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Flexible IT is the key to future

Enterprises are re-evaluating the fundamentals of their IT strategy due to two converging sets of trends

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Sanghamitra Kar
New Update
Santhosh DSouza

Santhosh D'Souza

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Enterprises are re-evaluating the fundamentals of their IT strategy due to two converging sets of trends. On the one hand, today’s Enterprise needs to conduct its business at scale, 24x7, and to respond in real-time to signals from its ecosystem – end customers, partners and stake-holders – flowing in from multiple channels including social media. On the other hand, technology trends - analytics, cloud and mobility for instance – simultaneously alter the way IT is purchased, provisioned and managed through its lifecycle.

Meeting modern enterprise challenges requires innovative solutions. However, the deluge of data coupled with key technology trends means organisations have to innovate and also leap frog to creative solutions that address their needs. The storage, security and management of information is critical to any organisation. Without the technology in place to deliver the right data to the right place at the right time, production lines stop, hospital care is compromised and retailers can’t get hold of stock. Added to the complexity of ensuring that data is flowing properly around an organisation, IT Managers have the responsibility of ensuring that the infrastructure that they put in place today also works tomorrow.

Second guessing the future is risky business. Strategies change, new technologies come of age and the difference between success and failure gets narrower, even as budgets tighten and competition increases. Businesses need their data to be instantly available, mobile and secure, with “as fast as possible” being the only tolerable benchmark when it comes to implementing new technologies or systems that offer competitive advantage.

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When the only thing we can be sure of is change, a company’s IT must be flexible, able to adapt swiftly and keep up with the pace of demands. So the question that needs to be answered by businesses is, Is your IT architecture flexible?

Besides being prepared for challenges ahead, most organisations today are driven by the need to cut costs. Despite appearances, these two business drivers are not at odds with each other. Efficient IT equates to a company buying less, lowering operating costs and reducing waste whilst still maintaining an infrastructure that can scale and adapt. This will also result in less time and resources being spent on mundane operations.

An example of an industry that has been impacted by technology changes is the banking sector. The vertical has been growing and catering to the needs of diverse segments of the society and the economy. To offer the best customer experience, Information Technology in the banking sector has to be flexible to accommodate growth and changing demands. Technology has wrought a complete paradigm shift in the functioning of banks and delivery of banking services, to the point where the lifeblood of a banking operation rests entirely in its application and data infrastructure.

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NABARD epitomizes this shift: the institution has put in place a technology infrastructure that can be used by all co-operative banks under NABARD to offer the latest banking products to their customers. Co-operative banks are at the forefront of the financial inclusion drive across the nation. The driving force here are the Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) at the village level reaching six and a half lakh villages and serving small and marginal farmers with land holdings of less than five acres each. PACS and Co-operative Banks in general find it difficult to build and maintain technology infrastructure, and NABARD came to their rescue by creating a private or community cloud Core Banking platform. Every customer of nearly 200 co-operative banks spanning approximately 6800 branches can now avail of modern services, including Any Branch Banking, Electronic Funds Transfer, ATM access and Direct Benefit Transfers of government subsidies.

By adopting NABARD’s core banking platform powered by NetApp storage, the co-operative banks have saved substantial amounts of money and boast of customer experience at par with any commercial bank.

In the creation of such a shared, agile, always on and scalable critical banking platform, several criteria came to be critical to the evaluation of technologies necessary. Some of them are briefly outlined here:

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Unified Architecture: Data is at the heart of today’s enterprise, but data arrives in an enterprise through different channels, is stored in different ways and is delivered to applications and end users through different protocols. The IT architecture of a business needs to support multiple protocols simultaneously and be able to switch seamlessly. These protocols include Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File Systems (NFS). A unified data storage and management architecture eradicates the need for storage silos and the overheads of different management operations for different needs.

Intelligent Caching and Storage Tiering: These features allow data to be transparently located in different storage media based on demand and access patterns. By using a judicious mix of hard disk drives, solid state drives and cache, a data platform can offer the best performance where it matters most: to the data that is most in demand, while ensuring that the costs of storing less frequently used data are minimal.

Secure Multi-Tenancy: All businesses have multiple business units and different applications accessing important data from the company’s storage and this could lead to security issues about who has access to what data. Your IT infrastructure will need to have solutions that provide end-to-end, secure multi-tenancy across applications. This will allow users to take advantage of the shared infrastructure without having to worry about whether their data is vulnerable to internal or external threats.

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Agility and Scalability: Businesses and Product/Service Offerings change considerably in the demands they place on the IT resources that power them. To accommodate constant change and growth, IT resource allocations have to change constantly. This leads to a couple of conclusions: an enterprise needs to have granular control over data platforms to tweak allocations without having to disrupt services. The enterprise also needs to scale its data platforms vertically and horizontally, again without disrupting operations..

Service Automation: In addition to scalability, the extra data accumulating as a business grows needs to be controlled with the most simplicity. Service automation allows authorized personnel to simply click a button to make changes in IT components and resources, rather than running through an endless sequence of screens or commands. Automation can even extend to the data platform itself being authorized to make changes necessary to adhere to service level agreements.

Nonstop operations: Having access to data always and at any location is integral to the functioning of a majority of businesses. Non-availability of data paralyzes most enterprises. However hardware and software upgrades need to be conducted periodically on an existing platform. Some components inevitably fail and need replacement. The data platform therefore should be architected for truly non-disruptive operations, maintenance and upgrades.

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Storage Efficiency: Companies need to look for storage facilities that not only store large amounts of data, but also factor in raw capacity requirements, cost and speed. A solution that stores more for less and completes tasks with a quick response time is what is needed.

If these criteria are followed, a well orchestrated and intelligent IT infrastructure will be the result. Whilst flexible IT has many advantages, one of the greatest aspects is its ability to increase automation and efficiency. Tasks such as recovery, backup and test development will take less time, use less effort and cost less money, delivering your business savings that are invaluable.

And for those organisations where cost savings are king, there are tools available which calculate the savings made with new infrastructure. This means the economics of IT will be changed as budget can be shifted away from maintenance and will be focused on providing future-ready IT services that enable business to accelerate.

The author is the Director Systems Engineering, NetApp

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