By Dileep Nadimpalli, Senior Research Manager, IDC

Businesses are accelerating the adoption of new-age technologies, such as edge computing, hybrid multicloud, AI, generative AI (GenAI), digital twins, and so forth, to address the dynamically changing customer demands. All these technologies must be integrated and hyperconnected to derive actionable business outcomes, which require a distributed IT architecture posing multiple management, scale, and security complexities. Enterprises are in a flux trying to balance the rising new-age technology demands around agility, scalability, performance, and connectivity to ensure seamless experience with data security requirements and sustainability goals. Data security assumes center stage, given that all intelligence is within the data, and hence must be safeguarded from continuous attacks.

With the advent of digital technologies, such as AI, hybrid cloud, and so forth, the industry has witnessed an exponential increase in data growth from distributed environments and a diverse set of endpoints. As per IDC's Global DataSphere Forecast, 2023–2027, "The amount of data generated worldwide over the next five years is expected to be at least 2.2x the amount of data generated over the past 10 years." With the influx of data from various sources, there is an urgent need for enterprises to implement a robust storage platform that balances intelligent data management, cyber-resiliency, and sustainability.

Proactive Data Management with AI Integration

To efficiently manage and protect vast amounts of data, organizations are considering new-age data platforms with AI-based capabilities to detect and predict trends and anomalies to be proactive in managing data and detecting threats. This implies that AIOps capabilities must be tightly embedded into all the storage functions for intelligent provisioning, capacity planning, migration, encryption, threat detection, data recovery, and so forth for efficiency, ease of use, and better customer experience.

Cyber Resiliency against Escalating Threats

As per IDC Enterprise Infrastructure Survey 2023, the biggest challenge India organizations are facing today is "managing cybersecurity risks and data governance." Gone are the days when organizations used to experience cyberattacks and ransomware occasionally. Now, the frequency and complexity of these threats have increased multifold. Cyberattackers leveled up the game by leveraging AI tools to devise sophisticated threats, making it even more difficult for enterprises to safeguard and protect their data. Therefore, organizations are forced to not only adopt a cyber-resilient IT infrastructure but also conduct regular threat assessments, take necessary checkpoints on a continuous basis to proactively prevent cyberattacks, and have a near-real-time recovery plan in the event of an attack. It is now imperative to maintain sane copies of data to revert to, in case of security breaches such as ransomware attacks.

Power Efficiencies to Drive Sustainability

Further, with data growth there’s been a significant uptake of data hungry workloads such as HPC, AI/ML, IoT, etc., that consume multiple Petabytes of data, thereby burning through substantial energy for its upkeep. However, given the growing concerns around environment conservation and power consumption costs, it is not sustainable to have both data and energy consumption grow at the same pace. Due to such majorly data-driven workloads, average power densities per rack grew from 5kW to 20kW mainly driven by the need for larger amounts of data storage. This not only requires additional focus on reducing energy consumption and monitoring in the data center, but it also emphasizes the need for strong data-reduction capabilities within storage architectures without compromising on performance. Enterprises are therefore incented to focus on sustainability to meet increasing storage capacity demands and optimizing energy usage to reduce environmental impact. As per IDC Enterprise Infrastructure survey 2023, close to 38% of the Indian enterprises mentioned that sustainability is one of the key criteria for infrastructure deployments decisions. This clearly implies that enterprises must consider sustainable infrastructure that reduces carbon footprint by means of innovative power efficiency and data reduction technologies.

Partner of Choice: Right Technology Partner makes the Difference.

It is extremely critical for organizations to carefully evaluate current requirements and future infrastructure demands before finalizing a technology vendor. Enterprises cannot just look at the speeds and feeds which is now table stakes but also focus on cyber resiliency, automation, sustainability, and hybrid multi-cloud data management driven by AI as key elements while selecting a technology vendor.

With data at the center stage of all intelligence, it is critical to safeguard data from ever-increasing and complex cyber threat landscape. Enterprises understand that there is no security solution which can ensure 100% data protection, and hence it is imperative to consider vendors that deploy a holistic cyber resiliency approach which uses AI/ML techniques to proactively detect anomalies, data breaches and ensures data recovery in near-real time. For Instance, IBM Storage FlashSystem powered with IBM FlashCore modules is embedded with “Inline ransomware detection” within their storage controllers that uses AI/ML capabilities to monitor and detect anomalies that resemble ransomware behaviour in near real-time. These enterprise grade storage controllers integrate with IBM Storage Insights platform which provides AIOps capabilities and enables cyber resiliency via IBM Storage Defender integration.

Sustainability is also emerging as one of the key business imperatives among Indian organizations, but they lack experience and knowledge in achieving sustainability objectives. Enterprises depend on technology vendors to help them drive sustainability goals; hence it’s essential that such vendors have designed their infrastructure solutions bearing in mind the importance of sustainability and energy efficiency. For Instance, IBM Storage FlashSystem with its high-density form factor and capabilities to offload tasks such as compression, decompression, meta data management, etc., from controllers to the flash drives which allows data reduction, thereby reducing overall power consumption of the data center, without compromising on performance.

Conclusion

The need for digitalization is a must for every enterprise but addressing data management, data resiliency, data security and environmental sustainability due to increasing border-less digital landscape is the key challenge. Organizations should not directly get involved in standalone technology and product deployment, rather should assess existing IT landscape, and identify the potential gaps. Businesses that fail to do so will eventually settle for inadequate cyber resiliency solutions which might cause data breaches, resulting in financial loss and damage to the organization’s reputation. Hence, selecting the right technology and deployment partner that addresses all these requirements in a holistic fashion is critical to survive and thrive in this digital era.

Dileep Nadimpalli, Senior Research Manager, IDC