Technologies and trends taking over enterprises in the era of digital transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the digital revolution being witnessed across sectors globally. The past few years made it a necessity for businesses to set off on their digital transformation journeys despite the hesitation and associated challenges. Sanjay Agrawal, Technology Head, Hitachi Vantara shares his thoughts on the various technology trends that are taking over Indian enterprises, key technologies that customers are currently investing in, and the challenges being faced by organisations in their newly embraced digital transformations.

• What are the data trends that are likely to dominate the digital transformation journey of Indian companies in the coming years?

Data forms the foundation on which the process of digital transformation is built.  There has been an increasing focus on data, throughout every step of its journey, starting from the point of data capturing all the way till its monetization and retirement.

As more and more organisations embark on their digital transformation journey, the rate of data produced is multiplying at a staggering rate. This has also led to the growing problem of dark data- which refers to unused and untapped data.  According to IDC, only 2.5% of all data is estimated to be analyzed which means a major chunk of valuable data remains unutilised. Organisations are adopting DataOps practices, which involves deploying resources including people, processes and technology to expand visibility, understand and integrate data, and enable access for analytics and operational workloads. This is followed by cataloguing of the data, thereby making it more accessible and available for usage. We are also witnessing data lakes moving into architectures powered by object storage, which provides superior security, efficiency, interoperability and speed.

Strategical business decisions are now being driven by data. CIOs today are no longer dependent on traditional technologies. Teams are leveraging tools and technologies to automate manual processes and increase collaboration between various teams within the organisation. Data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) have introduced new opportunities for the convergence of IT and OT to derive more value from the data and promote non-siloed forms of working. DataOps leads to data agility, which in turn leads to business agility.

• What are the key technologies that Indian customers are currently investing in?

In the last couple of years, predominantly during the pandemic phase, customers are adopting IT modernization with a strong focus around automation with a self-service model. One such example would be chat-bots. Hybrid cloud is another area of technology that is growing in popularity. With the additional boost provided by the pandemic, organisations that initially preferred traditional IT have started evaluating and adopting the value of hybrid cloud.

Today, key business and strategic decisions are heavily reliant on data which have led to businesses embracing data-driven models for operations.

• What are the challenges being faced by Indian businesses in their cloud adoption journey? How can this be addressed?

A major challenge faced by CIOs is that most of the IT vendors only address two or three of the problems faced by a business during their cloud journey. Choosing a vendor that provides them with end-to-end solutions without being biased towards a particular technology or solution will help make the transition smoother, quicker and cost efficient.

Due to the pandemic, the shift to cloud was inevitable. But the cloud-cost paradox was a challenge that many enterprises encountered once they embraced their cloud journeys. The challenges faced due to inadequate automation, lack of visibility across cloud accounts, and duplicate and idle resources from poor application architectural design led to wasted expenditures of millions of dollars every year. However, there is less awareness about the fact that these unplanned costs can be addressed with flexible infrastructure choices, right workload shifts and transparent processes. Strategic decisions based on FinOps principles will help avoid ungoverned on-demand consumption, and unexpected management/operational costs. With the support of FinOps, organisations focus on cloud financial management through a combination of integrated systems, best practices and the right expertise which leads to better assessment of cloud costs, smarter business decisions and trade-offs.

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