Investments in technologies like cloud, AI, automation, collaboration tools and others hold increased significance for companies in Covid times. In an interaction with CRN India, Nitin Jadhav, Head of Solution Engineering at Yotta Infrastructure, shares the best practices at his company and how it is supporting partners and customers
Your assessment of the lockdown situation and what are the lessons learned?
The world has never witnessed a global pandemic that affected every industry and every social aspect of our lives in the manner that COVID-19 has. Most businesses do not account for an economic disruption of this scale. Those who moved their core operations and workforce to teleworking, were able to better manage themselves and devise the next course of action. The volatility of the situation puts a lot of pressure on the company’s management to redefine the dynamics of the new working pattern at a massive scale.
Though some companies had to make some rather hard decisions to survive during this crisis, COVID-19 gives companies an opportunity to be better prepared to navigate any future emergency. One of the important learnings for organisations is to ensure that they revisit their business continuity and crisis management plan after a fixed period and build resilience into their company’s DNA. Along with making virtual infrastructure an essential part of their overall business strategy, companies should now also focus on becoming agile and be able to scale their operations as the situation demands.
Investments in technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence, IoT, automation, VDI and collaboration tools for virtual meetings must increase to ride the wave of remote working. Further, employees should be at the core of an organisation’s BCP as they form the backbone of any successful business. They should be trained on how to use different digital tools, and regular simulation tests can help ensure that the employees are aligned with the company’s crisis management strategy.
What is Yotta’s preparedness to handle such unprecedented situations?
We have always been a 100 per cent digitised company and emerging technologies sit at the centre of our business model. Our teams, right from marketing to sales to IT, are always reviewing our internal processes to see how we can better utilise technology. Our data is divided into on-premise, our own hosted cloud and on SaaS model, and we have a multiple network connectivity link in place to make sure that we have a back-up in case a link fails. Even before COVID-19 hit us, we had built a system that digitally tracks all the ongoing processes and monitors the operations of the data centre based on IoT, RFID tagging without any manual intervention. Our employees are equipped with the required collaborative tools to ensure the work carries on smoothly, even when teams are working remotely.
With rise in cyber threats and attacks during this period, how are you ensuring your customers’ data is safe and helping them mitigate risks?
At Yotta, we believe in preparedness and readiness to ensure we serve our customers seamlessly. We recently concluded a phishing simulation exercise to understand how our employees would respond to a possible phishing attack, as now they all are working from home on their own devices and internet connections. As part of our security offerings, we offer our customers managed security services that ensure proactiveness to addresses threats to their business continuity. We provide infrastructure security which includes next-generation firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, antivirus, WAF, DDoS, Host-based security services, content filtering, VPN and remote access. We make sure that we customise our managed security services to meet business requirements and safeguard customers’ data by helping them prepare, detect, protect, respond, recover, report and record at every point of their security lifecycle.
Data threat can be physical and virtual. At Yotta, we address both effectively. For instance, our Data Centre building – Yotta NM1 is protected with 13 layers of security and is equipped with a special chemical and narcotics detection system, a very first in India. We also follow a Zero Trust Architecture, a security model that doesn’t trust even internal teams or systems by giving default access and always verifies credentials for everyone and everything before allowing access to the system. Our data centre also features a state-of-the-art Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Centre (SOC) that provide 24×7 monitoring. It even has automated intrusion detection that alerts our customers in case of a data breach. For all our customers, we have implemented comprehensive data protection measures like offline data back-up and recovery, data encryption, adhering to the regulations for data protection and constant traffic monitoring will help to protect data stored in a data centre from evident threats such as hacking, malware and spyware.
Highlight some of the challenges faced in providing service or support in the lockdown period
There are no challenges as such. We are serving our customers with a minimum recommended workforce suggested by the government in their COVID-19 management guidelines. In these times, we have extended remote support to all our customers; hence they do not need to worry about their hosted IT infrastructure with us.
With remote working becoming the new normal, what are the best practices that your customers should adopt?
It is important for every organisation today, irrespective of their scale, to have a flexible yet robust business continuity strategy in place. Some of the things we would recommend our customers would be to adopt colocation services instead of captive DC to enjoy uninterrupted services. Customer can opt for Yotta cloud services to set up the DR site or use VDI services on the cloud along with the whole gamut of managed services. Cybersecurity should be taken more seriously to ward off possible threat vectors. Employee and partner engagement should be given utmost importance, and proper communication channels should be put in place to address any concerns.
How would Yotta complement in such a scenario?
We ensure that we are regularly connecting with our customers to advise and guide them on how best they can leverage technology to sail through the new normal. Our data centre offer specialised services and have remote working capabilities that will help us serve our customers across different verticals. Our hyperscale offerings will help them store the humungous volume of data that will be generated as a result of moving everything online. Our colocation data centre services will make access to critical data and business application easier for the remote workforce. It will also provide ease in migrating to the cloud since colocation acts as the hub for cloud infrastructure. We are also organising different webinars to share some important tips and best practices that can help businesses in these times.
Recognising this change, what is your message to partners and customers?
We want to ensure our partners and customers that we are monitoring the situation and taking adequate measures to provide best-in-class services to them seamlessly. We are focussing on technology innovation to support them in these unprecedented times. Yotta is fully armed to meet the business requirements of all the channel partners and customers, and work with them as we all adjust to the new work culture. Very importantly, at Yotta to support our potential customers amidst these challenging times, we are offering them 25 per cent savings on their current IT infrastructure spends.
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