By Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President & Managing Director, Veeam India & SAARC
Early this year, the global pandemic triggered the health and humanitarian crisis along with making businesses face unprecedented challenges in the form increased uncertainty, dented customer confidence, compliance issues and more importantly effective utilization of human resources. Fast forward to the year end, technology led business continuity and recovery plans put together by leaders have started bearing fruit in the form of encouraging business outlook, stronger liquidity, business momentum and enhanced customer confidence. In the backdrop of the positive business momentum, here are the key technology & trends predictions for 2021
Remote collaboration: Protecting critical organization information will be a top priority for CIOs as millions of employees across metro cities and a large migrant employee base in tier 2 & 3 cities continue to operate remotely across distributed environments. User data from personal PCs, notebooks, smartphones and Software as a Service (SaaS) business models from technology tools like Office 365, sharepoint will continue to witness exponential growth and will result in heightened demand for data management and security solutions.
CISO in the spotlight: Businesses will continue to sharpen focus on increasing business resiliency as organizations prepare for the new normal in 2021. To protect an organization’s identity, the role of chief information security officer(CISO) will gain added prominence and play a vital role in influencing important business decisions. From predicting potential loop holes in IT security framework to fending mission critical processes and data from sophisticated cyber attacks, CISOs will have their task cut out.
Digital India: India’s vision to transform into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy will receive further impetus as the public and private sectors will further accelerate adoption of digital services. Government services like e-passport seva, Aadhar card, GST to smart city, infrastructure are expected to receive increased spending on digitization of services for inclusive growth. Additionally, 5G network will act as catalyst to accelerate the Digital India vision and will demand a comprehensive data management strategy for accommodating data proliferation
Cloud service providers: As more customers continue to move workloads to cloud, cloud service providers will have to guard against any outages due to sudden spike in workloads. The key will be to protect and quickly migrate workloads to other infrastructure and retain customer confidence by building robust frameworks.
Key Sectors:
Financial Services and Fintech: Digital banking will further accelerate as traditional Financial services sector and Fintech players will continue to lead the adoption of digital services. Data management will be at the heart of these digitized services to provide uninterrupted services like customer onboarding, digital KYC, insurance management etc. Increasingly banking sector will migrate workloads to cloud environment to meet the growing demand. Additionally, evolving ransomware attacks will pose serious threats thereby making retrieval of data difficult.
Healthcare & Pharma: The highly regulated healthcare and pharma will elevate their efforts in protecting end point customer and business data. Additionally, enhanced patient care services will drive the need for contactless and touchless healthcare services. Hence, maintaining compliance and regulation standards will take centre stage as Indian Healthcare & Pharma companies will focus on digitization to prepare for global business opportunities.
FMCG: Like e-commerce players are driving online retail services, FMCG players will significantly move their business operations on digital platforms to meet growing customer expectations in delivering any products & services online. From maturing of supply chain to ordering straight from the manufacturer will receive impetus.
This year, COVID 19 acted as a catalyst to accelerate the digitization process. More digital transformation was adopted in the past few months as compared to the previous years. What will truly define success in 2021 is effective management and protection of exponential data growth across virtual, physical and cloud environments.