Data centres, be it on-prem or on-cloud, have been engines of the digital transformation journey of organisations. At times, it’s considered that deploying physical data centres or adoption of cloud is the first step to digitalisation. In a brief interaction with Express Computer at the Technology Senate 2023, Navin Nathani, General Manager & Head IT – Transformation and Value Creation, Aditya Birla Group, Hindalco Industries, shares his vantage points on data centre technology and cloud adoption. Also, he speaks about the changing industry trends, challenges, sustainable development, and cybersecurity concerns.
Emphasising on cloud adoption at a massive scale, Nathani says, “We’ve been hearing that cloud adoption is at its peak now. The popularity of the cloud is probably because of the efficiency and flexibility it offers.”
Looking at the industry trends, technology is growing by the day and so are data centre technologies. “Data centres are getting on to the next level of the transformation journey. Nowadays, we also have the concept of Green Data Centres wherein sustainable development has been given much emphasis,” he mentions while addressing environmental concerns due to high amounts of heat dissipation from data centres. Nathani further sheds light on how cloud adoption can reduce the e-waste generated while providing companies flexible and agile workload management. “So, companies are stepping up to adopt green data centres and also leverage solar power to add to the sustainability factor,” he adds.
After highlighting the upsides of data centre technologies and the significance of cloud adoption, he also underlines certain challenges that enterprises often face while adopting cloud technologies.
Nathani says, “One of the biggest challenges in cloud adoption is to figure out the need to move the workloads and what workloads to move. I believe, companies should not adopt cloud just because many or most firms are doing so, but, should undergo thorough due diligence and understand their requirements and then induce any technology to their system.”
Further, he mentions that though cloud opens up a more agile and flexible way to manage workloads and applications, enterprises need to set a few guidelines or best practices to ascertain what applications should be moved to cloud and what should be kept on-prem. Moreover, such a practice could also help in keeping the data secure from cyber attacks or breaches.
In a nutshell, data centres have definitely been crucial in kickstarting the digital transformation journey of enterprises. Moreover, during the pandemic times, it helped strengthen the backend IT infrastructure that enabled the workforce to work remotely. Thus, keeping the enterprises afloat during troubled times. Yes, security is probably an issue that most companies are concerned about while moving to the cloud. However, proper management of workloads and a strong cybersecurity framework can be of great help.
[The above-mentioned are the speaker's personal views and does not represent the organisation's perspective]