The technology landscape of India is in top gear. With the rapid change of the economic environment, enterprises are looking to capitalise with emerging technologies. This has increased the reliance on data centers and IT service providers many folds. Yotta, a new aged managed data center service provider backed by the Hiranandani Group, has launched its first Data Center Park at Novi Mumbai. Their first data center building, Yotta NM l went live on 7th July 2020. It is India’s only active third-party data center, that has been accredited with the coveted Uptime lnstitute’s Tier IV certification for designing; stamping the credibility for real-world performance and operations. We go oneon-one with Sunil Gupta, Managing Partner & CEO, Yotta Infrastructure, to discuss how Yotta is instrumental in the changing landscape of IT services. Also known as the ‘Data Center Man of India’ Sunil has built more than fifteen Data Centers, Cloud and hosting Infrastructure in the country and has more in the pipeline.
What is driving the demand for data centers in India?
Digital consumption in the form of OTT, social media content, online shopping and e-payments are surging at a tremendous rate. As per Ericsson’s Mobility Report, an average Indian will consume 25GB data per month by 2025. Parallelly, enterprises are moving towards Cloud, and using emerging technologies like loT, Al/ ML, Automation. Adding to the increase in demand are Government of India’s digital India campaign and data localization policy. All this is leading to a huge data explosion. To handle this demand, the need of the hour is data center parks and not data center buildings. We will continue to see investments from International companies and even local players in this space.
How has COVID-19 changed the technology landscape for Enterprises?
This pandemic has forced enterprises to jump on the digital transformation journey. Companies that were contemplating to move to the Cloud are now adopting it rapidly. With more than 50% of the workforce of India Inc. working remotely even after the pandemic ends, has resulted in increased demand for online collaboration tools, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Cybersecurity tools and Disaster Recovery solutions. As a managed service provider, we are witnessing a surge in request from businesses to migrate to the Cloud or co-locate their on-premise datacenters to our multi-tenant co-location datacenter. Data Centers are classified as an essential service and were allowed to continue to operate even throughout the strictest lockdown periods in India. This was not the same for all captive data centers, many of which suffered faults due to lack of maintenance.
IT has been seen as an expense instead of an investment. Is this view changing?
The way IT is perceived depends on the maturity of the organization. However, in most enterprises, IT is now seen as a strategic investment that gives businesses an edge to deliver innovative solutions to their customers and elevate their experience. Aligning IT and Business, delivers an endless list of benefits like faster go-to-market, increased customer experience and much more.
How is Yotta assisting CIO’s in these trying times?
This pandemic that caught everyone in uncharted territory. Organizations are looking to cut costs because of the losses suffered due to the lockdown, and businesses have turned to their CIO’s to realign to the new business objectives that warrant lower IT spends. While enterprises want to lap up digitisation like never before, they are also looking to move from CAPEX based model to OPEX based. This is where Yotta Tech, our wide portfolio of pay-as-you-go technology services come to the rescue. Also, our large economies of scale because of own land assets, in-house construction capability and power distribution, have resulted in lower costs which are directly passed on to the customers – thereby reducing their annual datacenter spends by atleast 25%.
What would you advise CIO’s who are looking to rapidly move up the digitization ladder?
Our advice to CIO’s, is that they should move away from a captive or on-premise data center to a Multi-Tenant Data Center (MTDC). The advantages of a MTDC, outweigh the one derived by a captive data center. Besides, if already not, Enterprises should move their workloads to the Cloud. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) like Yotta can audit their legacy applications and help them migrate to the Cloud. For a remote and distributed workforce, services such as Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) can be considered. This ensures secure access to enterprise data while lower capex costs. Lastly, IT services should now, should be consumed on the ‘as-a-Service’ model or pay-asyou-use billing and this is an area where Yotta is very well positioned to collaborate with CIO’s in their digitization journey. As a young Managed Service Provider (MSP), we work closely with our customers as their partner and offer solutions as ‘Anything as a Service’ (XaaS). Thus, helping Businesses to focus on their core expertise and handling their IT needs on a cost-efficient basis.
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