Category: Future

Today, business and IT leaders increasingly focus on leveraging digital technologies and innovation to keep their organisations productive, efficient, relevant, and, most importantly, forward-looking. The need to transform how they do business has led to the proliferation of the technologies like cloud, AI/ML, Big Data Analytics, and IoT; and the current unprecedented situation has made all these technologies mainstream, as enterprises are looking to take advantage of all the digital innovation happening around them.

For organisations to remain competitive, they must embrace digital transformation and the requisite infrastructure needed to achieve it. As business leaders are putting digital transformation at the center of their growth and profitable strategies, the digital infrastructure’s role that manages it has become more important than ever.

This is where flexible, resilient, scalable, secure, and high-speed connectivity that is easy to manage and deploy will not only bind all the pieces of the digital transformation together but also act as the core of business continuity. And the current distributed workforce scenario has further amplified the need for every organisation to be supported by a resilient connectivity solution.

The backbone of digital infrastructure

We all would agree that data is the lifeblood of digital transformation, and connectivity enables this lifeblood to flow. This means data flows through the network infrastructure multiple times, whether it is created in the cloud, on-premise data center, IoT devices, or a remote location. Suppose any organisation is looking to leverage the value and derive insights from this data. In that case, the underlying network must provide the appropriate levels of protection, resiliency, security, speed, and compliance for the data.

And this is the reason why managed service providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and IT services firms are looking to bolster their connectivity resilience so that they can serve and support their customers in the best possible way. Just like cloud computing introduced utility service models for processing power, intelligent network and connectivity have brought flexibility and agility to the way organisations get connected to the world.

As far as data centers are concerned, they are seen as a connectivity hub offering their colocation customers tremendous possibilities while building their networks. The success or failure of any colocation data center largely depends upon the strength of its interconnect options. While enterprises look for cost savings pertaining to power or cooling or benefits associated with data security when they co-locate servers in a data center, the right connectivity services can act as key enabler in transforming their business.

Enabling business agility

In the current scenario, enterprises are opting for carrier-neutral data centers that provide the best option for networking data and help build customisable network solutions. These data centers offer customers access to multiple Cloud Service Providers and ISPs, giving flexibility they need to scale and adapt to changing business needs.

Apart from enabling business agility, carrier-neutral data centres’ network services also address the data connectivity needs of enterprises of all sizes. These services ride on a high capacity, high performance, and neutral network, which seamlessly integrated with a national and global network powered by multiple ISPs, Internet Exchanges, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), carriers, and other network service providers so that organisations can build their communication networks to deliver the optimum end-user experience.​

Interconnectivity & low latency is key

Building resilience into the networks any enterprise depends on is more important than ever and that’s why carrier-neutral data centers ensure their connectivity solutions does not fail and, at the same time, help in orchestrating the critical interconnectivity any business requires.

The focus of most of the data center service providers is always on supporting customers to ensure their business is strengthened by secure, resilient infrastructure and fast, flexible connectivity, enabling them to bring their data, applications, and customers closer. In this endeavour, the leading service providers are trying to create a data center interconnect network on a dark fibre to help customers hosted on multiple data centers. This, in turn, will help such customers opt for low latency network.

When we talk about data center connection, everything boils down to speed and performance. In their quest to offer all the advantages to the customers, data center service providers must ensure that the connection is not getting hampered by latency. This is where cross-connections prove beneficial, wherein cross-connect cabling that shares bandwidth between Internet Service Provider and server reduces the number of hops between carriers. By avoiding all other network switches, no extra latency is added, which provides businesses with fastest connectivity possible.

The continued reliance on connectivity 

Technological innovations are driving a new paradigm for enterprises and coaxing them to embrace digital transformation. In such an environment, business success is largely dependent upon ensuring a resilient network connectivity.

Most importantly, business leaders must ensure their digital strategy delivers the required RoI, and at the same time, innovation outcomes allow them to disrupt. All these can be achieved by having a resilient interconnectivity strategy. The new normal is that organisations must achieve always-on, always-available secure connectivity across enterprise applications, data, and systems if they strive to compete in today’s dynamic business environment.

From the data center perspective, organisations must go with a colocation provider that offers high levels of data center connectivity. While evaluating data center facilities, enterprises should also assess the interconnect and infrastructure capabilities to ensure they receive the right connectivity solutions needed to grow their businesses and better serve their customers.

Source – https://etinsights.et-edge.com/connectivity-is-key-to-enabling-digital-transformation/

Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) encompasses Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

The current pandemic has accelerated the pace or adoption of digitalisation in our professional or personal lives. As more and more organisations are embracing digital-first strategy, they continue to see the benefits in terms of business agility, eliminating redundancy, and driving efficiency. Besides, they are increasingly investing in new technologies to churn out business intelligence, build new business models, and create business value.

This trend of digitisation, automation, and the connected world is a double-edged sword for enterprises of all sizes. On one side, it is opening a big market for the businesses to reach out to the customers spread across the world; on the other side; they are creating huge competition for themselves.

With this global landscape in front of organisations, in terms of opportunities as well as threats, it becomes imperative for them to be innovative and offer the best quality product and services to the market. The success or failure of businesses, however, largely depends upon their ability to scale up or scale down in the shortest possible time as well as provide the best of the customer experience.

Rise of ‘As-a-Service’ model

How do organisations manage this dilemma of scaling up or down and not making long-term CAPEX and OPEX commitment?The straightforward response to this is that enterprises should look at adopting ‘As-a-Service’ model. Besides digitisation, consuming everything on ‘As-a-Service’model will ensure that they are scaling up or down faster and maintaining a profitable, cost-efficient business house. This model will also help them deliver new and innovative services and seamless customer experiences.

Cloud is one such phenomenon, where service providers are taking a risk on their customers behalf, invest millions of dollars to create the infrastructure, and convert that infrastructure into services. Enterprises need to put their applications on to the cloud and consume whatever suits them. In this model, being termed as ‘Everything-as-a-Service’ or XaaS, services rendered and delivered completely reside on the cloud with virtual access to almost everything.

‘Everything-as-a-Service’ encompasses Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which simplifies the deployment and integration of cloud services. With more and more services are being delivered on the cloud, providing virtual access to everything, and with digital technologies like AI/ML and IoT playing a critical role in building these services, ‘Everything-as-a-Service’ will gradually become a necessity for a truly digital-native enterprise.

The industry is witness to the adoption of SaaS technologies that replaced on-premises applications to an extent. However, big or small enterprises are still stuck with legacy technologies and are piling on more without thinking about how that will affect the fast-changing business models. Looking at how many micro-service applications are yet being developed in-house and enterprises’ struggle to think beyond their legacy infrastructure, cloud vendors are approaching such organisations (having captive data centers) with a promise of delivering everything on ‘As-a-Service’ model.

A true differentiator for enterprises

Another trend being witnessed in the market, where the best of the OEMs, ISVs, SMEs, and SOHOs, are working in the advanced technology space and coming up with the best tech products and innovative services. The infrastructure providers partner with these companies while adopting their technology, integrating it with their infrastructure, and orchestrating and delivering all these to the customers’ large segment on ‘As-a-Service’ model. This kind of partnership is bound to help businesses focus on their core expertise and handle their IT needs cost-effectively, as all the services will be available to them at zero CAPEX investment and zero OPEX commitment.

According to research reports from IMARC, the global XaaS market is projected to reach $344.3 billion by 2024, expanding at a CAGR of 24 percent during 2019-2024. The increasing adoption of cloud-based monitoring, coupled with the growing need for scalable storage services, represents one of the key factors strengthening the growth of the global XaaS market.

The report further suggests that organisations worldwide are currently undergoing a digital transformation, which has resulted in the robust growth of corporate data. Cloud-based solutions offer affordable and efficient options for data storage, which is further contributing to the market growth. In line with this, the reducing cost of subscriptions with improved bandwidth and connectivity is also anticipated to bolster the market growth.

Enterprises are seeing XaaS as a game-changing business model, as it is helping them with a broader user base, creating and delivering more customer-focused solutions, exploring new markets, and cross-selling products and services

Hence, one cannot deny the fact that ‘Everything-as-a-Service’ has the potential to transform the landscape across industries, making them more efficient and optimal in resources utilisation. With the tangible benefits of XaaS observed by industry experts, it is gradually being adapted to create new business models and scale existing models through innovation.

XaaS has become a primary driver in technology initiatives undertaken by enterprises. The rapid evolution and adoption of the cloud have led to the fast acceptance of the XaaS model.

The future belongs to XaaS

While the world has turned upside down over the past one year, the COVID imposed digitisation in our professional and personal lives helped everyone stay afloat. During this critical period, business organisations truly realised the value of the XaaS model among other digital technologies, as the adoption of it helped them sail through the disruptions and, at the same time, maintain business continuity.

When we look at the growing use cases of cloud, AI, ML, and IoT or citizen privacy concerns which will also make data to be locally stored in the domestic data centers– all these trends indicate that India will need a big dose of infrastructure in terms of data centers, cloud, and supporting services and everything must be made available on ‘As-a-Service’ model.

Source : https://www.dqindia.com/thriving-new-normal-everything-service/

We all are witness to the evolution of the banking industry. Till about 2000, physical bank branches were the visible, de-facto representation of the banks, which customers most preferred. From 2000 to 2009, ATM’s took over and started co-existing with bank branches, giving a huge push to ease for doing banking any time (may not be anywhere but surely at many places).

Starting 2010 banks started going digital, opening-up avenues and channels of doing anytime banking. We can now access banking services round-the-clock, and indeed from anywhere in the world. According to National Payment Council of India, with UPI, digital transactions in India increased by 188% year-on-year in 2019.

The forthcoming five years, in the post-COVID world, will further change and evolve the way people undertake digital transactions. We are already witnessing and shall continue to witness eKYC, digital cards, Artificial Intelligence-based surveillance, compliances, and of course, more and more options for mobile-based digital payments.

At the same time, this sector is undergoing tough times, with the NPA’s and the resultant capital adequacy and liquidity issues coming in regular academic and media debates. Driven by all these challenges, the sector is witnessing consolidation of various banks, especially in the public sector to create few large- scale banks with global scales, operational efficiencies, and best technological and operating practices.

Today, both public and private sector banks invest in technology tools and platforms to offer agile, reliable, and superior solutions that will boost the customer experience. Many banks are securely migrating their infrastructure to cloud to make the user journey more and more seamless and intuitive, while maintaining the agility, speed, and scalability to launch new business services.

On the other hand, cooperative banks and thousands of smaller banks operating in hinterlands are not able to bring controls and efficiencies in their operations, and scale-up and meet up to the expectations of their much-aware young generation customers. It is simply because they are not able to invest in and adopt the same digital infrastructure which their bigger counterparts possess.

Need for agile banking

All these fast-changing market dynamics bring in the need and importance of an “Ever Agile and Always Available” banking digital infrastructure. For banks, agility generally refers to the constant development of digital banking platforms in response to fast-changing customer demand. And with regulatory changes, diversity of channels, and stiff competition from pure-play digital players, banks look at agility as a way of simplifying and creating more accountability towards customers.

As customer expectations continue to transform, banks move towards being more agile and nimble. They are transforming banking to create an integrated ecosystem for the customers by participating in their journeys. And while banks are being challenged by digital players, they are also drawing inspiration from these companies and adopting their transformation and digital disruption models.

To start with and possibly most importantly, banking institutions need to focus on the core place where their digital infrastructure stays and does all the digital magic, that is, their data center. A data center is not just a brick-and-mortar building, with a huge amount of power, cooling, physical security, and thick fiber connectivity but also all IT infrastructure resources and service layers like Cloud it brings along and delivers on an ‘As-a-Service’ model.

Besides digitalisation, consuming everything on ‘As-a-Service’ model will make sure that banks are not only scaling up or down faster but also maintaining a profitable, cost-efficient business. Banking institutions are gradually moving their workloads to the cloud for lower costs, dynamic availability and scalability of services and low-latency access. The need for highly scalable third-party data center infrastructure built on economies of scale is on the rise due to these factors since public cloud grids run in data centers and not in captive facilities.

But as you know, that is not a real-life scenario. In real life, you need to ensure that maximum juice is extracted from your CAPEX invested hardware before that gets obsolete and you get into a refresh cycle. And when you do get into that cycle, you are faced with your CEO/CFO demanding optimisation of costs and at the same time scaling up of resources to take benefits of newer business avenues or technological advancements. This makes you need to take care of running the business, avoiding any minute of downtime, and migrating from one technological environment to another.

The path to agile banking – ‘Everything-as-a-Service’   

With emerging technologies, onboarding and enhancing user experience has evolved. By harnessing AI and ML, banks can meet compliance and regulatory requirements without compromising on security and spending enormous amounts of money on emerging technologies. Solutions delivered on ‘As-a-Service’ model make these advanced technologies accessible to banks of all sizes, which could earlier be implemented only by a handful of large banks.

• First example is the use of Video KYC-as-a-Service; wherein, at a fraction of the cost, banks can adopt this technology and start onboarding customers sitting in the remotest part of the country, thus increasing their business, improving efficiencies and compliances, and promoting all-inclusive banking.
• Another example is of Reconciliation, which is the most critical process for any bank. Manual reconciliation is tedious and subject to errors. However, with the advent of AI and other tools, this solution is now available as a machine-driven solution. The digital technologies can be used on a pay-as-you-consume model, thus providing speed, scalability, volume, and accuracy with an agfutomated and integrated approach meeting the compliance requirements more securely while keeping costs low and making itself available to banks of all sizes.
• The third example is of Anti-Money Laundering. With automated and AI-powered solutions, banks can do a risk modelling of a prospect, continuously monitor risks, identify suspicious transactions, and money laundering attempts. This solution can be used by various surround services like Payment systems viz. SWIFT, ACH, Mobile Money, Exchange House transactions, Treasury functions, and Demat services. This can be also be tailored to accommodate specific requirements of the different types of organisation in the BFSI domain and be consumed on a pay-as-you-go model.

Banking Compliance-as-a-Service

Yotta has partnered with IDBI Intech to offer the latter’s i-Reconciliation (i-Recon) and i-Anti-Money Laundering (i-AML) applications under ‘Compliance as-a-service umbrella. These services will address the growing challenges of regulatory compliance as mandated by RBI while keeping the operational complexities and costs low for the banks, insurance companies and NBFCs. These services will be available on Yotta Enterprise Cloud, which is highly scalable, secure, and hosted at Yotta NM1 data center.

With digitalisation and an increase in the number of transactions, be it online, via card, or ATMs, consumer protection has become essential and critical. This has led to a rise in the number of regulatory compliances for the banks and the need to meet them most efficiently. With evolving regulatory changes, the BFSI sector needs to address various operational complexities in a time-bound and cost-effective manner. The Compliance-as-a-Service model helps banks to be more agile in responding to evolving regulatory expectations in a cost-effective manner.

i-Recon application will offer an integrated reconciliation platform addressing the challenges of scalability, transaction volume, speed, and accuracy with an automated and integrated approach as required by banks and insurance companies. Similarly, i-AML will help BFSI companies to identify and combat various money laundering risks.

Cloud provides agility, but Hybrid IT Infrastructure is an ideal solution

Most optimum utilisation of resources while maintaining our fullest corporate security is what we associate with Private Cloud. And on-demand, pay-as-you-use and cost efficiencies in a dynamic usage environment is what we associate with Public Cloud.

Hence, an ideal solution is not just Hybrid Cloud, but what I call as Hybrid IT Infrastructure where colocation, hosted private cloud and public cloud co-exist, so you can choose and plan the appropriate time frames to migrate from one environment to another without any downtimes and while keeping lower overall costs, long term scalability and security posture of the organisation under constant consideration.

This ideal solution also calls for overarching and transparent governance and monitoring orchestration layer for you to track, monitor and manage the health of your physical and virtual assets on a real-time basis – with all this available to you on a straightforward subscription-based services model.

Making headway for growth

Banking has come a long way. It is important for the banks to realise that digital transformation isn’t just about offering customers online banking or providing other services digitally. They need much more in terms of 100% availability, long term scalability, and tangible reduction in costs.

Since agility is an essential means of implementing digital transformation, banks would require a massive digital infrastructure that supports their traditional banking services and newer promising services like Video KYC, AML, Reconciliation, and others that can be consumed on an ‘As-a-Service’ model. This, in turn, will help banking institutions focus on addressing customers’ needs rather than just building products and back-end technologies.

The banking industry has always been at the forefront of adopting emerging technologies and has a strong track record for technology-led leadership. This is true in the case of AI too, which has been adopted by many banks in a variety of important functions. Today, this assumes greater significance, as the usage of online and mobile banking channels has risen significantly, and customers have cut down their branch visits in the wake of the pandemic. This has pushed banks to raise their bar for providing digital experiences, as customers expect the same experience that they have been accustomed to from digital upstarts.

With AI, banks can achieve their objectives, as this technology can truly be used to automate their processes (leading to greater efficiencies), engaging with customers and personalising experiences (leading to better customer satisfaction) and risk management. Let us now look at some critical areas in a bank where AI can make a pivotal difference.

Speeding up the process of customer onboarding

AI can make a significant difference in the way banks onboard customers. For example, when a customer wants to open a new bank account or applies for a loan, he or she has to provide a number of documents and identification proofs to the bank. The bank then has to physically scan each document to authenticate the document. This is even more applicable when a customer applies for a loan, and a bank checks bank statements, identification proofs, and other financial details to determine the credit worthiness of the customer. As these are manual activities, they are error-prone and time consuming. Additionally, as there is no real-time verification of information submitted by the customer, there is a possibility of missing or inadequate information.

In an AI-enabled eKYC platform, the entire process can be automated by using AI-driven face match and document verification algorithms. Once the process of eKYC starts, the data from the Government issued ID card and photo can be matched with the live selfie video to authenticate the customer. Data from ID cards is extracted using smart OCR and validated against government supported databases. This helps in completing the KYC in less than one minute compared to a minimum of 2-3 days that is required for customer onboarding.

AI can play a big role in reconciliation too. Today, a significant percentage of reconciliation efforts is spent on analysing transactions that already match, instead of focusing on the entries that require more analysis and investigation. AI can help in completely automating the reconciliation process and reduce the time and efforts that it takes to reconcile transactions. As the process is completely automated, there is no possibility of errors.

Raising the bar for customer experience

AI’s potential in raising the bar for customer experience is the highest in the banking industry. The most basic usage of the power of AI can be seen from the way banks have used chatbots to answer customer queries, besides customer acquisition and engagement. A study by Juniper Research in 2019 estimated that the operational cost savings from using chatbots in banking will reach $7.3 billion globally by 2023. While chatbots are now used by almost every bank, a bigger potential for AI lies in personalising experiences for customers. Considering the huge amount of data that banks have at their disposal (demographic data, transaction data, credit card spends, e-commerce transactions), banks are extremely well placed to hyper-personalise the experience for a customer.

The Boston Consulting Group estimates that a bank can garner as much as $300 million in revenue growth for every $100 billion that it has in assets, by personalising its customer interactions. For example, if a customer is paying rent of Rs 20,000 every month, then the AI model could recommend a home loan to you and show you how the EMI for the house could be a lot lesser than the rent you are paying every month. Similar recommendations can be made by the AI engine when a person crosses a certain age-threshold and suggestions can accordingly be made (health insurance, education loan, etc). AI can also understand and suggest the preferred channel that a specific customer prefers to interact with the bank – some are comfortable with email, some with telephonic calls or some could prefer to interact via chat only.

Preventing fraud

Despite huge technological advances, frauds are a common occurrence, and have only grown in scale. AI’s ability to learn and analyse each banking transaction can be used to prevent frauds. For example, if your credit card has never ever been used abroad, and if a transaction takes place on your card, then the AI system can flag this off, and automatically place a call to you to verify the transaction. If an account is being logged in at an hour that has never ever been recorded in the transaction history of an individual, then the AI system can flag this transaction to the bank.

Banks are also leveraging AI and ML for monitoring purposes. For instance, AI/ML engines are being used analyse data and then breaking them down to detect any malicious activity or presence of any compromising malware. Apart from security prioritization, AI also helps in assessing phishing websites, malicious attempts, and all other vulnerabilities.

Similarly, AI can be a big powerful asset in leading the fight against anti-money laundering. An AI powered anti-money laundering solution can monitor for example, small innocuous irregular deposits that are then transferred to a global merchant. By shifting through mountains of data and connected entities, the AI system can identify patterns that signify money laundering and provide a bank with insights into previously unknown relationships.

How can AI enable Banking-as-a-Service?

For AI to run efficiently, it needs huge amount of computational power. While HPC systems are well equipped to power AI-driven transactions, the cost is prohibitive. This is where HPC as a service can be utilized for accessing AI as a service.

This gives cost efficiencies with guaranteed performance. This requires zero CAPEX investment and can be consumed using a pay-as-you-use model. Scalability is also not an issue and can be scaled up or down as per the workloads.

Democratisation of AI is not possible today as AI is not accessible by all and is considered too costly to implement. This can be made possible by adopting Banking-as-a-Service, which is enabled by AI. All banking related services can be consumed as a service. Small banks or financial institutions that do not have access to AI powered solutions can use Banking-as-a-Service, as all these solutions are available on a pay-per-use model. Currently, the usage of AI in banking is low, primarily because of infrastructure-related costs. This is where High Performance Computing-as-a-Service can be a big catalyst for democratising the usage of AI.

Today, a bank’s competition may not strictly be a bank, and can be a pure play technology company. Technology companies who have a deeper understanding of technology and work on huge data sets are better placed to provide a better customer experience. Samsung, Google and Apple are some of the best examples that showcase this capability. The popularity of Google Pay shows how relatively new entrants with deep technology expertise can disrupt the payments space. Banks have also understood the significance of these disruptive technologies and are actively partnering or investing in startups who specialise in emerging technologies. A case in point is ICICI Bank, which has taken a stake in Tapits Technologies, a startup that enables contactless merchant onboarding using eKYC.

In the future, as more banks embrace a more digital future, it will be imperative for all banks to have an AI-first approach. Even the government has time and again emphasised that for banks to transform and fulfill India’s growing needs, they mist harness technologies like AI and Big Data. As more digital only banks enter the fray, this approach will be critical in defining their future competitiveness!

During the beginning of the year 2020, the Synergy Group had come out with a detailed review of enterprise IT spending over the last ten years. The analysis revealed that annual spending on cloud infrastructure services had gone up from virtually zero to almost $100 billion. In a recent report in December, the Synergy Group revealed that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, and hosted private cloud services) and SaaS reached $65 billion in the third quarter, up 28% from the third quarter of 2019. Undoubtedly, COVID-19 drove changes in enterprise behavior and sped up the transition from on-premise operations to cloud-based services. These statistics reveal the unstoppable march of cloud computing as a technology and points out to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated adoption by a significant percentage.

Today, even as the world waits for the vaccine to be available for the common masses, almost everything has been reset. IT infrastructure and procurement will never be the same again and will have a big impact on the next decade.

From my experience, I would like to point out key trends that I believe would be extremely important for enterprise IT in the next ten years:

1 Every company will use the cloud

The cloud’s growth has been unstoppable, as can be seen from the predictions of independent analysts. The industry estimates further suggests that cloud will be an irreplaceable component of enterprise IT in the future. Even today, the growth of almost every emerging technology depends heavily on the cloud, and is the foundational platform for AI, IoT and Analytics. While each technology can function on-premise too, it is the cloud that gives these technologies the firepower, and this is set to become more prominent in the future. Enterprise IT will be associated with cloud, and every company will use the cloud in one form or the other.

2 The edge will move to the center

It is a connected world, and the future will see an explosion of devices being connected to the Internet. A McKinsey study for example, claims that 127 new IoT devices connect to the Internet every second. Data centers will have to be built keeping this trend in mind, as organisations will look at keeping data close to the location where it is being generated. Also called as edge computing, this requires placing data center nodes as close to the sources of data and content. As more devices such as autonomous cars require real-time access and decision-making capability, it will not be feasible to transmit data all the way to a traditional cloud. With 5G on the horizon, edge computing will remain in high demand, as it ensures low latency and high speed. This is corroborated by the IDC FutureScape report, which states that by 2022, 40% of enterprises will have doubled their IT asset spending in edge locations.

3 An era of joint cloud offerings

The next decade will be defined by multi-cloud offerings, and every customer will look at having different cloud vendors for specific workloads. In 2019, the industry witnessed a landmark alliance between Oracle and Microsoft. This enables customers to migrate or run their enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. Customers can have the best of both worlds, by running one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within the Oracle Cloud. This agreement heralds the arrival of an era where customers will have the ability to run applications that share data across clouds. In the future, we will see more partnerships between fierce rivals.

4 Domain specific clouds will become the norm

Like other industry software such as ERP, cloud will also highly become domain specific. An example of this trend can be seen from the recent launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which is designed to enhance patient engagement, empower team collaboration, and improve clinical and operational data insights to connect data from across systems to predict risk and help improve patient care and operational efficiencies. This industry-specific solution provides integrated capabilities for automated and efficient high-value workflows, and advanced data analysis functionally for structured and unstructured data so that healthcare organisations can truly transform information into insight and insight into action. Going forward, we will see the creation of highly specialised cloud, as specific industries require specialised functionalities. This is also needed in the case of regulated industries such as financial services and telecom, where companies need to comply with specific regulations as required by the authorities.

5 Rise in As-a-Service models

With cloud adoption increasing, there will be a rise in affordable ‘As-a-Service’ models for specific industries. Today, thanks to the cloud, almost every service can be offered in a virtual way. Enterprises will combine intelligent analytics with products, leading to an era of productised services. In the future, almost every machine will have the option of being serviced remotely. Availability of cheap bandwidth coupled with a rise in intelligent devices, will lead to enterprises providing data insights for their devices.

We will also see a rise in industry focused ‘As-a-Service’ models. With no limits of computational power, we will see new industry focused models emerging. For example, small banks or financial firms that do not have the financial ability to invest in emerging technologies such as AI can make use of ‘Banking-as-a-Service’ and consume services in a pay per use model. Similarly, pharmaceutical firms can make use of a service such as ‘Drug discovery-as-a-Service’ to use the technological capabilities of firms to significantly reduce the time for discovering a drug. Similarly, the manufacturing sector can use ‘Manufacturing-as-a-Service’ to reduce their costs for manufacturing. A company called 3D Hubs, for example, has built a common hub for manufacturers to share 3D printers that do not want to invest on their own. In the next few years, the adoption of ‘As-a-Service’ models will be witnessed in every sector.

6 Democratisation of AI

While AI holds huge promise for transforming every possible industry, it is limited by the huge computational power that is required to power AI systems. In 2018, OpenAI, an AI research and development firm, highlighted that that the amount of computational power required to train the largest AI models has doubled every 3.4 months since 2012. Looking at the increased demand for computational power for AI, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently warned that deep learning is hitting computational limits. However, with more cloud power being available, AI will become truly mainstream. Today, thanks to the cloud, there are no limits. As AI needs more data to learn, a cloud-model can help in ingesting more data, leading to more learning. A cloud-model is also more economical, as it allows enterprises to purchase only the specific computational power they need, even if it is for a short duration.

7 Energy efficiency will be the new benchmark

In the future, energy efficiency will be a competitive benchmark for data center providers. Research firm, Gartner, estimates that power costs will increase at least 10% per year due to cost per kilowatt-hour (kwh) increases and underlying demand. Close to 70% of a hyperscale colocation data center operational expenditure is power, and as demand increases, this number is only set to rise further. From innovative cooling mechanisms to using natural gas, solar or wind energy extensively, the future will see a rise in energy related innovations, as energy efficiency becomes the new benchmark.

8 India will become the global hub for data centers

India already has a huge number of factors that will help it to position itself as a global hub for data centers. This can also be seen from the huge number of investments that this sector has received. A recent report by property consulting firm Anarock, states that India’s data centers received $977 million in private equity and strategic investments since 2008, of which nearly 40% or approximately $396 million were infused between the January-September 2020 period. The report further states that India will see an addition of at least 28 large hyperscale data centers over the next three years. The reasons are clear – India already is well known across the world as a software services powerhouse. It is also home to a large developer population. The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), India expects the country to overtake the US as world’s largest developer population center by 2024. Data consumption is increasingly rapidly. A fast-rising e-commerce and increasing consumption for OTT services is also fueling the demand for data. When one looks at the current demand, and what it will lead to, you can visualise the huge growth that is going to come for data centers.

How businesses will benefit?

Each of the above trends points out to an era that will increasingly use data insights for improving their own efficiencies and productivity levels. For example, democratisation of AI will level the playing field between large and small players. Companies can use the ‘As-a-Service’ model to reduce the entry barriers and start experimenting with emerging technologies using the foundation of cloud. Financial or technological capability will no longer be the roadblock, and domain experts in sectors such as healthcare or manufacturing can use the potential of AI to solve some of the biggest problems concerning their industries. Simply put, there are no restrictions, and any company or individual can start experimenting with negligible costs.

Data centers have to think beyond ‘infrastructure’

Data center players will also have to be nimble and think innovatively to start offering services and solutions that are beyond the usual IaaS or PaaS offerings. For example, can data center players offer ‘High Performance Computing-as-a-Service’ to say, a small pharmaceutical company? Can data center service providers create unique co-created solutions by taking in active inputs from the community and solving known problems at a price point that they can afford? Can data center players create their own IP that helps their clients improve their energy efficiencies by a significant margin?

The future will belong to those data center companies who can provide answers to such questions or solve the challenges faced by the industry; and service providers that can scale quickly without any limits and provide intelligent outcome-based models that help their clients achieve the business objectives through a portfolio of ‘As-a-Service’ models.

Source: https://www.techcircle.in/2021/01/25/the-future-of-enterprise-it-what-the-next-decade-holds-for-us

The world has almost come to a standstill amid the COVID 19 pandemic. Rapidly integrating digital technologies is the only way for businesses to remain resilient and navigate the disruptions that CIOs are encountering every day.

CIOs today have their backs against the wall to realign priorities, strategise to maintain business continuity, and rethink their long term-short term strategies. Increased use of virtual communication while being the key to carrying on the operations in such unprecedented times, is adding more responsibilities for IT teams.

Here are some key considerations for CIOs while rethinking their strategies for companies to transition into being entirely digitally enabled during, and even after this phase.

Digital transformation is the key

Most of the global companies, along with their CIOs, have started working on a digital transformation plan or have one already in place to curb the impact of COVID-19 to the minimum. It is the responsibility of CIOs to ascertain if companies can manage the enormous workload while working remotely.

Sectors like banking, education, IT, etc., where they didn’t even consider working from home as an option, are now not only working remotely by teleworking with their teams and clients but also holding virtual events such as webinars to keep their customers and employees engaged.

Going digital would also lower operating expenses and extra workload that comes with traditional methods. Cloud and colocation data centers played a massive role to bring workplace 2.0 into existence. Accessing data, working on a shared document and collaborating with team members has become possible due to cloud technologies. CIOs must ensure that their company understands the importance of digital transformation and that if not restructured into a digital environment, they would be running a high risk of being replaced by the ones who were quick to adopt a digital model.

Security is the need of the hour

Cyberattacks are one of the critical threats that CIOs are facing during this unplanned and sudden shift to the virtual workplace. According to Cloudflare, cyber threats have increased by almost six-times their usual levels over the past few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies should reassess the risk tolerance capabilities of their IT infrastructure. One of the effective ways to tackle the situation is to move towards ‘Zero Trust Approach’. CIOs must focus on cloud infrastructure with identity providers like Azure or Okta to enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) as the central point of authentication. For on-prem infrastructure, VPN and remote access gateway are likely to be the risk areas. CIOs must be ready with a backup plan to patch immediately.

IT investments for a secure future

A survey by IDC has shown that the IT spending growth forecast has slid down to 2.7 per cent from 5.1 per cent within three months. However, cloud and security are the two identified key areas for sustainable crisis response. The pandemic has reinforced the significance of cloud and colocation data centers industrywide. The data center service providers have provided great support while making the shift to online working culture. CIOs are reducing the spend on futuristic technologies and limiting it to what is needed at the moment for business continuity.

Right communication with internal and external stakeholders

It is imperative to take proactive steps and ensure that you have regular communication with your customers so that they are updated on all developments and feel secure. Customers and employees should be apprised of future possibilities but in a way that doesn’t cause panic or distress. CIOs should familiarise the teams with tech tools provided to them for effective communication and optimise productivity. Sharing information from a reliable source continuously will help to put people’s minds at ease and make them more productive.

The current crisis is extremely volatile without a clear end in sight. During this time, CIOs need to look after the digital lifelines of their companies and ensure they are taking the right steps to support their organisations. By being proactive in implementing digital business strategies, CIOs can ensure to maintain business continuity and a faster run to normalcy when things get back on track.

Source: https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/strategy-and-management/how-cios-can-navigate-covid-19-disruptions/75749922

Product design, development, and data analysis are empowered by deep learning, AI and big data analytics. These require high-performing GPUs for scaling and speeding up the process, explains Nitin Jadhav, Head of Solution Engineering – Yotta Infrastructure.

Years ago, a graphic processor unit or GPU used to be a small part of the central processing unit or CPU. It was, as the name suggests used for making our PCs or computers graphic and video enabled.

With advancement, our content evolved into pictures, audio and video. It then follows that the role of GPU would become more critical in the general scheme of things. And it did. GPU was slowly and steadily making its way to becoming from something that was much in demand in the niche markets of gamers and VR/AR to something that had a more mass appeal.

GPUs are the new CPUs

Today we see more and more usage of 3D modelling and animation, leading to high demand for the advance high-performing computing capabilities of GPU solutions. We see animation studios now partnering with companies providing GPU solutions to enhance the quality of their animated feature films.

Also, the rapid adoption of the IoT and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) across sectors, for product design, development, and data analysis backed by deep learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data analytics require high-performing GPUs for scaling and speeding up the process.

GPU can speed up machine learning and AI workloads in terms of magnitude, hours and days instead of weeks and months. Today, GPUs that can handle massively parallel processing which reduces the time to complete the task and in turn also reduces the total cost of ownership. For example, companies are using AI-powered by GPU to automate processes like employee approvals, payment processing, and sales discounting.

GPU on the cloud

It is a challenge for most enterprises to set up a GPU infrastructure on-premise. Also, it is tricky to understand and plan the demand for this infrastructure for its optimal usage. This is why GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) came into being and is a no brainer for most businesses. GPUaaS is basically for on-demand, elastic provisioning of GPU infrastructure.

Low-cost implications, support from cloud service providers and on-demand scalability, are some of the key benefits of GPUaaS. The SaaS service model is expected to grow due to the large-scale adoption of cloud-based GPU computing solutions by end-users. The market players in the GPU market are increasingly focusing on delivering SaaS-based solutions to their customers.

GPUaaS – the future of smart working

GPUaaS can be used for tasks as diverse as training multilingual AI speech engines to detecting early signs of diabetes-induced blindness. The speed necessary for machine learning systems like this can only be accomplished with modern GPUaaS that offer a compelling alternative to traditional general-purpose processors with flexible pricing and no CAPEX.

GPU as a Service, can be used with a server model and also as a workstation. If you plan to run computationally intensive tasks, they can consume a lot of CPU power, offloading some of this work to a GPU can free up resources and improve performance output. Similarly, for workstations, the GPU can handle the toughest workloads while the CPU handles regular computing.

With the new technologies becoming more mainstream, GPUaaS will witness an extensive set of applications across industries soon.

GPUaaS – the road ahead

Companies operating in the GPUaaS market are also developing GPU specifically for deep learning and AI. Most product design, development, and data analysis are empowered and backed by deep learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics these days. These require high-performing GPUs for scaling and speeding up the process.

The market for GPUaaS is already set to exceed US$ 7 billion by 2025; and the Asia-Pacific GPUaaS market is projected to register significant growth with a CAGR of over 40% between 2019 and 2025 according to a research report by Global Market Insights. The region is also a key contributor to the gaming market and is rapidly adopting cloud gaming, resulting in industry growth. Any enterprise looking for a processing activity which relies on highly fast, yet simple calculations are looking at GPUaaS very closely.

Smart cities and energy-efficient buildings will also require high-performing GPUs to run the real-time process seamlessly, along with the deployment of deep learning for predictive analytics. All this and more will lead to the growth of GPUaaS in the future.

Source : https://www.pcquest.com/rise-gpu-service/

Hybrid Data Warehousing for Scalability

Data, as we know, is the most prized asset for a business. With increased touchpoints for businesses, the data that comes in is often stored in siloes across the organization. Due to this, data science teams are unable to optimally run their analytics tools or deploy algorithms to derive actionable insights from the data sets. Today, most organizations use a combination of cloud services along with on-premise infrastructure to manage critical data. With the data protection norms setting in, organizations will have to implement a cloud strategy that aligns with the governance and storage requirements of India’s Personal Data Protection Bill 2019. A hybrid approach to the cloud will thus help businesses meet both their security and scalability requirements by deploying a blend of private and public cloud services in their IT infrastructure.

With the rise in data, the computing and processing demands of the cloud architecture needs to be elastic for data deployment models. Hybrid cloud will allow organizations to meet the on-demand data requirements and derive insights in real-time to meet the business objectives. It would also allow for seamless data management by ensuring the portability of workloads among the on-premise infrastructure and public cloud.

Securing Data in the Cloud

A lurking challenge for cloud-environments is the security of critical data. In a hybrid cloud, enterprises can disintegrate confidential and less critical information for storage purposes. By doing this, they can effectively put in place a disaster recovery mechanism that can replicate data in real-time and create data copies on multiple sites. The security requirements of a hybrid cloud environment can be addressed by deploying a single unified security environment across the organizational network.

Advantages of Hybrid Cloud

As customer experience takes the center stage in business decisions, a hybrid cloud management solution offers the agility required to mine heaps of unstructured customer data and run business analytics on them. Some retail brands are using hyper scalable cloud solutions to manage information overload during heavy-traffic period and optimise their sites to provide a personalised experience in real-time. A hybrid approach makes it easier for enterprises to integrate multiple tools and reduce latency for seamless customer experience.

Indian companies are stepping up their dependency on hybrid cloud and working towards moving their traditional data into data lakes. Hybrid cloud solutions not only provide flexibility to run applications of various scale but also create self-service data platforms by modernizing the IT infrastructure. With hybrid cloud, enterprises can align their workloads, either on-premise or on cloud, that aligns with data security, governance and business requirements of the organization.

With major players setting up their data centers in India, the hybrid cloud model will provide a balanced IT model to deploy an optimal cloud migration strategy. Organizations will be able to select the best infrastructure for different applications by leveraging the elasticity of a hyper specialised arrangement. The year 2019 saw major global players coming together to harness their cloud capabilities and India’s maturing start-up and SME ecosystem only paves the way for a considerable shift to integrated cloud solutions.

Source: https://www.dqindia.com/moving-workload-hybrid-cloud-better-data-management