Technology trends driving big shift in enterprises

Shailendra Ravi

The evolution of technology has been the key milestones in the growth of industries across verticals. It has covered a long journey from main frames to server PC and now it’s heading to the third platform that will be dominated by pervasive mobile devices, social, cloud and big data analytics (SMAC) and Internet of Things (IoT).

The disruptive trends are redefining the applications and technology we use. Internet of Things, cloud computing and mobility are among the most potential disruptive technology trend that is expected to make IT organization responsive and productive than ever. Mobility is important for business as it improves employee communication, enhances out-of-office productivity and enriches customer engagement. Cloud computing is expected to help in economic advantages, speed, agility, flexibility, infinite elasticity and innovation.

The related technology trends that have risen to prominence today include Hybrid Cloud, Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC), Flash, Hadoop, Next Generation Application Frameworks and Security.

Hybrid Cloud: Cloud is a reality in India today, and companies are increasingly exploring the adoption of hybrid cloud. EMC Survey shows 31% of Indian IT decision makers have created hybrid cloud. Hybrid Cloud adoption is the best way of optimizing costs, bringing the efficiencies in the IT organization through self-service & automation and delivering service with the highest elasticity and, offering the economical transparency for its end users. It brings the best of private and public clouds together, minus the disadvantages. The technology is therefore relevant and useful across sectors and market segments.

Application based cloud is yet another platform that can be deployed in public, private and hybrid cloud. The cornerstone of this concept is the use of developer framework that maximize the productivity of code production by hiding the lower level complexities. It often uses intelligent message queuing and data fabric technologies for scale and ultra-low-latency data operations.

Software Defined Datacenters: With Cloud, mobile, social and information creating a whole host of new workloads that will need servers to provision the compute capacity, SDDC will be the foundation of next generation of cloud computing and cloud-based services. SDDC provides tremendous benefits for all enterprises that struggle with data center management, especially those with limited IT resources. The most important is that it dramatically simplifies the process and increases the speed of appropriating and provisioning networking, server and storage resources, enabling an organization to become more flexible, agile and responsive to customers. With automated policy-based provisioning, application deployment can occur in minutes—or even seconds. Virtualized infrastructure is more cost-effective.

Flash: Among component technologies, Flash based storage is rapidly and violently disrupting the status quo. Earlier the early integration of SSDs into a storage strategy was all about accelerating specific workloads, followed by getting a better overall balance of price/performance in external storage arrays. However, as flash is becoming more pervasive, optimized, and affordable, new applications and new storage software stacks are also emerging that are built “ground-up” for solid-state. Thus today, flash storage has value in a number of implementations within and across the storage infrastructure—be that in storage systems themselves, in servers, or in the network. Even the small percentage of flash in almost any location in the storage hierarchy, and using it in combination with some intelligent management software (optimization code in an AFA, and caching or tiering in hybrid arrays) will almost always yield both performance and financial improvements.

Hadoop: The outburst of massive amounts of unstructured data from various sources like social media, mobile sensors and Internet of Things devices has made Hadoop important for most enterprises. Over the years it has grown into an important platform for Big Data Analytics due to its flexibility, reliability, scalability, and ability to suit the needs of developers, web startups, and enterprise IT. Hadoop gives the enterprises an effective business insights by eliminating data silos, reducing the need to migrate between storage and analytics software, providing businesses with a more holistic view of their customers and operations.

Next Generation Application Frameworks: With the emergence of next-gen application frameworks such as Spring, application development can be simplified. They bring with them flexibility, integration capabilities, cloud readiness and even enable social interaction by interfacing with all social networks. These frameworks help address the next generation applications on the “third platform” (as it is referred to by IDC) which are cloud and mobile native.

Security: With SMAC dominating the IT industry, data security and compliance has also become a concern for enterprises. There is an urgent requirement to have a security solution that helps security analysts detect and investigate threats. The combination of big data security data collection, management and analytics capabilities with full networks and long-based visibility and automated threat intelligence, helps security analysts to better detect, investigate, and also assist them understand threats they could often not easily see or understand before. Considering the danger and damage that security breaches pose, Indian organizations have become extremely concerned about deploying the right security solutions.

The new developments in the technology space are all set to revolutionize the way we do business by increased efficiency and productivity while unearthing new opportunities for organizations.

The author is senior director, Emerging Markets, EMC India Center of Excellence