paramount. Last-mile connectivity challenges leave a significant impact on the overall network performance causing operational issues, hindering business continuity, and affecting service delivery and, eventually, customer experience.

With strengthened connectivity infrastructure across regions, network providers are increasingly able to address last-mile connectivity challenges; 5G rollout will further simplify this. However, when businesses need to connect with multiple networks across the globe, the way they access them becomes key.

The Conventional Way

Traditionally, businesses connect to global networks through Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and transit services. This approach involves routing internet traffic through a third-party provider, for a hefty fee, which can add additional latency and reduce network performance.

The challenge is that some of these internet services do not extend beyond their existing connected geographies, leaving businesses with problems such as increased latency, lack of usage visibility and control, data security, and application maintenance, among others. Transit services further require multiple network hops to bridge connectivity gaps, thus adding to latency.

Additionally, relying on a single transit provider can also increase the risk of network downtime and limit access to online content and services. Furthermore, transit services are costly, which adds to business expenditure and can cripple scalability and expansion, especially for small and medium-sized businesses, which tend to be bound by capital crunch.

Therefore, using transit services for extended connectivity isn’t ideal. However, is there really a way to ensure snappy, reliable connectivity that’s also not as expensive? This is where Internet Peering comes to the rescue.

The New Approach – Internet Peering

Internet Peering refers to the exchange of internet traffic between different networks without the need to establish separate connections to each network through ISPs. The connections between two ISPs are bridged with the help of Internet Exchange Points or IXPs. By directly connecting networks, it reduces the number of steps, that data must travel through to reach its destination.

Unlike traditional connectivity methods that rely on transit providers, Internet Peering enables businesses to connect directly to multiple ISPs, which can improve network performance, reduce costs, and increase the reliability and resiliency of the network.

Peering essentially improves internet traffic performance by bringing networks closer together, reducing the time it takes for a packet to travel from one network to another. This results in the performance being far better than conventional routing methods.

Also Read: The IX Factor in Data Centers – How do Enterprises Benefit?

Peering is thus the ideal choice for businesses that:

  • Want to reduce their cost of transit
  • Want to reduce the complexity of their connectivity
  • Require higher network performance
  • Want to reduce the latency.

Making Business Seamless

By making it possible to avoid routing traffic over the internet, peering offers a bunch of significant advantages over the conventional approach.

Improved Network Performance & Security: By connecting directly to multiple ISPs through a single-hop connection, businesses can improve the speed and stability of network connectivity, resulting in uninterrupted, integrated operations and enhanced service delivery across regions. It can also bring down the risk of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.

Cost Savings: Unlike conventional routing, it is cheaper since both networks are directly exchanging traffic with each other. With expensive transit services out of the way, internet peering can help businesses reduce their overall network costs, allowing them to allocate their revenues elsewhere, to help them grow and thrive.

Superior Service Delivery: In cases where continuous, reliable network traffic is critical (like in the case of video streaming), having control over performance is crucial. Connecting directly to the networks that provide critical service for you or your customers increases your control over the quality of services.

Enhanced Business Agility: It enables businesses to exchange data quickly and easily and collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers, improving overall business agility. By improving the speed and reliability of their internet connections, businesses can gain a competitive advantage over their rivals.

Data Centers and Internet Peering

A data center is only as good as how well-connected it is, and how it simplifies connectivity for customers. Peering complements data center infrastructure because network and connectivity are the lifelines of data centers. At Yotta, our Internet Peering services leverage an extensive network of exchange points through partnerships with leading internet service providers providing our customers with direct connections to other networks, resulting in improved performance, increased reliability, and reduced latency.

By reducing congestion, improving speed and reliability, and reducing costs, internet peering can help make the internet faster, more reliable, and more efficient. It thus provides a cost-effective solution that offers improved performance, scalability, and security for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve.

How SAP Lets You Do More with Big Data

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SAP is a leading provider of enterprise software solutions enabling businesses to augment maximum value and opportunities from their Big Data pool. Its comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications, services, and analytics capabilities allows organisations to capture, store, process, analyse and visualise large amounts of structured and unstructured data quickly, securely, and cost-effectively.

With SAP’s integrated end-to-end platform for managing Big Data workloads, companies can harness insights from their data more effectively while boosting operational efficiency. Additionally, businesses gain access to actionable intelligence that can be used to make better decisions in areas such as customer segmentation or supply chain optimisation. In this article, we will discuss how SAP makes it easier for businesses to do more with their Big Data.

Let’s get started.

What is Big Data and Data Lake?
Big Data refers to datasets that are too large or complex for regular computing systems. In contrast, a Data Lake is a type of system specifically designed for storing and managing Big Data. SAP has developed an end-to-end solution for managing and analysing Big Data that utilises both on-premise and cloud technologies.

SAP’s suite of solutions makes it easy to collect, store, manage, and analyse Big Data from multiple sources. The platform allows businesses to gain insights into customer trends and behaviours in order to drive smarter decision-making across the organisation. For example, they can leverage predictive analytics capabilities to anticipate customer needs before they arise or utilise sentiment analysis tools to gauge public opinion about products or services.

How Does Big Data Transform Businesses?
Big Data has enabled organisations to become more agile, efficient, and customer-centric than ever before. By leveraging the power of data science, businesses can utilise rich insights to drive decisions that help create a better customer experience. However, managing large amounts of structured and unstructured data is not easy. That’s where SAP steps in.

SAP provides solutions that take the complexity out of Big Data management with their suite of products. They enable organisations to better handle large amounts of structured and unstructured data by providing a unified platform that allows all types of data to be stored and accessed with ease. This gives businesses the ability to make use of Predictive Analytics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) for informed decision-making.

In addition, SAP offers the tools to easily turn data into actionable insights with integrated visualisation capabilities that allow businesses to gain a better understanding of their customers’ needs and preferences. With powerful AI-driven analytics, organisations can build smarter processes for enhancing operational efficiency and customer engagement.

SAP’s Big Data solutions help companies not only better manage their data, but also use it in meaningful ways to drive business growth. With its suite of products, businesses can make decisions based on real-time insights, uncover new opportunities through predictive analysis and extract valuable information from the vast amounts of data available. All this is possible thanks to SAP’s unified platform that helps organisations make the most out of the Big Data revolution.

How are Enterprises Leveraging Big Data?
Big Data is revolutionising how companies manage and make decisions about their data. Enterprises are taking advantage of insights from Big Data to improve operations, drive better decision-making, and pave the way for innovation of new products and services.

SAP has developed a portfolio of technology solutions that enable enterprises to do more with Big Data. SAP HANA is an in-memory database platform designed to process large volumes of information quickly and efficiently. This enables customers to analyse data from multiple sources and discover valuable business insights in real-time.

The SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite offers advanced analytics capabilities for uncovering relationships between datasets using sophisticated algorithms for predictive modelling. Finally, the SAP IQ relational database system is specifically designed for data warehousing and business intelligence needs.

With Big Data and the right technology in place, companies can gain a competitive edge by leveraging enterprise data to drive growth and profitability.

How Does SAP Make it Possible to Leverage Big Data Analysis in an Easy Way?
World’s leading software provider, SAP provides comprehensive capabilities that make it easy to enrich insights from data. With SAP’s powerful tools, businesses can easily leverage the potential of Big Data Analytics efficiently.

At the core of SAP’s data analytics solution is its HANA platform – a high-speed database that enables businesses to process and analyse large amounts of data quickly. It can be used to quickly sift through structured and unstructured data in real-time.

HANA also provides access to data analytics tools, allowing businesses to gain valuable insights from their data without having to write complex codes.

Besides HANA, SAP also provides various other Big Data Analytics solutions. BusinessObjects allows enterprises to gain deep insights into customer behaviour and trends. Predictive Analytics solutions enable businesses to anticipate future outcomes and identify potential risks.

Serving as the one-stop solution provider for all things SAP, Yotta delivers comprehensive solutions to help organisations become Digital, Intelligent and Autonomous enterprises – with Big Data running at the center. Yotta’s Single-window services cover all major SAP use cases – from advisory and consulting to infrastructure, implementation, migration, and management and support. Yotta’s advisory/consulting services help businesses gain clarity on their business objectives, identify the most suitable tools for making them happen and build an optimal roadmap for their SAP and Big Data journey.

Posted in SAP

5 Key Capabilities that an ITSM Platform Must Provide

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How often have you looked at your technology infrastructure and thought, “There has got to be a better way to manage this?”

Technology keeps advancing, but the tools we use to manage it often seem to lag behind. This can lead to inefficiencies and frustration on the part of both IT staff and those who rely on technology services within the organisation. IT Service Management (ITSM) is a top area which often determines employee experience and productivity.

The right ITSM platform can provide you with the capabilities you need to overcome these challenges. It can help you automate processes, improve communication and collaboration, and make it easier to track and resolve issues. In short, it can help you transform your IT service and support operations into streamlined, simplified and seamless processes.

When evaluating IT service management platforms, there are a few key capabilities that you should look for. Keep reading as we explore what those capabilities are and how they can benefit your organisation.

Reduce Operational Costs
One of the primary objectives of any ITSM platform should be reduction in operational costs. By automating processes and providing self-service options, enterprises can relieve their IT staff from repetitive manual tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives.

In fact, the IT infrastructure and operations spending globally make up around 60% of the total IT spending, with infrastructure and operations staff making up half of all required IT staffing. This underlines the potential for cost savings through investment in an ITSM platform that is designed around the new-age digital environment.

A good ITSM platform will give you visibility into your entire operations, so you can identify areas where you can improve efficiency and cut costs. For example, you may be able to eliminate duplicate processes or consolidate vendors to get better pricing.

Improve Communication and Collaboration
Poor communication and collaboration are often at the root of many IT service and support challenges. When processes run in siloes, it’s difficult to get resolutions efficiently. A good ITSM platform will help break down those barriers by providing a central place for all communication and collaboration to take place.

It should also give you the ability to create workflows that automatically route tasks to the appropriate team or individual. This way, you can be sure that everyone is on the same page and that no one is left out of the loop.

Make it Easier to Track & Resolve Issues
An ITSM platform can also help you track and resolve issues more effectively. By providing a central repository for all tickets and incidents, you can quickly see where problems are occurring and who is working on them.

You should also look for a platform that offers robust reporting capabilities. This way, you can identify trends and spot potential problems before they cause major disruptions.

Risk-Free Implementation of IT Changes
Another important capability of an ITSM platform is the ability to make changes to your IT infrastructure without incurring risk. This is accomplished through a process known as Change Management.

With change management, you can plan and track all changes to your IT environment. This includes everything from new hardware and software deployments to simple configuration changes. By having a central place to manage all changes, you can be sure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Change management can also help you reduce the chances of disruptions by ensuring that all changes are properly tested before they’re implemented in production. This helps in ensuring that any new changes will actually improve efficiency and not cause problems down the road.

Improve Accountability within Business Functions
How often have you seen problems caused by a lack of accountability? It’s all too common in IT operations. When there’s no one responsible for a particular task or process, things can quickly go off the rails.

An ITSM platform can help improve accountability by providing clear ownership of tasks and processes. For example, you can use an ITSM platform to create a centralised knowledge base, ensuring that all information is stored at one place. Anyone who needs to access it can do so easily, and it’s easy to track changes.

In addition, it can help you track compliance with company policies and procedures. This is important for auditing purposes and can help you identify potential problems before they cause major disruptions.

How Yotta’s S-Cube Delivers All of the Above?
S-Cube is a comprehensive and fully customisable ITSM solution that can help you achieve all of the above capabilities and more. It’s designed from the ground up to be easy to use, so you can get started quickly and see results fast.

In addition, S-Cube is highly scalable, so it can grow with your business. And because it’s cloud-hosted, you can access it from anywhere in the world. S-Cube not only manages customer support services from start to finish, but also offers a wide variety of IT and helpdesk service options.

Elevate Your Enterprise Efficiencies with the
Right SAP AMS Partner

Posted on by yotta@manage

Increased outcomes and productivity remain top priorities for enterprises, and business process optimisation is a key step in this direction. Central to an enterprise’s application ecosystem, putting in place the right support framework for the SAP environment can’t be overlooked.

SAP Application Management Services (AMS) enable IT teams with the required toolsets to eliminate complexities and yield maximum value from their SAP applications while keeping costs in check, reducing risks and catering to emerging business needs.

When businesses operate in a dynamic environment, constant enhancement of their SAP landscape and its support framework becomes a key priority for IT departments to streamline business processes – and SAP AMS delivers just that.

Below outlined are the two key components of SAP AMS.

  • Helpdesk support: Offers 24/7 centralised helpdesk support through a multi-channel approach that includes web, email, phone and chat, equipping teams with better incident management capabilities.
  • System administration and monitoring: Delivers system configuration support and transport management for implementation and roll-out of new SAP projects, along with monitoring of SAP system performance and execution of routine maintenance.

SAP Basis – The base for achieving holistic management of SAP applications
Most enterprises commence their SAP journey with the implementation of ERP. However, as the scope of workflows widen, the addition of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Business Intelligence, etc, becomes inevitable. Amidst a growing application landscape, its administration becomes paramount to achieving greater visibility and unified control over business processes.

Serving as the core of an enterprise’s SAP landscape, SAP Business Application Software Integrated Solution, commonly known as SAP Basis, provides a unified administrative platform for managing SAP applications, facilitating optimum performance in all systems of the environment.

To enable interoperability and portability of SAP applications spread across systems and databases, SAP Basis helps deliver the core objective of smooth, consistent performance of SAP systems by equipping your teams with the required technical foundation, including middleware programs and tools. This is achieved through comprehensive capabilities that encapsulate maintenance and monitoring, upgrades, planning, user and system administration, among other tasks.

Here are some top ways how SAP Basis aids system administration.

  • Identification of resources for SAP deployment and upgrade
  • Future planning
  • Assigning responsibilities and tasks to the workforce
  • Review and configuration of transport requests
  • Managing system workloads and scheduling background tasks
  • Monitoring and optimising system performance
  • Managing backups and disaster recovery
  • Deploying best practices to drive greater efficiencies
  • Monitoring and analysing system logs and other administrative activities.

Driving bigger outcomes through the right SAP AMS partner
A reliable, certified SAP AMS partner can go a long way in your digitisation journey and save substantial investments in building a skilled resource pool for managing your SAP applications, leaving the job to the expertise of the service provider.

With 24/7 support backed by technical expertise and a consultative approach, a certified SAP AMS partner helps ensure the most efficient delivery of application services, maintain cost-effectiveness, and ensure flexible and seamless business operations while boosting productivity.

Strategic approach: An SAP AMS Partner with a mature understanding of your business and the digital landscape, knows what’s needed to derive the highest value from your SAP ecosystem. This puts them in a better position to align resources to future needs by taking a strategic approach rather than focusing the entire bandwidth on tactical tasks.

Greater flexibility: Agility and flexibility are uncompromisable for any business operating in a dynamic environment. Enterprises must remain on their toes to adapt their IT systems and respond to any situation or arising needs. Keeping pace with new solutions within your SAP environment through a capable SAP AMS partner significantly boosts your ability to respond to emerging business requirements.

Always-on, always available: When your business needs to operate round-the-clock, your systems can’t afford any interruptions. An SAP AMS partner ensures seamless operations with always-available 24/7 support, so your critical applications are always available to your teams and business. Further, supporting key functional and technical aspects demands the prowess of an experienced SAP service provider.

Tailored for your business: Big yields are gained when your technology partner understands your business as you do. Identifying your present and future business needs, partners can help you address them through the right set of AMS solutions, offered through right-sized delivery models that unlock the best possible value for your organisation.

Better RoI: Almost everything boils down to cost and Return on Investment, and rightfully so. Your investments in cutting-edge SAP applications generate the best returns when the entire environment functions at its full capacity and at all times. An AMS partner can help enterprises handle demands with greater agility, consistency and efficiency and derive maximum value from your SAP investments.

Yotta’s SAP AMS practice embodies all of the above benefits. It delivers them to businesses to help them unlock new levels of productivity and business success – regardless of the scale of business or industry. Yotta’s certified SAP team delivers operational and strategic objectives with superior technical expertise and industry knowledge.

Explore our SAP capabilities here.

Posted in SAP

Top 5 Reasons Why IT Service Management is Key to Your Digitisation Journey

Posted on by yotta@manage

One of the most important, but also among the most neglected business processes has been IT Service and Asset Management. Enterprise outlook towards it, until recent years, has been of a supporting component of the overall business process chain. However, with customer and employee experience gaining centerstage and with the focus on user-friendliness in today’s experience-led business environment, IT Service Management (ITSM) is gaining greater emphasis in digital strategies.

This shift in outlook can also be attributed to enterprise growth and the resultant complexities for IT teams, particularly more in a distributed, hybrid work environment. It often becomes difficult for IT service and support teams to monitor, manage and respond to each instance, further added by the challenges of ad-hoc tasks in a growing business.

In a world defined by hyper-connectivity, wherein both end customers and employees are digitally connected to businesses like never before, conventional frameworks of ITSM prove obsolete and inefficient. Traditional service and support delivery via emails lacks defined structure and involves longer timelines – from request logging to resolution. This renders it inefficient, while also leaving adverse impact on productivity and user experiences.

In a typical scenario, even with a layer of some dedicated tools in place, enterprises initiate their ITSM journey with process documentation and implementation of simple tools for managing delivery of IT assets, software and services.

Need for structured ITSM process
The stepping-stone to establish a defined ITSM process includes adoption of industry best practices. In this case, Information Technology Infrastructure Library, widely known as ITIL, a recognised framework that helps organisations identify and implement the most powerful and best-suited ITSM tool to handle their IT service management tasks. While ITIL holds greater importance for organisations without or little ITSM capabilities, it is also essential for enterprises with slightly matured mechanisms to re-evaluate their ITSM processes and realign them with the latest practices for the most efficient operations, enhanced experiences and ensuring holistic digitisation.

ITSM vs ITIL
To understand the difference between the two, it should be noted that ITIL and ITSM are complementary in nature. While ITSM is the application of policies, best practices and processes for managing IT services rendered to employees and customers, ITIL is essentially the framework that lays down these practices and guidelines to help enterprises navigate through ITSM tools and implement them in their digital infrastructure.

Let’s understand what enterprises gain with a robust ITSM practice and how it forms a critical component of their larger digitisation initiatives.

  • Improved consistency in service delivery: The primary and one of the most important benefits is more efficient and consistent IT service delivery to users – a core outcome that enterprises desire from ITSM. This further ensures consistent and enhanced experiences for users, both employees and end consumers.
  • Stronger support to business operations and increased efficiencies: It equips enterprise IT teams to deliver services with greater efficiency, ease and without significant manual intervention in a range of situations by leveraging automation. Thus, making ITSM a supporting element to business operations, and not a burden. A more effective ITSM mechanism means more effective teams. In many instances, employees’ work comes to a standstill due to unresolved tickets. With automation and streamlined processes delivering faster resolution and service delivery, enterprises can be assured of greater productivity across teams.
  • Business continuity and resiliency: Enterprises have, unarguably, learned in the recent years that true business continuity and resiliency is achieved when all business functions operate seamlessly and independently, yet cohesively, with minimal and no manual intervention. A well-established and robust ITSM practice, therefore, helps businesses achieve greater resiliency in their IT service environment.
  • Record management capabilities: Siloed, unorganised approaches to manage ITSM have time and again posed challenges to IT service teams when it comes to maintaining records of service delivery. With their structured approach and dedicated capabilities, ITSM tools address this pain point, allowing teams to not just maintain records and evidence, but also refer to past incidents at given point of time.
  • Greater cost effectiveness: Return on Investment (RoI) and cost-effectiveness remain common and consistent in any digitisation initiative, regardless of the nature and scale. When streamlined and automated processes are factored in, ITSM help businesses better align, right size and optimise their resource pool, leading to significant cost savings. This is further complemented by availability of ITSM solutions without upfront infrastructure investment or overwhelming enterprises’ IT infrastructure – made possible with OpEx based as-a-service provisioning and consumption.

Kickstart your ITSM journey with S-Cube
Overriding cluttered ITSM solutions, S-Cube provides a more efficient, simple, streamlined, reliable and end-to-end ITSM tool for organisations of any scale or nature. Powered by eStomi Technologies and backed by Yotta’s trusted cloud platform, Yotta Enterprise Cloud, S-Cube delivers complete capabilities to enterprises to customise the tool as per their business needs. It features a fully functional ITSM Baseline based on ITIL 4 that ensures greater alignment with new ways of working. A cloud-based, full-stack platform for IT and helpdesk support and service, S-Cube helps enterprise IT teams manage end-to-end customer support services, including all the processes and activities to design, create, deliver, and support IT and helpdesk services.

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Automating Business Processes with
SAP Business One

Posted on by yotta@manage

With the world moving towards completely imbibing technology as one of its key drivers, advanced technology systems and automation have become imperative for businesses worldwide. Many companies have embraced tools that would help them seamlessly embark on digital transformation and eliminate the current bottlenecks that hinder their growth.

When we talk about digitisation or digital transformation, it is important to understand that neither it is a one-off task nor can businesses achieve it overnight. While the task is steep, it should not deter them from shifting from their stale insights driven decision-making via legacy systems to modern, agile, and beefier solutions.

Automation has been one of the key drivers in enabling a business to adapt to the vociferously changing ecosystem and one of the primary enablers of automation has been SAP Business One.

SAP Business One – Your automation partner
Every business has a plethora of tasks that are inadvertent in ensuring the smooth functioning of operations. While these tasks may be laborious and time-consuming, they are an integral part and hold importance in determining business success.

SAP Business One has been instrumental in reshaping the future of how we perceive work across sectors. It is convenient for SMEs and MSMEs and has lent them additional leeway for managing their business smoothly.

SAP Business One comes with functional modules that integrate across departments, such as reporting, finance, purchase, sales, and customer relationship, allowing the company to store and manage data centrally. In addition, it has enabled smooth data and information flow across departments, removing the traditional silos that were abundant due to legacy systems.

Automation trends
Listed below are key emerging trends for organisations adopting SAP Business One for automating their operations:

  • The impetus to hybrid cloud will increase, and so will the focus on integrating cloud-based solutions to enterprise ERP
  • The demand for SAP Business One will increase, owing to the growth in SMEs and MSMEs and their move towards achieving automation
  • There will be a reinforced focus on achieving complete visibility in the company’s operations and gaining granular control.

Why do organisations need SAP Business One for automating their business processes?
Automation has been one of the needs of modern businesses for smooth and efficient day-to-day operations and management. Here are the set of questions that can propel you to understand if automation is what your business needs to level up your processes.

  • Is your software too cluttered for your workforce and hampering their day-to-day performance?
  • Is your current ERP system the reason behind multiple performance and operational bottlenecks?
  • Are you struggling to maintain inventory count across locations?
  • Is the idea of dealing with the software propelling your workforce to perform monotonous tasks manually?
  • Do you have real-time information pertaining to your business functions and invoices?
  • Does your workforce feel the existing ERP is unintuitive and difficult to handle?

SAP Business One Benefits
Here are some of the key functions where enterprises can enable effortless business automation with SAP Business One.

Management & Administration: SAP Business One enables enterprises with increased visibility, control and efficiencies by eliminating manual intervention in key areas of management and administration tasks.

Accounting & Finance: Provides the ability to gain complete insights into transactions across areas such as journal entries, financial reports, budget management, incoming and outgoing payments, account reconciliation and more, with high degree of automation.

Purchasing & Operations: With SAP Business One at the fore, businesses can undertake intelligent invoice scanning that enables them to feed the necessary data directly into the ERP through automated processing. It further allows local purchase orders to be used for automatic sales order creation, which eliminates the need for manual interpretation and overlooking.

Marketing & Sales: Seamlessly tread through and manage campaigns, opportunities and pipeline. Moreover, SAP Business One’s intelligent processing allows automatic activity creation for business partners such as logistics providers, sellers, and more.  With its Proof of Delivery Note Upload in Outbound Delivery and Invoice feature, SAP Business One adds a security layer and also automatically integrates outbound delivery status with the relevant invoice.

Inventory & Distribution: Keeping count of inventory, especially across multiple locations, can be a mind-numbing task. SAP Business One simplifies this with automated visibility on inventory availability and management across locations. It provides deep-dive into multiple day-to-day aspects including product and price management, goods issues and receipts, etc.

Projects & Resources: Data-driven insights help enterprises in better decision-making when it comes to project handling, reporting, resource capacity planning, stage dependencies and more. It enables enterprises with the ability to extract structured information from unstructured documents and integrate them with transactional data automatically.

Data collected by business document extraction is automatically enriched and integrated with your existing structured master data and transactional data, thereby aiding business partner identification.

Embark your SAP Business One journey with Yotta
When businesses are able to plan and have the right resources at play, SAP Business One can become the backbone of any organisation. It helps in ensuring that data remains centralised and available for sharing business insights across departments seamlessly.

With Yotta’s Single-window SAP Services, your business transformation becomes easier. We provide SAP advisory service, upgrade and migration, implementation, infrastructure management, and BASIS & AMS Support for optimised results.

Click here to explore Yotta’s Single-window SAP Services.

Posted in SAP