DQ Digital Leadership Conclave 2018-Panel Discussion- New Age IT Infra

Technology and data are driving change in business and society at an unprecedented rate. The transformation to a digital enterprise is complex, challenging and potentially expensive. Most organizations cannot simply ‘lift and shift’ or ‘rip and replace’ their systems and hand them over to service providers, or simply move all their business processes to public cloud. They have to manage a complex transformation involving on-premises applications and infrastructure, public cloud, Software as a Service, Infrastructure and Platform as a Service and colocation amongst many other things. The session discussion revolved around how organizations embrace and seek to lead that change, or struggle to get up to speed.

SHARAD AGARWAL, CIO, JK TYPE

“As an industry if we look back around four years back, we were a traditional in house data center type of infrastructure. But in the last couple of years, we have moved to a private cloud model. This transition has given a very good intractable and seamless experience to the end user that something we couldn't have imagined sometime back. This has changed the perspective and people are able to work on the same platform. As a company we can derive the analytics based on user perspective, view the expectation perspective and everything is on a single platform.”

PERTISH MANKOTIA, CIO, SHEELA FOAM

“Both public and private clouds are available to us and still there is core system that has to be in your own data center and has to be controlled. But there are few things which are having beyond our database. You can keep your data in your center and it has to be scalable. If the event permits us then we can store the data in house. But if the situation demands, then you have to go outside the cloud because you need things to be scalable there.” 

KAPIL MAHAJAN, CIO, SafeExpress

“We started small as most of the Phase 1 of the cloud was about moving your less critical workloads to the cloud. One of our companies, SafeEducate which is into government skilling programs is totally runs on the cloud today, including their ERP, Operational systems, HR systems and the financial system. We are on multiple clouds like Salesforce Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Amazon and IBM SoftLayer. As per as the core business is concerned most of our applications now runs on the cloud.”

KAMAL KASHYAP, COUNTRY MANAGER, INDIA- PUBLIC SECTOR SALES, ENTERPRISE GROUP, HPE

 “We believe that the world is going to be hybrid and not just in India but across the globe and that’s experience all the corporate and the government IT organizations have. There are certain workloads which for various reasons of performance, cost, privacy or regulatory requirements you would want them to be dedicated physically, possibly on a private cloud setup.The need for cloud native applications will not go away and you would need to have most your applications in an environment which is cloud native.”

RAJESH GOENKA , DIRECTOR, SALES & MARKETING,RASHI PERIPHERALS

“Cloud is very near future and it is unavoidable. First and foremost, if we accept that then we can find the ways and means of implementing it optimally. The biggest concern right now is ‘Security’ and ‘Bandwidth’ and more importantly the limited number of data centers available in India currently. Most of the data right now of social platforms are stored in Singapore or different countries therefore we need to really focus hard to have the data storage locally and of enough bandwidth to service those data.”