Been There...Done That

When rhetoric and sales pitch ends, the real test of technolgy begins at the enterprise shop floor. CIOs often at times were caught in the technology maze, and what works for company-A, might not work for company-B. But by looking at how other companies have handled key tech deployments gives immense insights and learnings for them to take home some of the best of breed practices that may help in tackling some of the intricate IT issues in their own organizations. Looking at the tech landscape right now there are many trends that are gaining top of the mind recall among IT decision makers. Here, three technologists share their insights on BYOD and Unified Storage.

BYOD on a Controlled Environment

 

 

Jayantha Prabhu
chief technology officer, Essar Services India

 

 

BYOD comes with many caveats but Essar services has created a balanced BYOD regime. The BYOD program in our organization is not applicable for all smartphones or tablets, rather it's available only for enterprise ready devices. For instance only Samsung certified ‘enterprise ready' devices right now are under our BYOD. For BYOD to work seamlessly, it is very important to make sure that backend infrastructure is ready to take on devices that are running on newer platforms. A detailed study regarding the selection of proper solution and architecture design, issues relating to integration is a must. This approach made us reduce project cost and implementation times. BYOD is much more than device management. Our initial challenges were ones like managing mobile devices that access resources like email with risk acceptance. We soon learned, and our requirements matured from a general device management to a more sophisticated ‘on device' data protection, enterprise app, secure connectivity, data and voice usage visibility, etc. We worked towards it and developed our back-end infrastructure to have these enhanced functionality. In our current setup, we are utilizing both BlackBerry Enterprise 5.0.3 and Express servers 5.0.2. Users are provisioned on either of the servers based on their role.

Beyond the tech, one of the key success criterion is the senior management commitment and support. This has helped us immensely to drive the BYOD initiative across the group. Top priorities for us are data security, building enterprise app on SUP platform, and encourage its usage to bring in efficiency and increase productivity in business.

 

One Storage...One View

 

KP Sunny
CIO, Federal Bank

 

 

Storage from multiple vendors can provide choice of technologies, but on the flip side, it calls for dedicated people to manage these devices. Moreover the fact that ageing storage devcies will have wealth of data that cannot be ignored, despite they being legacy by technology. Clearly all data is important when it comes for getting insights out of it. In this backdrop, a virtualized environment will be able to accommodate such dissimilar storage sub-system and ushers in transparency. In addition, it also provides sufficient improvement in the data retrieval process depending on the capability of the virtualization header. Another important advantage is data tiering. We are also on our journey towards a unified storage system.

As a bank, we have to store multiple forms of data in file format as well as the transactional data. We have been accommodating these type of data in multiple storage sub-systems. To maintain such systems, we have to put in large effort which prove to be costly. Retaining such resources is another big challenge. As we move along, consolidation of the storage through virtualization will lead us to a unified storage system.

As far as Federal Bank is concerned, we look for any type of information that is available about a customer. It might be a transaction data, an email by the customer, a scanned KYC document which was acquired during the account opening process or it can be the video footage that was captured during a visit to the ATM counter. Storage space is required for such large volume of information which might be relevant for a deep dive into the behavior of a customer. Looking at the type of file formats that are required to store these information, a unified storage will be the final destination towards which we will be moving to.

 

Panacea Through Unified Storage

 

 

Subhashini Ramakrishnan
chief technology manager, Dax Networks

 

 

 

Be it server or user storage, the move towards centralized storage management is an integral part of infrastructural requirement for most IT departments today. A unified storage system consolidates file based and block based access in a single storage platform, and supports IP based SAN (iSCSI) and NAS (Network Attached Storage), thus meeting storage needs for servers and users, respectively. The all-in-one capabliteis of a unfied storage device satisfies a range of storage needs and processes. Moreover with provision for RAID and replication, the box offers high availability and reliability.

The premise of the dedicated unified storage platform is that it is inexpensive, easy to use, and fast for file sharing. The overall impact on TCO is definitely notable as the all-in-one box concept simplifies manageability by reducing operational costs. High availability and reliability of data is a major value-add to your business' data. Most importantly, convenience of scalability as your data continues to grow, is an important factor to be considered while you make your IT investments.

It is very important that one picks the right storage solution for your network's needs. To be able to team-up with a solution provider who can precisely understand and foresee your storage requirements in order to suggest and implement the optimal solution is critical. The first step to this is to ensure clear analysis of your storage requirement including future expansion.

By making a good initial storage investment, one can evade most glitches in your company's storage infrastructure and ensure smooth functioning for a couple of years ahead.