Industrial Automation Magazine India

Organisations are increasingly turning to cloud platforms to refine their digital strategies

Published on : Wednesday 09-02-2022

Rajesh Dangi, Chief Digital Officer, NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies.

Two years of the pandemic and a lot going for digitalisation. How has this impacted the datacentre industry?
The Covid-19 crises made the world embrace the possibilities of datacentres and cloud technologies. Businesses that were earlier just experimenting with cloud architectures have now completely shifted to it. India is on the road to become one of the fastest growing Datacentre & Cloud markets in the world. The rapid digital transformation due to the pandemic has increased the dependency on third party service providers. We have observed that after Covid-19, organisations across verticals are looking for a trusted partner that could not only support them with a reliable datacentre infrastructure but also ensure seamless round-the-clock operations. This all makes us believe that the datacentres in India are set to see a rapid amplification. Even NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies has witnessed this growth over the last couple of years. 
 
There is no one-size-fits-all solution in datacentres so what are the factors that determine the selection? 
There are three key factors that influence the decision while choosing datacentre, and these are:  
a. Power, any datacentre needs consistency on the main power source, datacentres which are powered by the grid with sufficient redundancy always score higher than the others, the internal power sources such as generators and UPS systems can be designed to provide interim power when the main sources fail but the main source needs to have multiple girds powering the local substation.
 
b. Connectivity – all datacentres hosting customer workloads and must have multiple telecom providers coming in to provide redundancy and different paths to connect to the external world, typically any datacentre having presence of three to four Telco’s will be good enough criteria.
 
c. Security, the utmost important factor from the geographical stability (earthquake, flooding proof location, etc.), to physical and logical security of the facility. The logical security for workload, process and organisational security certification standing matters the most, any datacentre that is being regularly audited by third party auditors and has good standing in applicable security standards backed by qualified third-party auditors will stand apart eventually.
 
This is the age of disruptions and the cloud is in ferment too. How is this affecting the industry?
Believe it or not, Cloud has become omnipresent. The way cloud computing reuses IT resources to manage large databases is simply unprecedented. Organisations are increasingly turning to cloud platforms to refine their digital strategies, expand their core services as needed, and reduce large infrastructure investments. With new developments such as 5G and WiFi 6 that are integrated and adapted, cloud technologies will continue to evolve. Adoption of these new technologies will accelerate migration to cloud platforms. The availability of high-speed Internet, increased consumption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions and favourable government policies have led to the rapid growth of datacentres in India. This growth is leading India towards becoming a true digital economy. According to a NASSCOM report from February 2021, investments in the Indian datacentre market are expected to reach about $5 billion by 2025. Even NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies has witnessed this growth over the last couple of years. 
 
Another debate is about Edge and Cloud which appears to be settling in favour of hybrid solutions. Is this co-existence possible?
Nowadays, everyone seems to be waking up to edge cloud and services, thus making cloud computing one of the hottest cutting-edge technologies in the digital transformation era.
 
Edge computing will help more digital users and services to bridge the digital divide. Intelligent edge locations and gateways with powerful hardware accelerators will change the computing and storage landscape forever. Today’s cloud landscape for enterprises is distributed in multi-cloud with edge enablement and the way forward is Hybrid Solutions. 
 
NxtGen is ready with multiple cloud services including the latest hybrid (Unified core, private and edge cloud-ready), SpeedCloud application services platform that can cater multi-cloud, multi-tenancy, and multi-model deployment (BareMetal as a Service, HPC as a service, virtual instances, container services, high-performance storage, digital services for media engines, etc.), all via a single seamless dashboard with transparent resource metering for on-demand pay as you go model. 
 
When it comes to the manufacturing industry, with the growing digitalisation and anticipated 5G rollout, what are the opportunities in this area? 
Cutting-edge manufacturing sites, distribution centres and numerous other campus environments can benefit from the deployment of a private 5G infrastructure supporting various spectrums of 5G radio access networks. From algorithmic updates to a production process, predictive maintenance of machinery and real-time interaction with autonomous distribution vehicles, private 5G networks afford numerous advantages for modern enterprises. With Mobile Edge Compute, MEC is the need of the hour that can integrate with radio units and run the 5G workloads side by side would be a tremendous value addition to the manufacturing sites replacing the legacy WiFi network with faster and long-range alternatives of private 5G ecosystem.
 
What differentiates NxtGen services and solutions from the competition? Any breakthrough on the anvil?
I will say that it is not the technology that sets the company apart, but the way the industry uses and integrates multiple technologies and delivers fruitful results that sets the company apart. The technology landscape is vast and dynamic as always, thus a culture of creativity, conceptualisation, and co-creation with customers will become the key tenets. The team has solved customer problems by working closely with them to help them develop the most cost-effective technologies. The true differentiator is the DNA for innovation, cost-effectiveness and pay-per-use cloud and datacentre services with free consulting solutions and faster implementations to name a few. The company believes that all customer needs are unique and helps to solve them together to win the deals and pushes them to choose this team as a long-term strategic partner, rather than the partner-driven box sale practiced by most competitors.
 
There has been an increase in user tech and we cannot stay at enterprise levels solely. We want to take the tech closer to our users. Therefore, we are planning to increase our footprints in 16 cities in India. Recently, NxtGen has on-boarded a few clients from the Middle East. So, we are planning an international expansion in coming years to provide better cloud services on an international scale as well. 
 
With open source systems while leveraging emerging technologies NxtGen has been leading the innovation path, each innovation at every possible level and aspect of cloud infrastructure like high performance computing, unified storage, use of NVME drives, further introducing differentiated digital services ranging from AI/ML, Data Analytics, MLOps is making the difference. NxtGen simplified self-service virtualisation and container platforms called SpeedCloud was introduced and deployed for various customers in a short span of time providing customer price performance benefits.
 
What is the present size of the market and anticipated demand over the next 5 years?
Now that the enterprises are used to digital adoption, the focus has shifted from cloud infrastructure to cloud accessibility. As more organisations embrace the power, it is critical that a culture shift is also addressed in line with this evolution. Thus, we can see the increasing Internet penetration and the widespread use of interactive applications are increasing the demand for improved data networks and extensive storage options. 5G and automation have taken a front seat in leading the cloud computing trends.