The real action is at the Edge

During the Dataquest Leadership Conclave held at New Delhi’s Hyatt Regency on June 8, there was a panel discussion on “IT infrastructure 2.0, driving the growth”. The participants were Arun Karna, MD and CEO, AT&T Global Network Services India Pvt Ltd, Sanjay Chowdhry, CIO, Hamdard Laboratories, and Jasper Paul, Senior Product Manager, Site24x7.

Sukanta De, Director, Sdela Consulting, was the moderator. He said the major campuses in India are amazing, along with high-end equipment. India is a leader in software. India also has the largest number and skilled professionals in the IT sector.

Arun Karna, AT&T Global Network Services, said that the enterprise space is based on some pillars, such as data and network infrastructure, etc. IT infrastructure 2.0 can be defined by the digital approach. The outermost layer is the digital Edge. Enterprises have access to digital marketplace, etc. Flexibility and agility are provided to the enterprise architecture. The real action is at the Edge.

We have major components, such as cloud, Edge, security, IoT, 5G, etc. Cloud has emerged as the major speed enabler over the last few years. SaaS app market will grow to $200 million by 2024, doubling over 2018. Enterprise is today far more distributed. 5G and Edge are now coming together. IoT is seeing massive uptick. Today, supply chains are getting digitized.

Security is also there. The threat surface has widened because of the extended enterprise. We need to secure the end points, data and apps, have threat intelligence built in, etc. Big Data is there, and needs to be refined. We need to have more insights with AI and analytics. We need to predict better.

Sanjay Chowdhry, Hamdard, said the buzzword today is digitization. We are making organizations more digital. We need to ramp up the infrastructure. Total digitization has come upon us, and is being done, due to the pandemic. No work gets hampered, while WFH. 

We also need to have the sales force teams raising tickets online. We have moved to the e-commerce platform, as well. People can order medicines now, sitting at home. Today, it is a customer-driven world. RPA, AI, and IoT are also coming up. More productivity enhancements can be done. However, as a country, we are today lacking in data security. We need to improve that.

Jasper Paul, Senior Product Manager, Site24x7, said real-time data, cloud transformation, etc., have generated huge data. We have AI/ML to take care of the enrichment of data. If we have dashboards and collaboration management, we can take care of situations. That information is again sent to the AI model. We definitely need monitoring data. We can get valuable insights from that. Customer experiences also need to improve. We are driving the technology with Site24x7.

Arun Karna, AT&T, said that we need to go hybrid and virtual. We are now having composable infrastructure, by moulding the infrastructure to the business. Jasper Paul, Site24x7, said that containerization and serverless compute have taken over. Sanjay Chowdhry, Hamdard, said the business should drive the infrastructure.

The theme of the conclave was Let’s Transform at Scale with NeXtGen Tech and featured the 29th ICT Business Awards show.