Indian CIOs are ahead of the curve: Vinay Sinha, managing director - India Sales, AMD

Remote workforces, which largely came into being due to the COVID-19 pandemic, are here to stay for all the benefits that it offers. Organisations are embracing digital transformation like never before, which has lead IT decision-makers to opt for solutions that offer flexibility and scalability along with advanced security. In a conversation with Dataquest, Vinay Sinha, managing director - India Sales, AMD spoke about the IT infrastructure priorities for CIOs at present, data centre trends to look out for and cybersecurity challenges associated with virtualisation.

DQ: What would be some of the IT infrastructure priorities for CIOs this year?

Vinay Sinha: As we are in the midst of digital transformation, organizations are looking to empower remote workforces and deal with heavy workloads on multiple applications led by a surge of data. In line with the changing business dynamics, CIOs seek innovations that modernize the traditional datacenters, that brings more high-performance computing capabilities with improved efficiency. Additionally, advanced security features, flexibility and scalability are some of the key priorities CIOs are looking to address. Further, cost continues to be a key factor for enterprises, especially in the case of legacy organizations that have just embarked upon their digital transformation journeys. “More with less” has become the preferred choices for organizations as IT spending has become critical in a post-pandemic setting.

At AMD, we are focusing on solutions that are on top of the mind for IT decision-makers such as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, relational databases, and data analytics. Taking a closer look at the environment, we also believe that Indian CIOs are ahead of the curve, as India is home to some of the most cutting-edge IT and innovation hubs in the world.

DQ: What are some of the emerging data centre trends to watch out for?

Vinay Sinha: IDC predicts that by 2023, over 65% of the APAC GDP will be digitalized. With organizations across the globe actively coming forward to provide technical parity to workforces that are becoming hybrid by design and seeking to seamlessly service their customers, IT decision-makers are compelled to relook at their IT infrastructure.

There is an inflection coming in terms of performance. With digital transformation at the fore, several businesses have turned towards cloud, 5G, and AI. Cloud has never been so important as of today. Performance, scalability, and security are factors that are more vital than ever for the cloud.

CTOs are considering modernizing their datacenters and adopting models, to enable them to make faster, data-driven decisions, enhance cybersecurity and drive impactful business outcomes. Led by the need to gain insights from analyzing copious amounts of data quickly, while maximizing return on investments, and HPC applications, it is expected that enterprise datacenters will undergo rapid modernization.

DQ: Why must organizations focus on desktop virtualization at present?

Vinay Sinha: Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a critical enabler of today’s rapidly changing workforce. It provides remote access to key business applications and tools while maintaining company’s data security. As the percentage of remote workers increase, businesses need the capabilities to scale their IT infrastructure for their remote users, while maintaining low latency to ensure good experience. VDI brings an even richer and seamless user experience to a mobile and distributed workforce - by providing users with protected access to desktops, applications, and data from anywhere and on virtually any device.

VDI on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will be a key focus, as HCI consolidates storage, networking, and compute into one easy-to-manage system. It enables lower capital and operational expenses while boosting business agility and resilience. As businesses seek to catalyze their digitalization journeys in 2021 and beyond, we can expect more businesses to leverage on VDI.

DQ: Are there any cybersecurity challenges associated with it?

Vinay Sinha: Changing business and market conditions make data protection a top concern for organizations of every size and specialty. Technologies such as cloud computing and Internet of Things bring risk and potential vulnerabilities too along with the benefits. As the threat landscape continues to expand, cybersecurity will always remain as the fundamental requirement for modern computing. Robust security hardware and software is key to secure your data future.

Security features at the CPU and system-on-chip (SoC) level play a large role here. This is primarily owing to the changes in system and application structure, the growing importance of defining trust and limiting attack surfaces, and most importantly, the foundational role that hardware designed with security features can play. Chip-level security features are likely to become even more top-of-the-mind, as the Internet of Things distributes processing power toward edge infrastructure, where security concerns become even more critical.

Q5. What is the role played by AMD in modernizing the datacenter for the cloud and enterprises?

Vinay Sinha: At AMD, we work closely with our customers to build agile and robust IT infrastructure to cater to evolving business needs and bring performance leadership in HCI, Relational Database Management and HPC. Our commitment to the datacenter has enabled us to deliver groundbreaking performance for enterprise, cloud and HPC through the generational versions of AMD EPYC processors. Along with our ecosystem partners, we offer jointly engineered solutions that offer outstanding performance, scalability and TCO.

With the recently launched 3rdGen AMD EPYC processors, we are helping help HPC, cloud and enterprise customers do more, faster, while helping lower total cost of operations. This is the transformational value AMD is bringing to the industry and the server ecosystem. We have up to twice the workload performance over the competition in HPC , cloud  and enterprise workloads with our newest server CPUs.