IT managers Walking a Tight Rope!

The Indian information technology (IT) industry has played a key role in putting India on the global map. India is a preferred destination for companies looking to offshore their IT and back-office functions. It also retains its low-cost advantage and is a financially attractive location when viewed in combination with the talent.

Keeping this in mind, India is one of the fastest-growing markets in terms of IT hardware and communications' infrastructure consumption. Today, Indian IT companies have emerged as larger players on the global stage. IT companies have realized that they need to manage and utilize a huge chunk of unstructured data.

They are currently grappling with huge requirements for compliance and managing their IT networks in an efficient way. With the presence of new technologies adaptable with a blink of an eye, IT managers are facing difficulties in handling data boom and new grown demands.

With more corporate data stored or accessed by devices (tablets, smartphones, and laptops) that are not fully controlled by IT administrators, the likelihood of data loss incidents caused by improperly secured personal devices will rise. This has challenged the present network set-ups of enterprises.

Rough Path

The first thing to get impacted is spending for new projects in IT and reduced IT operational budgets. While the computing environment is expanding and becoming more complex, the resources and budget to manage IT are, in many cases, diminishing. IT organizations need to find ways to realize higher productivity.

Today, multiple options of communication available to consumers (smartphones, media tablets, netbooks, and ultraportable PCs) are pushing enterprises to explore the possibility of adopting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.

The popularity of mobile devices, social networking, and Web 2.0 technologies presents several challenges to CIOs; CIOs need to accept and embrace them, before their benefits can be fully realized in the enterprise. Going forward, we expect more and more organizations to adopt mobility and social technologies to increase business efficiency.

With BYOD as a trend picking up in most enterprises, the real challenge for data center owners will be the increasing complexities of securing physical, virtual, and cloud based systems.

It is believed that BYOD as a concept will become more widespread among Indian enterprises; and the required network readiness would be put in place by the corporate technology heads to allow individuals to use a device of their choice, yet be a part of enterprise mobility. Advantages that accrue from this approach would include lower capex spending by the organization, increased productivity, and more satisfied employees. However the adoption of a BYOD policy will require investments in strengthening the corporate network infrastructure and putting in place a suitable governance and security framework.

Changing Needs and Demands

Data center networking needs are changing fast, as virtual server infrastructure puts more data on each machine, increases the amount of communication between physical servers and adds to the amount of bandwidth needed to transmit data to the end-users.

Data center compute and storage technologies have advanced over the last decade, and the legacy approach to networking has not kept pace. As cloud computing and the mobile internet accelerate, demand is intensifying for a quantum leap forward in data center capabilities.

The situation gets more complicated with ever-increasing power tariffs, which compels the CIOs to look at every component of the IT/physical infrastructure contributing to operational expenses. Total Cost of Ownership or TCO has become the key decision-making factor to choose from among the solutions various vendors are trying to peddle to the CIO.

Dynamic changes in Load and Server refresh, and integral complexities arising from such product refreshes in terms of capacity management, reliability, and real-time monitoring of the existing ecosystem, are driving the CIOs to look at solutions which use a single dashboard for real-time insights into events not just at room-level or row-level, but at the U-level inside the racks.

Skipping Stones!

Some of the ways a CIO may tackle these reccurring issues are assigning process improvement teams which focus both on operational improvement as well as using the available but unused functionalities in the current infrastructure adds to the operational efficiency.

It is proven that effective use of technology can enhance productivity of an organization. Enhanced productivity ensures getting more out of less. Timely information availability, increased automation of business processes, cost-efficient digitization, process optimization, and presence-aware systems are just a few examples of IT initiatives that can substantially enhance cost efficiencies.

IT organizations have the responsibility for helping their businesses achieve their collaboration, virtualization, and globalization goals; and they need to find ways to achieve them while maintaining compliance, security, and scalability within their budgets.

There is a need for real-time analytics for extremely large datasets. This enables new business models, better customer service, and simply put better results.

Also, to process extremely high rates of critical data is of prime importance. This supports ingesting and processing large datasets quickly and efficiently. Companies should focus on utilizing the large repository of contents for business benefits. Because of the cloud services rollout and adoption, another trend would be in managing large quantities of content which could be geographically dispersed. The solution has to be the ability to manage very large, very scalable stores in the petabyte range.

Next in Line

Numerous trends affect today's business strategies and decisions, some affect specific functional areas of a business, while others represent broader social, technological, or competitive areas. Cloud and virtualization are no more the buzzwords. They are for real and here to stay and be adopted. Network virtualization is one of the key trends that we will witness in 2012.

They help minimize initial capex, reduce IT footprint, save power, reduce heat, earn more carbon credits, etc. The other trend is around BYOD which is slowly becoming an unstoppable force. With huge penetration of smartphones and tablets, CIOs will have to accept them as part of their network. At the same time, they have to ensure information security and security of the organization's assets.

From the data centers point of view, there is a fundamental change happening in the way you design the architecture and connect various elements without creating multiple hops. An increase in the deployment of blade servers due to a higher demand for compute capacity will also do round of talks in the coming times. The industry is also moving towards high-density rack based models to optimize the space & capacity.

Proactive and real-time monitoring & management is gaining popularity to anticipate any failure or loss in availability. It would soon be the key differentiator separating a successful operation from the mediocre ones.

CIOs will prefer integrated interoperable systems to enable speedy implementation and reduce operational costs without compromising on adaptability. 'Efficiency without compromise' or optimization of available resources would be the 'de facto' trend in the coming years.