Telecom on Hybrid Cloud: Interaction with Rajesh Awasthi

Hybrid cloud is gaining popularity across sectors and telecom is no exception. Tata Communications is making progress in cloud technology in telecom industry. In an exclusive interaction with us, Rajesh Awasthi, Associate VP, Managed Hosting & Cloud Services, Tata Communications, talks about various aspects

Can you elaborate on the current cloud-related needs of Indian enterprises?

As big data and new tech adoption is becoming increasingly prevalent on the back of digital transformation in India, enterprises are recognising the immense potential of cloud as a key driver of these new age technologies. NASSCOM predicts that India's cloud market is likely grow at 30 per cent per annum and cross USD $7 billion by 2022. And hence today, enterprises are re-prioritising to evolve in to a cloud-first company. This means that enterprises want to rebuild directly on the cloud. This is where the critical decision of choosing a private, public and hybrid cloud comes in to play and this is largely dependent on the needs of the business.

Given the industry trends, companies are tilting towards hybrid cloud as there is growing demand for agile, scalable and cost-efficient computing. The key advantage of hybrid is that it enhances the overall experience by providing the advantages of a public cloud domain along with the security of a private cloud. This approach allows greater flexibility within an organisation in the long-term as they decide on public vs private.  Another reason that more and more organisations are deploying the hybrid cloud solution is to overcome complexities existing in the traditional Information Technology environment. It allows enterprises to seamlessly augment information within the organisation without creating silos.

What capacities and solutions are being developed by the IT industry in response to these needs?

Companies, small and big alike are betting big on new technologies like AI and MLand ultimately need a robust and secure cloud. Take for instance, the growing food-tech start-ups in our country. Their strong and growing data repository needs AI, which helps in tagging and classification in the back-end. On the other hand, ML is used to train systems to identify dishes based on pictures, expand languages, words and more that customers use to obtain satisfactory results. All the data that is emerging from these technologies needs cloud support. This is just one example. However, new trends such as data-as-a-service, distributed platforms and IoT-enabled delivery models are all propelling cloud's growth in India.

Enterprises both big and small today are looking for a centralised high-performance platform, using a hosted data centre environment which then allows them to focus on their core business. To add, our solutions team worked with Lemon Tree Hotels to create a fully managed hosting and storage solution, which allowed for MPLS VPN services to work across all 10 existing hotel properties.The centralised global platform solution allowed for a uniform user-experience and consistent reporting across all hotel sites.

Where does Tata Communications see the capabilities of the Indian enterprises reaching in the next 3 years?

According to reports, India is set to lead the hybrid cloud usage and adoption with 43% of Indian enterprises estimated to adopt hybrid cloud by 2020. Hybrid Cloud will enable enterprises to have a significant impact on cost savings and operational efficiency. It will help businesses scale by integrating public cloud resources with an organisation’s existing infrastructure, resulting in new capabilities and overall reduction in costs. As enterprises lean towards an always connected and on the go digital environment, hybrid cloud will provide the required workload flexibility, boost innovation, ease of processing big data and use of cross platform IT services. Thus, it will play a critical role in ideating, planning and implementing the Digital India initiative.

Further, it will allow enterprises to scale seamlessly, expand rapidly and stay flexible without ever compromising security and will ensure a strict compliance with all regulatory and data sovereignty laws. Hybrid cloud platforms are also growing to be vital strategic drivers for small and large enterprises to improve their ROI significantly because of the efficiency and flexibility it brings.We are happy to also share that, Tata Communications was awarded the 2019 Global Product Line Strategy Leadership Award for Global Hybrid Cloud Services. The award recognizes us a leader in creating a robust, global hybrid cloud offering. Today, our IZO cloud enablement platform acts as a one-stop-shop for customers looking to pursue more deliberate multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies to balance performance and cost while meeting the specific needs of applications and workloads.

To enable enterprises to transform their legacy network to a customised and secure multi-cloud native hybrid network, we recently also extended our partnership with Cisco. The combination of Tata Communications’ IZO™ cloud enablement platform and Cisco SD-WAN is a fully-managed, global solution that gives businesses greater control over their digital infrastructure, the ability to securely connect any user to any application location and provides the assurance of application performance needed to support successful digital transformation.