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Organizations across the world have been accelerating their digital transformation efforts by adopting new technologies, implementing more automation, enhancing networks, and adding new kinds of endpoints to the enterprise IT. The result is unmanageable amount of data volumes. But data is the lifeblood of any business. In fact, data provides the intrinsic value to a business – it can be its customer and product data, supply chain data, competitor data, and any and every type of information. A business also thrives on a multitude of other data. It could be the data on its employees or the data that its IT system generates to keep the organization networked and online.
To keep the organization agile and flexible, it is imperative that all this data is available and accessible. But this availability and accessibility that are important for a culture of innovation also leave an organization vulnerable to malicious forces. More importantly, the dependence on data and technology has increased the criticality of IT to the operations of the enterprise manifold.
In such a fragile data driven world, few organizations can claim to survive a significant disruption to their IT operations without incurring huge financial and reputational losses, or facing regulatory scrutiny.
Organizations must perforce put in place systems to effectively and efficiently manage the growing data deluge – across a variety of enterprise applications and systems – to future proof the continuity of the business in the event of a catastrophe. The onus of this critical task rests on the much capable shoulders of the CIO.
The CIO&Leader roundtable, in association with Druva, held at Crowne Plaza, Gurugram on March 15, 2019, revolved around the challenges presented to enterprise in the data-driven era. In particular, the discussants took a close look at:
1. Challenges in automating data backup across application silos and cloud platforms (multiple applications across business divisions, locations, cloud vs in-premise apps)
2. Managing the proliferation of data protection solutions across the enterprise (multiple technologies for backup, legacy solutions)
3. Difficulties in ensuring effective business continuity and disaster recovery (including ransomware)
4. Complications in effective business compliance & data governance (legal, e-discovery, etc)
The roundtable was made up of 25 participants, all technology leaders in their respective industry space.
R Giridhar, Group Editor, 9.9 Group moderating the roundtable discussion
The discussion opened with a brief on the topic and a round of introduction by Raja Giridhar, Group Editor, 9.9 Group. Bakshish Dutta, Country Sales Manager, Druva opened the discussion with a succinct presentation on ‘Transforming data management with cloud’. Druva was founded in 2008 and is a leader in data protection and governance. The Silicon Valley based company has offices across the globe and has been ranked #1 by Gartner (Enterprise Endpoint backup) three times in a row. The company’s expertise includes backup and archiving of any source, disaster recovery, data loss prevention malware and threat protection, e-discovery enablement, data compliance and audit, and search and analytics.
Bakshish Dutta, Country Sales Manager - India and SAARC, Druva presents on “Simplifying Data Management - The SaaS Way”
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a growing trend in data management and the presentation demonstrated how SaaS simplifies data management. Taking the participants through the pain-points of legacy data protection system which is multi-vendor, labor intensive, complex and expensive to manage, Druva demonstrated why it is important for IT managers to simplify data management and protection using cloud.
Puneesh Lamba, Group CIO, CK Birla Group discusses Druva’s data retention and data recovery policy
Before the advent of cloud based data management, companies were required to buy software, configure and deploy it. Organizations are quickly recognizing the benefits of shifting from client-server desktop applications to web-based or cloud computing or the easiest option of SaaS. Naturally, SaaS by its nature provokes some questions on data security and costs. The discussants argued the case for and against SaaS data management and the conclusion drawn was an unanimous approval to data management and protection in the cloud.
Anil Porter, CIO, Interglobe Technology asks about the Dhruva’s roadmap to the Indian data privacy act which will be enforced soon
What distinguishes Druva SaaS from such providers is the fact that it is the only cloud native SaaS built on AWS. It offers:
1) Simplified Data Protection: Turnkey SaaS Solution (Cloud Native), no hardware, software, tapes, managing offsite locations. SLA driven services model, ease of deployment
2) Protection across all Modern Data Sources: Single Pane of Glass; laptops, desktops, servers, virtual, cloud applications (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
3) Value out of the Data: Governance, legal/audit, compliance, analytics
4) Scale Up/Down in Minutes: Add workloads/users on the Go
Post the presentation by Dutta, the discussion was opened to the participants. Parveen Sharma, National Director - IT, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co brought in the legal perspective to the discussion and gave much-needed insight into the compliance templates available on Druva for GDPR and PII (Personally identifiable information).
In the age of increasing threats to data and cyber crimes, it becomes incumbent upon the organization to have a data policy in place that keeps the data exchange environment sanitized and prevents overload of data on scare resources. Rajeev Gupta, Group CIO, Air One Aviation, provided some pertinent tips on this and shared how his company policy for employees to keep personal and official data separate to help manage data backup efficiently, is helping the organization counter security issues in the cloud.
The discussion came to the conclusion that in the globalized business environment where remote sites are managing more and more data, and where legacy backup and management systems fall short of requirements abysmally, automated cloud native solutions certainly are the perfect fit.
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