CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sameer Bhatia, Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group, and Country Manager for India & SAARC, Seagate Technology.
- How does Seagate view the growing need for cloud adoption models and multi-cloud environments with a data management strategy at the centre?
Cloud adoption has emerged as a crucial step for organisations to storing, managing, and analysing enormous amounts of data effectively and securely. A future-proof mass data management is the crux of unlocking greater value out of business data. It has to be resilient and extensible to operationalize use cases for AI/ ML and ensure applications have access to data, regardless of location.
A hybrid architecture, including centralized and edge locations, is increasing from 49% last year to 55% this year, according to Seagate’s Future-Proofing Storage whitepaper. Scaling and protecting data requires companies to navigate a complex web of ecosystems— from the multicloud, to hybrid cloud, through on prem and at the edge. The solution to that is a tightly integrated portfolio of mass capacity drives, storage sytems, and edge-to-cloud storage platform.
Seagate provides simplified, reliable, and efficient data storage solutions that minimize costs and maximize innovations for winning businesses to realise the full value of multicloud. through optimising their cloud deployments, managing data efficiently, and cost-effectively, as well as safeguarding critical information.
The decades of development have led Seagate to HAMR productisation which is even more important today as highly cost-efficient mass capacity storage will be a competitive enabler in cloud adoptions where more workloads migrate to the cloud as data is rapidly growing and increasing in value. At Seagate, we believe HAMR will further extend the large and sustainable cost advantage multiple compared to other storage media. Additionally, Seagate’s ability to service this growing demand through areal density gains – by increasing capacities from 3 terabytes (TB) to 4 TBs to 5 TBs per disk or more provides far greater capital efficiencies compared with current PMR technology over time.
Seagate’s storage systems are part of an easy-to-integrate, drop-in, vendor-agnostic portfolio enabling digital transformations, which allows companies to seamlessly boost their on-prem, hybrid, and multicloud strategies. A high-performance, self-healing block storage system like CORVAULT is capable of delivering multi-petabyte capacity, five-nines availability, and hyperscale efficiencies for data center and macro edge environments.
Our storage systems are also complementary to Lyve Cloud, an object-storage-as-a-service, which allows control of your data and interconnect with any cloud or compute ecosystem to enhance your hybrid multicloud performance.
Multicloud, multisite data silos are broken down with automated orchsetration for frictionless data movement, from endpoint to edge to cloud. Our vision aligns with the evolving needs of the Indian corporate landscape, and we are dedicated to supporting businesses with industry-leading data storage solutions and a customer-centric approach in their cloud adoption journey.
- As data is becoming the new currency, how is Seagate helping companies leverage the data to create value while ensuring security and compliance standards?
We live in a data economy. Data is currency, and security should not be a barrier to storing more of it. Companies must prioritize compliance across the entire cloud infrastructure. Any errors or gaps in a cloud’s configuration mean that any employee could be one click away from accidentally exposing entire databases. Once the information is public, it is exceedingly difficult to prevent threat actors from using it for nefarious purposes.
Seagate helps enterprises level up their cloud data secuity plan through our hard drive encryptions – a foundational component of storage security, object mutability, plus identity and access management that support data protection and anti-ransomware strategies. Enterprise-grade identity management support, automatic data replication, and data encryption are among our rigorous controls governing the management of data at rest and in flight, resulting in a highly secure, reliable exabyte storage service clearly aligned with the principles of Trust Services Criteria (TSC)—security, availability, process integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Also an industry leader in data-at-rest protection, Seagate ensures the highest level of encryption possible with Seagate Secure™. This technology a fundamental evolution in data security with the advent of self-encrypting hard drives that automatically and transparently protect confidential information on all hardware platforms. Among other safeguards, Seagate Secure technology delivers powerful disk encryption, scrambling data to prevent unauthorized access to hard drives in notebook computers, consumer electronics or other devices. With data always encrypted at rest and in flight, additionally, ransomware protection safeguards data from malicious attacks while object immutability protects data from accidental manipulation or deletion.
Along other features like Seagate Instant Secure Erase, Certified Erase, and Auto-Lock, data security and privacy are ensured, Seagate helps businesses protect valuable data and enable the circular economy.
Seagate has also partnered with industry standard and regulatory bodies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to achieve unified standards for media sanitization. System and infrastructure deployments are handled through automated configuration management tools to ensure continued compliance with desired state and hardening standards. This capability allows for consistent configurations and security while providing the ability to scale the service rapidly. Comprised of talented industry veterans, we also have a mature Information Security Management System (ISMS) modelled after IS0 27001 in our Lyve Cloud.
- With the advent of 5G how businesses are shifting to an Edge-with-Cloud model in 2023 to keep up with the IT infrastructure?
5G brings enormous potential to every sector. It promises faster data speeds, lower latency, and increased connectivity, allowing for the real-time transfer of large amounts of data. The device and data growth fuelled by 5G will make the IT infrastructure the ideal spot— the beachfront property—for edge computing. Edge-with-Cloud model, in which data is processed and stored closer to the source of data production will work in tandem, where 5G increases the speed and edge-model lowers latency by being closer to the network.
5G network enhancements will dramatically change the performance and economics of cellular networks, fuelling demand for infrastructure edge computing, which will drive investments in servers, storage, and networking deep into the telco infrastructure, such as at the base of cell towers. By placing computing resources at the infrastructure edge, 5G networks can capture enormous amounts of real-time data and cost-effectively process it for value extraction, versus simply throwing it away cloud, making it necessary to add additional computing resources to edge locations.
The benefits 5G helps enable range from automated patient monitoring and real-time crop detection to self-driving cars and robotic manufacturing. Additionally, to truly realize 5G’s potential, data at the edge must be front and centre to significantly improve the performance of applications and enable huge amounts of data to be processed in real-time.
- ESG & Sustainability are the key aspects of successful business operations, how is Seagate aligning with ESG & sustainability for the greater benefit?
Seagate is well on track towards meeting the goals to power our global footprint with 100% renewable energy by 2030, and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040. These goals were pledged last year in support of its commitment to a sustainable, inclusive, and ethical datasphere. As a global innovator and leader of mass-capacity storage solutions, we are crafting a sustainable datasphere and changing the game on circularity.
Circularity addresses greenhouse gas emissions, rare-earth mineral preservation, reduced water and energy usage, financial savings and other critical areas. It will move at the speed of trust in data sanitization. By innovating in the circular economy, we improve our planet; we focus our environmental efforts on conservation of energy and water; we reduce greenhouse gases and lower the amount of waste generated.
Seagate is a steward member of The Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) and we instituted several tangible actions to enable circularity through data sanitization at scale. These efforts can’t happen without the entire value chain—manufacturers, suppliers and customers—working collectively. We believe that together, we will make an exponentially larger impact by working collectively toward common goals.
