BYOD to fuel Data Center business in the country

 To have or not to have? Many organizations are still toying with the idea of whether or not to have a BYOD policy in place. And if this becomes a reality, it is likely to change the demand for data center businesses in India

BYOD is on the tip of every enterprise employee’s mouth – from sales and marketing to administration and the C-Level. With BYOD, enterprises are permitting their employees to use their personal mobile devices in the workplace for both personal and work-related purposes. The BYOD approach presents itself as an understanding between the enterprise and its employees on the terms and conditions governing the use of personal devices in the workplace. According to IDC, by 2020 the world is set to generate 50 times the amount of information and 75 times the number of information containers and new information taming technologies that would be aimed at driving down the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information.
The BYOD wave is revolutionizing the enterprise IT world and at the same time demanding much-awaited modernization of data center strategy.

An ever-growing BYOD market
BYOD is one of the key trends spurring the demand for data center business and stirring key transformations in the data center. A few companies in India have already embraced the BYOD trend and are realizing the next significant increase in end-user productivity. Given that every vendor has their own version of BYOD in today’s marketplace, it is going to be a long-term movement and is here to stay, whether an organization has got a BYOD policy in place or not.

 

Abhijit Potnis,
Director Technology Solutions – India and SAARC,
EMC

“Personal devices are completely changing the current business environment and also forcing organizations to make important infrastructure decisions in an already complex security environment,” states Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solutions – India and SAARC, EMC.

Remarks Shibu Paul, Regional Sales Director – India, ME & SEA, Array Networks, “BYOD is still evolving and is at a very initial stage in India but has a great potential as smart devises are evolving and so are network technologies like 4G. Customers, on their part, are confused to take an affirmative decision on a strategic BYOD solution. At Array, we have an Array Secure Access gateway which allows employees to log in to their applications securely over SSL VPN. Array has incorporated advanced machine-based secure authentication allowing organizations to restrict login to critical applications from a few approved devices only. Organizations are rolling out mobile applications for internal employees which will definitely bring in a huge drive for MDM and BYOD into enterprises.”

 

Shibu Mathews, Director – IT and Telecom, Rittal India	Shibu Paul, Regional Sales Director – India, ME & SEA, Array Networks	Sridhar Iyengar, Vice- President – Product Management, ManageEngine

“The explosion of mobile computing devices like smartphones and tablets should be great for businesses not only in India but around the globe. Organizations today are adapting quickly to mobile-enable their IT infrastructures to meet the growing demand for mobile device use in the enterprise IT environment and this keeps companies like us busy,” observes Shibu Mathews, Director – IT and Telecom, Rittal India.

According to IDC, India witnessed the highest rate of growth – over 186 per cent – in smartphone sales in the Asia-Pacific region during January-March 2014, outshining countries like China. “The way an enterprise manages its day-to-day work is changing; an enterprise employee expects to be productive anywhere, anytime and with any device. The emergence of high-performance and large display mobile devices has raised these expectations even higher. In my opinion, BYOD works to an organization’s advantage – whether it is a technology vendor or an enterprise like a bank, for example, or even a government/public sector unit,” asserts Santhosh D’ Souza, Director – Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services Private Ltd India.

“I think this is a positive change and more data that is being collected will only help and assist a better understanding of usage and will also bring solutions to various other analytical problems,” says Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager, Tableau India.

 

Anand Prahlad, Managing Director & Head of Operations, McAfee India, part of Intel Security	Amod Ranade, GM - Data Center Business Development, Schneider Electric IT Business, India	Shrirang Deshpande, Country Head-Data Center Business, Emerson Network Power

“Looking at the evolution of the IT industry, BYOD and MDMs are going to be kept factors in the IT infrastructure of an organization as this can help them to improve the work efficiency. We feel that increased demand of BYOD will also see growth of MDMs as it required to protect the critical information which, in turn, can help the data center market to grow,” says Olivier Tremouille, Managing Director, Socomec Innovative Power Solutions Private Ltd.
“Employees are demanding the freedom to choose their own devices at workplace, as an outcome of consumerization of IT. Therefore, many organizations are driving workspace transformation by adopting mobility solutions and impleme nting BYOD strategies, which empower employees while protecting enterprise data and simplifying IT manageability. This has triggered organizations to embrace a virtual desktop environment, replacing traditional desktop infrastructure and thus, desktop virtualization has evolved into a mainstream technology redefining the way we work and empowering mobile workforce,” recalls Atul Ahuja, Director – Desktop & Apps, Microsoft Alliance, India Subcontinent, Citrix.

However, many companies, including a majority of SMBs, have continuously faced challenges in the adoption of desktop virtualization primarily due to the initial investment or due to lack of skilled staff capable of sustaining it. To ease this challenge, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a unique solution that enables organizations to circumvent any CAPEX investment and opt for a pay-as-you-go model with on-demand scalability and no manageability requirement. In this cloud-based desktop delivery model, a suite of hosted applications and desktops are stored in a data center, which can be accessed anytime, anywhere and on any device without compromising user experience, and enterprise-grade security. For employees, DaaS provides a seamless computing experience on any device, while offering a host of benefits such as improved agility and productivity and cost benefits to organizations. In fact, DaaS is also emerging as a top priority for organizations to manage workforce more effectively with Mobile Workstyles helping organizations take the work near to the talent and not necessarily the few erstwhile centralized location and place of work. “It is an interesting paradox since DaaS is enabling organizations to save on infrastructure and costs yet causing an increase in workforce productivity and lowering attrition rates,” cites Atul.

BYOD & Data Center – its prospects
If an organization is hit by a BYOD culture, it also means that data center security policies will need to be reworked so as to authorize access for mobile and remote computing, while protecting corporate data from external access.

 

Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager, Tableau India

Olivier Tremouille, Managing Director, Socomec Innovative Power Solutions Private Ltd.

Data centers, which initially made their major appearance in India in the mid-1990s, have matured into essential business drivers. The India Data Center Services market is growing at a 23% CAGR over the three years and is set to emerge as an important data center hub of the world. India is bound to witness a growth in data center operations owing to the strong demand both from domestic and international market in the last few years. “In the last few years, the Indian data center industry has witnessed rapid growth. Even during the economic slowdown, the data center market was in the growth path. The major sectors influencing data centers in India are IT and Social Media,” shares Arun Ghosh, Country Head, CyberPower India.

Talking about consumerization of IT, with more and more people buying portable devices the need for data center storage will be on the rise. People across all age groups – working or non-working population – will be contributing to its growth. The increasing prevalence of BYOD and shift in dominance of the mobile device space strongly drives both cloud and hybrid solutions in provider data centers. With a workforce that can (and does) work anywhere, ensuring that services are highly available and scalable both in terms of usage levels and locations becomes a very important strategic technology decision. “Many businesses are currently experiencing the struggle of trying to support this change in internal user/customer with existing in-house solutions; we find that increasingly the model is moving to a blend of in-house infrastructure with direct ties into IaaS and SaaS providers. The contribution mix for this is likely to continue shifting more towards the IaaS/SaaS side, with less and less reliance on purely in-house systems and solutions,” opine Adam McCarthy, General Manager & Director, Rackspace Asia.

The growing trend of BYOD, as Anil Bhasin, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks, views, is likely to change the demand for data center businesses in India. “Firstly, data centers will start becoming a document repository for consumers; secondly, servers are required to support application virtualization and other ‘hardware replacement’ technologies. Also, with the growth of BYOD and mobile device management, businesses will need to address what security solutions they have in place to make sure they have all bases covered, in order to stay secure in the mobile era,” he says.

Security – the bigger aspect
However, as the trend of BYOD enters the workspace, it brings several concerns for the IT Admin. The biggest of them is security concern – access to secure applications and data. As more consumer laptops, tablets and smartphones are used across the enterprise for work purposes, it is critical to gain insight into the sensitive data accessed on and sent from these devices. According to Sridhar Iyengar, Vice- President – Product Management, ManageEngine, a reliable Mobile Device Management (MDM) strategy and tool can monitor and enforce security policies to mitigate these risks. “The usage of Mobile devices for business use is, in turn, expected to increase access to the data and applications that reside in the data center. This means that the data centers have to be designed for better application responsiveness and data throughput.”

 

Yogesh Sawant Director, Partner Sales and Field Alliances Organization, India, Hitachi Data Systems	Anil Bhasin Managing Director, India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks	Santhosh D’ Souza Director- Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt. Ltd India

Additionally, security policies and mechanisms in data centers will have to be tightened to ensure that the right person gets access to the right set of data and applications that they have the privileges for. As a part of security, areas like SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) will need to be looked at seriously by Enterprise Security Architects in order to detect, prevent and in some cases investigate security breaches to their corporate network, data and applications. “Lastly, the adoption of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for Desktop Virtualization also seems like a viable option to allow restricted and secure access to corporate data and information from any mobile remotely. This will have a bearing on the Data Center Infrastructure and how it is architected to provide such services,” says Iyengar.

One of the challenges that Anand Prahlad, Managing Director & Head of Operations, McAfee India Center at McAfee, part of Intel Security, points out in a BYOD setting is how regardless of who owns the device, in the event of a security incident the organization is still responsible to ensure the incident is dealt with, the damage contained and the risk mitigated to ensure it does not happen. In the event of data loss, the organization may still suffer in particular if confidential information is leaked including customer and employee data, financial information, and intellectual property, to name a few.

 

Subroto Das Director – South Asia & India WD	Arun Ghosh Country Head CyberPower India	Atul Ahuja Director - Desktop & Apps, Microsoft Alliance, India Sub Continent, Citrix

“To this end, every organization will need to do a risk assessment to look at the technology that will be supported, how users will access corporate resources and ultimately corporate data – all the way to – how they manage users who lose their device or leave the organization. Also, CIOs should look beyond a regular MDM and should adopt policies from the perspective of Data Loss Prevention, Identity Management, Intrusion prevention, Firewalls, secure Wi-Fi, DC, and Network Access control, etc for effective BYOD. On top of everything, the internal IT policy should be detailed and foolproof enough to drive the initiative and guide effectively to prevent failure of specific tools,” he says. Most importantly, CIOs should also invest in education for users around the risk involved in handling data over BYOD. Enterprises need to make sure that their IT infrastructure is up and running 24x7 and business continuity is not affected. The ability of infrastructure software to view real-time infrastructure metrics and data helps CIOs in planning and decision making.

Srinivas Tadigadapa, Director – Enterprise Solution Sales, Intel South Asia, responds with a similar sentiment, “As more mobile devices connect to the Internet, cloud-based software and applications get smarter, thus resulting in a new era of context-rich experiences and services. It also results in a massive amount of network connections and a continuous stream of real-time, unstructured data. New challenges for networks, computing and storage are emerging as the growing volume of data is transported, collected, aggregated and analyzed in data centers. As a result, data centers must be more agile and service-driven than ever before, and easier to manage and operate.”

 

Srinivas Tadigadapa,
Director – Enterprise Solution Sales,
Intel South Asia
 

Agrees Shrirang Deshpande, Country Head – Data Center Business, Emerson Network Power, “Not only has BYOD enhanced the mobility of workers but it has also increased the complexity as well as volume of data that passes through the network. We believe that the trend of BYOD will go a step further and usher in a new era of data center management through mobile devices as long as it is done correctly. Additionally, users will be able to monitor critical infrastructure and will be able to take action, if necessary, from a mobile device, whether they are on the go or on the data center floor.”

“BYOD and mobile device management implies that there will be information flowing in and out from a centralized storage anywhere, anytime. This means that the storage has to be reliable and expandable. WD offers a broad range of enterprise hard drives that are designed to address the data center requirements of workload, performance and reliability,” views Subroto Das, Director – South Asia & India, WD.

Finally…
Today, technology can bring together data from diverse sources such as social media, e-commerce, satellite images, TV & video, sensors & surveillance, news & journals, medical scans and correlate this data, analyze it, obtain insights and make predictions. With the continual growth in computerization and digitization across all verticals, the amount of data generated on a daily basis is skyrocketing. Additionally, the vast demographic diversification prevailing in the country will increase the rate of technology adoption amongst businesses, thereby amplifying digital data generation exponentially. Some factors such as burgeoning internet usage across the nation, the emergence of smart handheld devices and the explosion in social media will be the prime reasons driving the data center as well as the BYOD market.

 

The jury is still out on whether BYOD is a boon or bane. However, as Yogesh Sawant, Director, Partner Sales and Field Alliances Organization, India, Hitachi Data Systems, points out that CIOs in many organizations have banned such devices and have set policies to control accesses to outside facilities, while others have embraced BYOD and the new capabilities provided by these ubiquitous devices and network access.  From a CIO’s perspective, BYOD is permitting the merging of personal life devices and work/enterprise devices by enabling them to sync and share files across these devices.  This capability is desired by employees, particularly the tech-savvy type of employees. For enterprise IT, it adds complexity and costs in data and device security, application testing and support (browser compatibility) and customer support/IT helpdesk . Data centers too face challenges related to the data and content that need to be managed – they need to address the rising amount of unstructured data, a more mobile, dispersed workforce and the need for secure, simple access and collaboration.

samrita@varindia.com