The need to address security has become the norm in any cloud migration strategy: Samson David, Infosys

Security of enterprise assets and data is of utmost importance for any business. With threats growing at an exponential rate, enterprises need to move from being reactive in their response to proactively managing threats.
Today’s security initiatives have become increasingly important as enterprises embrace new technologies that help them stay ahead of the competition while reducing the cost of operations. With this regards, Dataquest spoke to Samson David -Senior Vice President - Global Head Cloud, Infrastructure Services & Security at Infosys. Excerpts

Please elaborate on the latest trends in the cloud, infrastructure services, and security sector.
Enterprises are under pressure dealing with huge growth in data volume, varied complexity of application workloads, real-time visibility and access modes powered by the disruption from mobility, big data, and Internet of Things. This creates new requirements around cloud, infrastructure and security and significant transformation around these services to create agile, highly scalable, resilient, secure, economically attractive, and business-aware environments.

This shift is creating interesting and rapid changes within the CIS industry. Enterprises are beginning to see that cloud and IT Infrastructure cannot have disparate strategies, but need to be intertwined. This is the premise of hybrid cloud. Extreme automation, combined with support of distributed architecture and incremental / linear scale-out of infrastructure brings agility and economics to new levels both on-premises and off-premises. Enterprises are looking to specialists to evaluate which workloads of theirs are appropriate for the cloud and which should remain on-premises or should be consumed as a service. Integration, consistent user experience, and empowerment of the end user are key focus areas.

A lot of traditional hardware functions such as routing and switching are now provided as-a-service by various cloud providers. Several traditional hardware functions are being replaced by software-based solutions that are easy to consume and administer. Software is changing the way enterprises manage their IT landscape. Focus on automation, self-learning and self-healing has resulted in a smaller number of people managing significantly larger scales of operation.

Technology is enabling people to completely re-imagine things.

What are the business opportunities Infosys sees in the cloud and security domain?
With numerous cloud service providers, companies need to find the optimum balance between workloads on the cloud and on-premises. Once these applications are in place, ensuring seamless operations in the hybrid IT world continues to be a challenge for both infrastructure and security. Looking at these areas and the larger Infosys themes around ‘Renew and New’, there are many opportunities in the space.

If one were to look at the immediate opportunity to ‘renew’ the core of IT infrastructure operations, we foresee about 70 percent of automation or elimination possibilities. Extreme automation will let clients predict and prevent incidents, create relevant scripts for automated responses to tickets, and create a database of standard responses to frequently occurring tickets. This helps reduce the effort involved in managing the enterprise. This is extremely important to ensure that customers have a ‘noiseless environment’ when it comes to their IT organization.

A significant opportunity for enterprises is fast growing around the premise of ‘Software is the new hardware’. Companies are leveraging the power of software (from the cloud and in-house) to discover and successfully compete in new business lines. We, at Infosys, are helping enterprises build the relevant infrastructure to discover these new service lines.Businesses and business plans need to find the right balance between “Humanics”, “Mechanics” and “Economics” to scale new horizons and convert possibilities into realities – all of this, leveraging the power of software.

What geographies are investing in cloud and security heavily?
We see an uptick in client investments in cloud, infrastructure and security across geographies. The scale of investments may differ but it has picked up across the world and in line with Infosys’ geographical revenue spread. While we are seeing significant traction from across various geographies, each of these is looking at cloud and security differently. A lot of this is driven by local regulations and compliance requirements. For example, we are working with banking customers reporting to a regulatory body that does not encourage cloud adoption to define a roadmap and move mission-critical data to the cloud. While North America and some of the European markets have moved ahead in terms of adoption, the benefits of the cloud are driving interest and adoption across regions like Asia and Australia.

How can businesses safeguard their cloud infrastructure and how does Infosys fit in the cloud and security domain?
For every enterprise, the major concerns when moving data and applications to the cloud have been around security. The need to address security has become the norm in any cloud migration strategy. Enterprises need to thoroughly understand and act upon the complexity that comes with cloud security, and ensure they adhere to industry and regulatory norms while meeting the requirements of the business.

Security of enterprise assets and data is of utmost importance for any business. With threats growing at an exponential rate, enterprises need to move from being reactive in their response to proactively managing threats.

Today’s security initiatives have become increasingly important as enterprises embrace new technologies that help them stay ahead of the competition while reducing the cost of operations.

Infosys security transformation services provide enterprises with continuous monitoring of their IT assets for threats, vulnerability management, security operations, and much more. We ensure that their IT infrastructure is compliant with all industry and regulatory requirements while mitigating internal and external security risks.

What is the future of the cloud, infrastructure and security industry?
There is a fundamental shift taking place. With software becoming the new hardware, the way the work was done in the past was more about administration and operations. I see this fundamentally shifting to become more of software engineering. Cloud and infrastructure will become the foundation for all other company-wide initiatives such as IoT, Big Data and analytics. These will ultimately help reshape the enterprise and open up opportunities in various business areas. Enterprises are realizing this and are making significant investments in the CIS space.

To re-imagine, redefine and rewrite the way the current infrastructure is managed and convert possibilities into realities, companies must find a way to run their operations noiselessly leveraging the power of software. There is a thrust on rediscovering new possibilities with new technologies. The automation trend is growing stronger and will accelerate further. Transformation and modernization hold the key to leveraging new possibilities. Software will simplify operations to drive growth in this space.