‘Data is Equal to Dollar’

Are we seeing enterprises taking data protection more seriously? What are the significant trends you see across industries, some being more sensitive to data?

Every industry is very sensitive to data. They have understood that data is equal to dollar. In India IT has been the first one to adopt it as they deal with the widest set of customers. Banking and finance industry is also looking at cloud infrastructures. They may not necessarily look at a public infrastructure but they look at a private infrastructure to manage their entire efficiency and cost. And Telecom is another segment we are surely looking at.

We have been seeing a lot of focus and uptake in terms of looking at new technologies, especially related to data backup and recovery. Enterprises are looking at how to optimize storage usage, how to efficiently manage storage space. The second thing they are looking at is that they would have probably bought a data backup and recovery software three years back, but the data size has probably grown by 2X or 3X by this time. The backup window has shrunk. ‘'Is my backup software efficient enough to manage this sort of situation where data size has grown and window has shrunk?'' That's what they are looking at. Thirdly, they are looking at an infrastructure for backup and recovery which is purely self- automated. They are looking at pretty comprehensive solutions that are self run and easy to manage. These are three things we are seeing from a customer side.

What are the key issues in data protection?

Enterprises are facing the challenge of growth of data. With that comes the challenge of what all data to store, what to use and what to discard. This is a big challenge across industries and different geographies like Japan, China, Australia. When we talk to a CIO, the biggest challenge he is facing today is the uncontrolled growth of data. The most important thing is how you classify data. Lot of people talk about it, but we at Dell, when we meet customers we talk about how we can assist them in classifying data. We primarily categorize data into three categories. Mission critical data is the data that has a direct impact on business. If you lose that data it will impact your business. Second category is called business critical data and third is called archive, which you would usually keep for compliance or government regulations etc.

Second challenge is in terms of security. Who is accessing what? What all websites users are visiting? What sort of data breach might happen? What sort of threats an organization is facing? The nature of the threats is changing and we can't predict what sort of threat is coming.

Adoption of cloud is another trend- adoption of cloud in all facets of the infrastructure. It is no longer limited to just the application, it has got extended to the hardware, it has also structured on the data back up and recovery. Enterprises are asking "Can I have a private cloud I can backup my data into? Can I have a Data Recovery of the backup data into a public cloud like an Amazon or Rackspace." Cloud has become a significant discussion point with the CIOs.

The other important trend is Bring your device, which is a common underlined theme across all organizations. Everybody brings their own set of devices, everybody has multiple devices, everybody has a Wi-Fi connectivity, and everything is connected to the corporate resources. Again security becomes a big threat. How do you manage those devices? How do you ensure that the devices are up to date with the organizational policies and guidelines?
From Dell software perspective we are quite well positioned in the sense that we cover all these portfolios.

 

After some critical changes, what is happening at Dell currently?
Dell is going through a significant phase of transformation as Michael Dell would say. We turned 30 years. It is been a great journey for Dell from what it was to what it is now. I think Dell as an organization is very well positioned now as we have a complete set of solutions spanning across end users, enterprise side solutions and services. And the most important thing about our solutions is that they are non intrusive. We sit down with the customer and understand how the infrastructure is and how do we make it more agile. It is a great time for Dell to take advantage about the trends I talked about. Dell has a solution set to take advantage of that. I think it's a great time to be at Dell.

What about specific initiatives relating to data security?
Good thing about all our solutions is that all these have been there for a long time. There are over 100,000 customers globally using these products and solutions. The products are very well mature and defined for the markets they operate in. For example, we have a backup software solution called NetVault which is for traditional backup. It span across the mid market to the large enterprise space. Then we have a solution set called AppAssure which is predominantly for managing mission critical applications. AppAssure has a feature called Assure Recovery, which means when its backing up the data, it will check for data integrity. If there is an issue, it will flag it off to the administrator at that point that there might be a challenge in recovery of that data. That's a very unique feature with a data backup software. I doubt if anyone has it. That's what the customer wants. The challenge is the recovery, it is not with the backup. Backup happens automatically with every backup and recovery software. But the customer is buying the product for the recovery.

How important is the Indian market going to be? And what will be the channel strategy going ahead?
From an India perspective, we have been in business in India for 10-12 years. What we are seeing from a business uptake perspective is public sector, retail, IT and ITES are primary adopters of our solutions. That's where we see the major market. From an industry perspective, the average growth is around 12-14 percent, we are growing at a much higher rate. India business is a very bullish business for us.
Dell has become highly channel focused now. Channels typically contribute around 80-90 percent of our business today. That's very significant and we continue to invest in channels. We run market development funds, we run incentive programs and training programs for channel partners. So for us channel is going to be our DNA and is going to be a very integral part of our business.