yotta, Author at Yotta

Banking on Data – Securely and Reliably

Posted on April 21, 2021October 4, 2022 by yotta

Digital payments and online commerce have been on the rise for many years; however, with the recent pandemic, this has only fast-tracked. With the increase in transactions, there is an increase in the data. Along with conventional banks, there are neo banks, fintech companies, and payment banks joining the ecosystem. With so many stakeholders involved, and enormous data generated, the Reserve Bank of India in 2018 came with a circular that required the storage of payment system data to be in the country. Additionally, the central government has drafted the personal data protection policy to protect consumers’ interests and safeguard their personal data.

These data regulations provide privileges to customers; however, at the same time, banks and financial institutions need to adhere to more regulatory obligations. Especially, International banks that process the payments data in their country of origin or at data centers that are out of India. While the storage or processing of personal and sensitive data can be done out of India, a mirror copy of the same must be maintained here in India. Additionally, there needs more clarity on what constitutes critical personal data. And this data, labelled as critical and personal, cannot be processed or stored outside India.

If data is the new oil, data centers are the bunkers that secure that oil

With data consumption on the rise, India is witnessing a surge in investments in data centers. While these investments depict the interest of players in the market, the actual realisation of these data centers will take several years, if not many.

So, can International banks or the BFSI industry or foreign companies till then avoid these laws?

While this has been a topic of debate and everyone has their viewpoints, the sooner banks set up their local data storage and processing facilities, the better equipped they would be to scale and handle new customers. Data storage and processing at such a large scale can only be achieved at a third-party data center. Having said this, building or maintaining captive data centers is both time consuming and a costly affair.

How do banks evaluate their colocation needs?

Latency for financial institutions is of prime importance. A moment lost can cost a bank a fortune. Moreover, with repeated downtimes, banks can lose customers faith and subsequently, their business. At the same time, security and meeting compliance requirements is another criterion that banks must evaluate.

Below we outline the seven factors that a bank should consider before making a move to an MTDC

Uptime Institute (UTI) Tier IV Certification – This certification is the epitome of quality. A UTI Tier IV certification assures you of the highest quality and infrastructure standards aligned with international best practices. Built on the concept of redundancy and reliability, a UTI Tier IV data center operates in case of severe disruptions, providing business continuity for your mission-critical operations. For instance, last year, during cyclone Nisarga, Yotta NM1 functioned without any outage; besides this, it was also operational during the famous Mumbai power outage.

Low-latency connectivity – Always prefer data centers with captive fiber connections. Our data center Yotta NM1 is well connected to the world via two dedicated fiber paths, each coming in from Mumbai-Pune Expressway and Old Mumbai-Pune Highway. All major telecom operators are connected with Yotta NM1, ensuring redundant, low-latency, and fail-safe connectivity.

Security and Compliance – This is one of the most critical aspects. Being regulated by various government and semi-government bodies, banks need to meet their compliance and regulatory requirements. Failure to meet these can result in security compromise and financial losses. Yotta meets critical compliance standards like the PCI: DSS 3, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, OPEN IX-DC OIX-2, ISO 9001:2015, ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018, ISO/IEC 27018:2019, and more. Additionally, it also offers robust physical security with industry firsts like Narcotics and Chemical detector, Authorised Key Management System for racks, and more.

Scalable – It makes no sense to work with a colocation provider that can only meet your current requirements. Your business is here to stay and grow. With this growth, you need scalability at the same site for a more seamless transition in the future. And for this, do not just take our word; we recently were honoured with the Innovation in Scalable Banking Infrastructure Award by The Economic Times.

Growing Storage – As with any business, the storage demand of banks is also growing. Banks are generating new data, thanks to online banking and other e-facilities. These data need to be stored, processed, and analysed reliably and securely. It is these data centers that provide a robust and reliable storage solution for these unstructured data. Besides, the cloud’s scalability also makes it easy for banks to access this 24x7x365, irrespective of the circumstances.

Location Advantage – The most ignored factor in selecting the co-location provider. A data center present amidst the commercial and residential hubs is more prone to disruption than a remote location far from the city’s hustle-bustle. Simultaneously, especially for International banks, data centers located in SEZ deliver an added advantage in terms of tax benefits, exemption from GST, Forex billing, and more.

Comprehensive services – An added advantage that banks can derive from the co-location partner where they can offer IT management, security, and other cloud-based applications on As-a-Service model. For instance, the latest Reserve Bank of India (Digital Payment Security Controls) directions, 2021, spells out the need for Fraud Risk Management amongst others. At Yotta, we offer Banking Compliance-as-a-Service that includes Anti-Money laundering solution and Reconciliation & Settlement System on cloud, that is scalable and offers complete risk management compliance solution.

Many banks are moving away from captive data centers to third-party co-location providers. The benefits are enormous. At Yotta, thanks to our state-of-the-art infrastructure, like Building Management System (BMS), you can remotely monitor your set-up without stepping out. Besides, in case of urgent deployments or emergency maintenance, teams can utilise our on-premise stay facilities at our comfortable service apartments.

Still not convinced. Schedule a tour of our data center and experience yourself.

Top 5 Predictions that will shape up Indian Data Center Industry in 2021

Posted on February 24, 2021October 4, 2022 by yotta

Here are some of the key trends that will shape up the Indian data center industry in 2021:

As the world is gearing up for the massive COVID-19 vaccination drive, the power of digital can be seen. India is one of the few countries to roll out the vaccination programme successfully. This has been made possible only with the help of underlying robust digital infrastructure that the government created for inventory management and delivery mechanism of vaccine for the last-mile connectivity. Besides, the converging technologies like cloud, mobility, analytics, robotics, and AI/ML helped in better planning and testing several innovative approaches to vaccination drive.

It is understood that the data generated out of this massive exercise will be on the cloud, which in turn, will reside on data centers – be it government or private, or a third party like Yotta. As a data hub, data center providers are ensuring the security of the data hosted and at the same time, providing accessibility without any hurdles. Looking at the criticality and significance, one can say that the need for digital infrastructure and data centers has increased by leaps and bounds.

Similarly, this year business organisations will focus on recovering from the pandemic. And in this process, the focus will be on digital investments that can drive their transformation strategies. As the enterprises are going to fast-track their digital transformation journey to gain competitive advantage, the role of data centers will become even more important.

Against this backdrop, we have outlined some of the key trends that will shape up the Indian data center industry in 2021:

The growing demand for robust digital infrastructure & future-ready hyperscale data centers, to transform the country into a digitally empowered society. The government’s push for data localisation and introduction of Data Protection Bill indicate that India will need a big dose of infrastructure in terms of data centers. According to JLL Report on (re)Imagine Data Centers: Running India’s Digital Economy, India’s data center industry provided crucial support and boost to the digital economy during the pandemic. The report also suggests that the country’s data center capacity is expected to grow from 375 MW in H1 2020 to 1,078 MW by 2025, registering a CAGR of 21%; and higher commitments from hyperscalers and lower availability of large data center spaces expected to drive expansions by existing and new data center operators. Even the emerging use cases around AI, ML, IoT will accelerate the demand for robust digital infrastructure. With the rise in data volume and growing digital consumption, multi-tenant, hyperscale data centers will become a must.

Public Cloud continues to ignite end-to-end digital transformation, delivering on its promise of scalability, cost-efficiency, and resiliency. To drive innovative and profitable business models, enterprises must align their business transformation efforts with the adoption of the public cloud platform. This is indicated by the results of the India Enterprise Cloud Survey 2020 as well, which suggests that across infrastructure, software, and platform, a clear shift is happening towards public cloud. And going forward, more and more workloads, including mission-critical enterprise applications, are being planned to be migrated to the public cloud. Hence, it will not be possible for most organisations to transform their businesses digitally unless they move some of their IT applications and infrastructure into the public cloud.

Operating business in Everything-as-a-Service economy, maintaining a profitable, cost-efficient business without making long term CAPEX and OPEX commitment. With more and more services are being delivered on cloud, providing virtual access to everything and digital technologies like AI/ML and IoT playing a critical role in building these services, Everything-as-a-Service will gradually become an imperative for a truly digital-native enterprise. Consuming everything on ‘As-a-Service’ model will make sure that businesses are not only scaling up or down faster but also delivering new and innovative services and seamless customer experiences. At the same time, the infrastructure providers need to partner with as many SMEs, SOHOs, and Start-Ups possible, and convert their services into ‘As-a-Service’ model so that businesses can focus on their core expertise and handle their IT needs on a cost-efficient basis.

AI-powered tools & applications to drive autonomous systems in data centers, ensuring reliability, high availability, redundancy, and resiliency. More and more data center operators will deploy automation tools within their premises for monitoring purpose. Intelligent monitoring systems and automation solutions are driven by AI will help create smart data centers offering features like remote operating system installation, intelligent metrics, firmware updates, network, storage configuration, etc. AI/ML technology will also be used to make data centers operationally and economically viable by aiding data center management with cooling, increasing energy efficiency, failure or operational bottlenecks predictions as well as helping with cybersecurity.

Renewed focus on energy consumption & efficiency, adopting green power, improving efficiencies, and reducing operating costs. For the data center industry, on-site power generation using renewable energy sources like solar, natural gas, and wind or offsetting their carbon use will become more important. This will make the data center service providers self-reliant in their power needs and offer the customers considerable savings on power tariff. It is imperative for the data center operators to make commitments to achieve carbon neutrality, and in this endeavour, they need to reduce their digital infrastructure carbon footprints. Besides, they will look to implement more energy-efficient cooling systems, servers, power supplies, and optimise power management. Datacenter players need to constantly find ways to use energy efficiently to pass on those savings to their customers.

By now, it is evident that without the cloud, mobility, security solutions, or collaboration tools, businesses could not have implemented remote working model and maintained business continuity. And to thrive in the post-pandemic world, the enterprises will continue their spend on cloud platforms and other digital technologies. This growing adoption of the technology-driven business model means the demand for multi-tenant, hyperscale data centers will soar high, opening a plethora of opportunities for both domestic and international data center operators.

Source: http://bwcio.businessworld.in/article/Top-5-Predictions-that-will-shape-up-Indian-Data-Center-Industry-in-2021/17-02-2021-378511/

Digital Resilience in Banking Industry: Do not let downtime have the upper hand

Posted on January 6, 2021October 6, 2022 by yotta

The digital revolution has picked up a faster pace since the Covid-19 outbreak and data has become the most valuable commodity. The potential threat of downtime is keeping enterprises on their toes as it can jeopardize their goodwill and market reputation and have a long-lasting impact on revenue, productivity, and overall customer experience. A disruption like this can even pose a threat to their existence.

However, despite being informed and aware of the consequences of the downtime, we keep hearing about incidents across the globe where power or IT outages have wreaked havoc on organisations. And it is not a new phenomenon. These kinds of incidents have been taking place over a decade now. But the most surprising part is that the industries like BFSI, who are the flag-bearers of digital transformation, have also been the downtime victims.

A case in point here is India’s leading private sector bank, which recently suffered an unexpected power outage at its primary data center. It impacted several of its services for a few hours leading to a string of unhappy customers and the loss of millions in revenue, thereby affecting its brand reputation. And this was not the first time – the bank faced outages in 2018 and 2019 as well. In December 2019, technical glitches in one of the bank’s data center affected its digital banking transactions.

Mitigating the risk of downtime

Such disruptions in the digital operations of the leading bank of the country rightly point towards the enterprise segment’s lack of preparedness in case of downtime. The banking industry has a lot of catching up to do on the technological front.

Indian banks’ digital transformation exercise gained momentum during the current unprecedented situation. Thanks to the scalable data center infrastructure being the backbone of their operations, all-digital banking channels have been open for customers in these times of uncertainty. Banks certainly realise the critical role played by data centers that not only help accelerate their digitalisation journey and power their mission-critical facilities but also keeps them functional and boost digital engagement with customers (the foundation of customer experience starts with the data center).

As data centers are essential for the Indian banking industry to remain resilient, banks need to strategically look at them to continue innovating without facing any downtime. For instance, a short power flick in a data center can bring down the entire banking system for at least a couple of hours. Hence, apart from making increased technology investment, banks need to plan to mitigate against all kinds of risks.

The results of the Uptime Institute Annual Data Center survey indicates that outages are becoming more damaging and expensive. A single outage can cost over $1 million and power failures, which impact everything on-site and can cause knock-on effects, are the most likely cause of major outages.

The right colocation partner can make all the difference

It is a known fact that data centers are extremely demanding and complex infrastructure to manage. At the same time, enterprises understand the inherent risks of a power outage. Hence, they are gradually moving away from a captive setup to third-party data centers as part of the risk mitigation strategies.

This holds for banking organisations to ensure 100% uptime of all their critical infrastructure and systems. We live in an era where there’s a strong push towards digital payments, but frequent outages won’t do good to either banks or their customers. And that’s why many Indian banks partner with multi-tenant data centers that deliver superior uptime compared to a captive data center.

While selecting a colocation partner, banks need to look at data center infrastructure and how it is designed, built, and operated to the highest global standards for resiliency and reliability. Simultaneously, the data center or colocation provider needs to assure banks of their guaranteed performance. The SLA should provide the uptime of the server racks and IT equipment. In case of a disaster or crisis, is the colocation provider equipped to ensure business continuity?

Key considerations

The focus should be on real redundancy. The ideal resilient and scalable colocation should:

Be able to sustain any single point of failure.

Be truly fault-tolerant.

Be resilient in all respects – electrical, cooling, building structure, accessibility, fiber redundancy, 48 hours of backup via generators, stay facility for client’s IT staff in case of urgent deployments.

In the light and learning from what has happened with the leading private bank or one of the largest cloud companies in not-so-distant past, and many such examples in the past, I would say that whether you are hosted at your own captive data center or a third-party data center, it need a serious audit in terms of its fault tolerance.

Additionally, it should meet the scaling needs of the bank and deliver rack and power capacity even after 25 years. It should also allow you to scale down without any capital or operational cost implications.

Hence, BFSI companies need to ensure that they host at an Uptime Institute design certified Tier IV data center. An Uptime Institute design certified Tier IV Data center can function uninterrupted in power outages and disasters. Any failure in power or cooling systems or any other parameter will not bring down a customer’s rack or any other infrastructure at any point of time, thus ensuring customers’ operational continuity. If you are hosting or planning to host at any data center, check their Uptime Institute Tier IV certification status here.

The most viable option

By now, it is evident that no organisation is immune to the threat of downtime. Coincidentally, the banking sector has been facing the wrath of these outages more than any other industry. We may agree that one-off such unexpected incidents temporarily disrupt their services or lead to other intermittent issues. Still, if the banks continue to grapple with frequent downtime, then it not only causes serious inconvenience to the customers but also exposes the weakness of their digital infrastructure and operational resilience. Besides, this puts their brand reputation at risk and increases customers’ chances of switching to other banks.

With the Indian government pushing digital transactions, the IT infrastructure that supports the digital delivery of financial services must be reliable. Looking at the significant rise in the failure rates, the industry experts are calling for greater investment by banks to overhaul their infrastructure to keep pace with the growing customer demand.

In the wake of these system outages and lapses in providing digital banking services by the country’s major banks, even Reserve Bank of India has urged banks and financial institutions to increase investments and strengthen their IT systems and technology.

In this endeavour, banks must do all the due diligence regarding reliability, redundancy, resiliency, and scalability, before selecting their digital infrastructure partner. Upon closely looking at the cause of the outage incidents that rocked the services of India’s leading banks, you realise that they can be better prepared if they have a robust supporting infrastructure. Hence, banking organisations must keep in mind that if their colocation provider is not Uptime Institute Tier IV-certified, it would not be able to deliver 100% uptime, which exposes a direct vulnerability to their business.

Why Disaster Recovery as a Service Is Integral to Business Continuity Planning

Posted on October 14, 2020October 4, 2022 by yotta

Past few months have raised some serious concerns on data protection, data management, and business continuity as enterprises adopted the digital working model. There has been significant dependency on cloud computing and data centers in the wake of COVID-19. In such times, inadvertent IT disasters like hardware failure, data corruption and power failure can cause huge problems which can lead to revenue loss for the affected business. The world has been cautious and has prepared itself for such disruptions due to excess load on servers while working remotely.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has been around for a couple of decades, but since the pandemic we have seen increased deployment of DRaaS products. A study by Technavio predicts that the DRaaS market is poised to grow by USD 27.44 billion during 2020-2024, at a CAGR of around 43% during the forecast period. DRaaS uses cloud computing to create a recovery infrastructure. In an event of system failure, it provides the company with a backup system and serves as a secondary infrastructure while the primary infrastructure undergoes repair. Today, companies are not only facing risks of cyberattacks from external threat vectors but are also going through an internal menace of over utilizing data center capacity. It is crucial to make sure that data centers are safe and suffer minimal downtime in case of a system failure. Hence, CIOs are proposing DRaaS while strategizing business continuity plan in current times, and companies are encouraged to invest in it.

Manage data centers remotely

Working with a distributed workforce for more than five months has resulted in a sudden growth in data traffic. If the company’s data center capacity is not sufficient to handle extra usage, the system could collapse causing downtime and financial loss. Companies with DRaaS can monitor their servers remotely. IT teams can scale up the data center to meet current usage patterns. DRaaS also provides data protection in real-time and replicates data, so, there will be less Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in times of failure. RPO is data loss during the collapse, reducing Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is the time it takes to recover data from the secondary infrastructure to get the data center up and running.

Protection from Cyberthreats

According to the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) report, India stands at the 11^th position globally in the number of attacks on servers hosted in the country, which amounts to 2,299,682 incidents in Q1 2020. Businesses had no to very less time to prepare themselves for remote working. Companies went under lockdown without taking safety precautions, such as VPNs and two-factor authentications. This made organizations prone to cyberattacks like ransomware and phishing attacks. DRaaS backs up data in the cloud, instead of using the company’s servers for it. This safeguards the company data and prevents data loss as well as reduces the damage caused by a cyberattack.

Efficiency in the time of a disaster

There are other alternatives for data recovery like Recovery as a Service (RaaS) or Backup as a Service (BaaS). These solutions take time to ensure data is safe and risk-free thereby, increasing the downtime for a substantial period. Whereas, DRaaS only adds a few minutes to the downtime to determine data safety. DRaaS provides a clear and predetermined plan on the next steps for the IT team in case of a system failure. DRaaS also allows companies to run multiple tests to ensure their failover plans are working properly, unlike other recovery solutions.

Automated recovery

Disaster recovery as a service is fast emerging as a popular service for backing up data and providing immediate system failover to a secondary infrastructure. DRaaS provides a much speedier, automated, and reliable recovery operation than that of an in-house data recovery plan. DRaaS service providers leverage data replication technologies, automated and orchestrated recovery, to lay out aggressive recovery point and recovery time objectives. Service providers are also benefitting by making use of public cloud that helps them in providing increased flexibility and offer usage-based model to their customers.

Seamless redundancy

Organisations using Tier IV DRaaS do not have to worry about loose ends in the system. They have redundancies for every process, 2N+1 infrastructure (two times the amount required for operation plus a backup). The data is stored in multiple places in a Tier IV ranking center to avoid a single point of failure that may result in significant downtime. Tier IV data center safeguards your data and applications regardless of any mechanical failures. There are backup systems available for cooling, power, data storage, and network links.

Cost effective to organizations

Owning your data recovery solution adds additional costs of IT infrastructure, connectivity, IT staff and so on. Moreover, these costs will be doubled up to receive upgrades for the data recovery solution, blocking the company’s funds with no value on the return of investment. DRaaS is also available on a pay-per-use model. This monthly subscription generally includes pre-configured hardware, management, support, and latest upgrades. The service provider bears the cost of constructing and maintaining the infrastructure which saves operating expenditure of the company. Moreover, the company need not hire IT professionals to manage the DR solution which further reduces costs.

COVID 19 has created made businesses revisit their IT infrastructure and network capabilities. Businesses are going digital and adopting cloud computing to salvage the situation and maintain business continuity. Keeping the data of the company protected is necessary in the ongoing virtual work environment. DRaaS is therefore a proven and effective solution in mitigating threats that CIOs must consider when evaluating their data center needs.

Source: https://www.expresscomputer.in/columns/why-disaster-recovery-as-a-service-is-integral-to-business-continuity-planning/64972/

Protecting Data in the Face of Disasters and Calamities

Posted on July 24, 2020October 4, 2022 by yotta

In recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of adverse incidents and contingencies that organizations prepare for as part of their business continuity planning (BCP). There are enough incidents of fire and other natural calamities that have destroyed offices, IT equipment, data servers, and more. In 2012, a fire at Mantralaya (the administrative HQ of the Government of Maharashtra in Mumbai) caused the loss of ten terabytes of data including crucial and sensitive records, and more recently, a fire incident at a business hub in South Mumbai caused widespread damage to IT equipment including captive data servers. Considering the digital age that we live in, data is the most valuable resource, so any outage in accessing that data comes with a hefty price tag.

According to recent research by Uptime Institute, which calculated the cost of downtime, approximately 33% of all incidents cost enterprises over the US$250,000 with 15% of downtime episodes costing more than US$1 million. So, it is no surprise that ensuring the physical safety and security of all data within the network has emerged as a top agenda for the custodians of infrastructure and operations. And this has made CIOs who invest in captive data centers re-think their data center strategy.

Limitations of captive/on-premise data centers

Traditionally, businesses have preferred captive data storage solutions. While it provides a sense of safety, any threat to an establishment that restricts physical access to the data center becomes a business-critical risk. This includes natural calamities like a cyclone or an earthquake, floods as experienced by Mumbai and Chennai in recent years that result in a power outage, fire, or a situation like the COVID-19-induced lockdown. Besides not having access to data, some of the other key issues with the traditional approach include:

High cost of data center downtime: Outages caused due to faults with the data center or any other factor that hinders the access to data can cripple business operations. So, if technical support staff is unable to attend a fault at an on-premise data center due to the lockdown, the operations come to a standstill. And in the competitive world that we operate in today, the cost of such a dent in reputation can be quite high.

Lack of agility: In-house data centers are slower to respond to business requirements as well as external factors such as a change in technology because of the capital outlay and intensive planning it takes. This lack of agility and ability to scale up or down based on business demand places businesses with captive data centers at a distinct disadvantage.

Incompatibility with BCP of the future: While we try and figure all the nuances of a post-pandemic world, the ability of an organization to enable work from home has become the starting point of business continuity. This includes providing all employees with secure and reliable access to all data, at all times. So, for organizations looking ahead, a diversified enterprise data policy will form an essential aspect of their future BCP.

Inaccessibility due to lockdown: Amidst this pandemic, where organizations are running on minimum strength or are under lockdown, they face a volatile situation in case of a disaster as they cannot access their premises for preventive or regular maintenance. On the other hand, an MTDC operates with specialized technicians and support staff to maintain the same. Also, data centers are categorized under essential services; hence they work without any disruption due to the lockdown and ensure business continuity for you and your customers.

Why moving to a Multi-Tenant Data Center (MTDC) makes business sense?

As more businesses accept the new realities and look to upgrade their IT infrastructure to prepare for tomorrow, multi-tenant data centers (MTDC) have emerged as a viable solution. However, MTDCs come in all shapes and forms, while most of them offer a set of basic advantages, the following parameters are useful to evaluate the best option for your requirements:

Reliability of service: The primary purpose of adopting an MTDC approach is to ensure reliable service with an assured near-zero downtime and continued operability even in the worst-case scenario. Tier IV certified MTDCs like the Yotta NM1 data center in Panvel are designed for power outages and are equipped with redundant backup facilities that ensure uninterrupted service for up to 48 hours with full IT load without any supply from the primary electrical grid.

Physical safety and security: Third-party data centers have dedicated technicians and support staff for the smooth functioning and quick redressal of issues. Additionally, MTDCs also provide multiple layers of protection such as security guards, biometrics and access management to prevent unauthorized access, as well as disaster recovery protocols for severe worst-case scenarios.

Tier IV certification: Uptime Institute’s certification for data centers has become a leading benchmark for the industry. It ranges from ‘I’ through ‘IV’ with Tier IV Certification being the highest. Listed below are some of the service criteria you could use to evaluate the provider along with the benchmarks that Tier IV certified MTDCs offer:

Concurrent maintenance: In traditional systems, any planned or unplanned maintenance in any equipment meant that the data center had to go offline. While some older systems offer redundancies for some functions, Tier IV MTDCs provide a minimum N+1 redundancy at all levels which allow administrators to carry out concurrent maintenance without disrupting IT loads or any operation.

Fault-tolerant: Power and cooling systems play a crucial role in the normal functioning of a data center. Any sudden defect caused in either system due to a leak in the chilled water pipeline or a glitch in a related component can cause a shutdown. Tier IV certification requires automatic detection, isolation, arrest and containment of such situations. The automatic switching to standby equipment through redundant distribution paths avoids any downtime.

Protection against fire: Compartmentalisation offers fire separation among working and standby equipment for power, cooling and BMS including that for active distribution paths that control those functions. Additional physical measures and use of fire-rated components also shield against consequential damage and ensure that server racks suffer no downtime. Even IT cooling loads continue operating at full capacity.

Consequential Effects of Fire Protection: Uptime Institute designed Tier IV data centers also continue to function despite any consequential damage caused to the equipment resulting from the heavy spray of water from the fire protection systems. Thanks to the concurrent Ingress Protection and Fire Ratings of Bus-ducts and all control cables that limit the damage, all system including server racks, full IT load and cooling load remain operational in the aftermath of a fire incident.

Business continuity, reliability, and peace of mind

As the lifeline of any modern-day organization, data is priceless. Additionally, any downtime in access to data has a real-world impact on businesses in the form of tarnished reputation or even financial losses. So, despite a marginally higher capital cost, MTDCs make for a better business decision in comparison with on-premise data centers. Thus, while from an operational perspective, it offers better business continuity, a managed data center service provider or an MTDC that offers end-to-end management also provides reliability and most importantly – peace of mind.

Understanding data center and cloud services in the post Covid-19 world

Posted on July 13, 2020October 4, 2022 by yotta

With the prolonged lockdown and the resultant stay-at-home orders, businesses across India dealt with supply chain shortages and slowdowns and were re-aligning their IT infrastructure strategies to operate without on-premise access or having a reliable infrastructure to ensure business continuity and downtime prevention. The pandemic thus has fast-tracked the evolution of many businesses into becoming digitally native, and enterprises had to adopt new ways of working and upgrade their IT infrastructures aggressively.

The Covid-19 outbreak reinstated that India needs far more data center capacity than we currently have. Data centers were put to the test as a large workforce suddenly moved to remote working during the global crisis. Companies were able to access, manage and process their data from a remote location due to data center networks working full throttle, to the extent of data center services being classified as one of the essential services. The emergence and acceptance of the new normal – adoption of cloud and acceleration of digitisation – have now become the pillars of the business continuity strategies for the post-Covid-19 world.

The burgeoning demand

The demand for data center and cloud solutions was already on the rise due to data localisation, and it has further increased exponentially during the pandemic. Working from home has accelerated the demand for Software as a Service (SaaS), which is driving tremendous traffic to data centers. Organisations are looking to outsource and are inclined towards third party cloud and data center service providers. Global cloud migration services are expected to grow at a CAGR of about 24% between 2020 to 2024 as per the market research by Technavio. Data centers and cloud are undoubtedly an integral part of business continuity strategies of companies to run operations with a distributed workforce amid the lockdown successfully. According to Statista, the industry revenues are expected to increase to over $50 billion per year by 2023 due to the rise in cloud adoption and data center services by many companies.

Less investment, flexibility, and scalability are the key factors that are driving the rapid adoption of cloud computing solutions among SMEs and MSMEs. The proliferation of investments in emerging technologies like IoT, AI/ML, analytics, big data, and other advanced technologies have resulted in the rapid adoption of cloud and data center solutions.

Rapid development in data centers

To ensure competitive advantage and ensure the highest level of reliability possible, data center players are abandoning the traditional construction models and using new technologies to upgrade and increase efficiency. Companies now require highly scalable data centers which offer thorough assessment, better management, disaster recovery, and fault tolerance. Uptime Institute Tier IV certified data centers can operate without interruption even when one or more of components of the system fail by preventing disruptions arising from the failure point. A fault-tolerant data center can prove to be significant in disaster recovery strategy; the system can backup components in the cloud and restore critical systems quickly, even if a natural or industrial disaster destroys IT infrastructure.

Hybrid cloud is the way to go

Hybrid cloud is helping companies to work with a flexible cloud model that suits different workgroups. This type of cloud provides improved data and IT management to derive better efficiency and increased productivity. Companies can move heavy workloads between private and public cloud easily and do not require additional CAPEX. These benefits allow businesses to easily shift to an OPEX model and save significant costs during such unprecedented times. Organisations are recalibrating their plans in the post-Covid-19 environment to derive maximum benefits from the cloud and gain competitive advantage. Leveraging hybrid cloud services is essential to scale up the efforts, sustain in the present environment, and prepare for future disruptions.

Exploring managed services

Agility and continuity are extremely valuable for the businesses in the current times of crises. As it has been difficult lately to get access to data centers or manage captive data centers, companies are moving towards outsourced managed service providers. While the IT staff finds it challenging to manage the IT infrastructure remotely, they are relying on colocation hyperscale providers for network optimisation, installations, managed cloud, and security services. Even post Covid-19, businesses will have to understand their need to utilize managed services to continue providing support to their IT teams, focus on business continuity, processes and tools to keep their employees safe and productive.

Development of next-generation data centers includes moving to edge computing, enabling AI to innovate and automate processes, and integrating SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center) to access and manage tasks from a remote location. Amid the Covid-19 crisis, global corporate giants and prominent investors are focused on the rising potential market for digital infrastructure. The data center industry will therefore be a critical catalyst to the growth of emerging technologies. Hyper scalers are roping in big corporations with excellent credibility as their customers which is further luring investors to enter the data center market.

It is slowly becoming certain that the world will never be the same post-Covid-19. Instead, it will continue to innovate and transform to prosper the global economy in future, and this is where data centers and cloud will undoubtedly play an integral part.

Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/understanding-data-center-and-cloud-services-in-the-post-covid-19-world/

Smart data storage: How MSMEs, startups can channelise limited resources for maximum benefits amid Covid

Posted on July 13, 2020October 4, 2022 by yotta

Technology for MSMEs: Outsourcing with a third-party data center and cloud service provider helps small businesses to utilize modern IT infrastructure and updated IT services. Startups have been depending on data centers and cloud solutions to run smoothly without having to establish additional technology infrastructure.

Technology for MSMEs: India is proving to be a land of promise for the emergence of new-age companies after the Government of India’s massive push on the Startup India campaign. The year 2019 was a big hit for Indian startups; with technology startups in the country raising a record $14.5 billion in investments from Indian and international investors according to a report by Tracxn. However, the global pandemic of Covid-19 has brought with it many unexpected challenges for the startup ecosystem. Startups are now looking towards technology solutions to combat these challenges and come out successfully from the downturn.

Over the years, startups have been depending on data centers and cloud solutions to run smoothly without having to establish additional technology infrastructure of their own. In the current scenario, startups must channelize their limited resources intelligently to reap out maximum benefits for continuity of their operations, focus on customer acquisition and expansion. Outsourcing with a third-party data center and cloud service provider helps small businesses to utilize modern IT infrastructure and updated IT services. Here are some reasons why data centers and cloud solutions are paramount for small business and startups:

Scalable Data storage

Data generation is increasing at a flying pace. Storing data in their own servers can be difficult and would call for additional investment every time there’s a need for more storage capacity. When a startup uses a colocation data center to fulfil their storage needs, they can increase their capacity whenever required and as quickly as the need arises. Moreover, the need is addressed easily without any hassle by altering the current plan and updated as per estimated increase. What’s equally important is the ability to scale down when the demand is low so that the company is able to make savings on their infrastructure costs when the demand diminishes.

Reliable connectivity

A robust multi-carrier network ensures that start-ups have 24×7 access to the data stored and their workloads. Data centers with multi-tenant facilities enable small businesses and startups to enjoy the features of a modern data center that could traditionally only be afforded by big companies. Startups can gain from technology stability, boosted performance and high-end hosting capabilities with the latest software applications.

Improved security & compliance

Data is an asset for every company. As operations increase, businesses must make sure that they take appropriate measures to secure their data. Co-locating at a third-party data center will help start-ups to safeguard their own data as well as client data due to strict access protocols/industry standards being adhered by data centers.

Additional managed services

A business needs much more than data storage and data management for a robust IT infrastructure. Multi-tenant colocation providers serve as integrated IT managed providers along with storage facilities to companies, for example, cloud computing, managed security and IT managed services. These services allow small businesses to work with big data analytics to retract potential insights at a small price, which ultimately leads to improved efficiency and productivity. Businesses are planning to explore innovative and cost-effective BCP solutions and are inclined to move to ‘Anything as a Service’ (XaaS) to harness new technologies. This would provide them with a strong suite of services from service providers and support to drive their business growth.

Enhanced cost efficiencies

Last but not the least, opting to outsource data center services would help startups save a lot of funds. One of the most common reasons due to which startups cease their operations is a shortfall of funds. Building and maintaining an on-premise data center takes a lot of financial, manpower, and time investments that small businesses may not be able to afford. Data center service providers allow them to pay as per their usage and work on the OPEX model instead of blocking funds in a capital investment.

A startup business is known for its innovative ideas, raw energy, incredible passion, amazing talent, and hunger to reach the top. But with the disruption that Covid-19 has brought into an already highly competitive market requires startups to be leaner than ever before and maximize their resources. Hence, reaching out to a colocation data center service provider for a highly scalable and efficient infrastructure layer and the best-in-class cloud services for their business will enable them to succeed in the ecosystem.

Source: https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/msme-tech-smart-data-storage-how-msmes-startups-can-channelise-limited-resources-for-maximum-benefits-amid-covid/2022351/

Getting your data center security right

Posted on February 18, 2020October 4, 2022 by yotta

The Equifax breach in 2017, which was termed as a case of ‘neglect of cybersecurity’, led to records of 143 million customers being stolen which included names, social security numbers, date of birth, addresses and driving license numbers. Sensitive information that can potentially misused by cybercriminals. Today data security has become a major concern for companies as their valuable data increasingly residing outside their premises either on third party datacentre or on public cloud. A small breach in the system can cause repercussions with long term effects as any part of the system can be an entry point for attackers who are continuously prowling the internet to look for unsecured access points. As a bare minimum, every company expects an assurance that its data is secure within the IT infrastructure of its data center service provider.

Due to the burgeoning demand for data centers, data center security market too is witnessing an upward trend. As per Future Market Insights, the data center security market is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 11.1% from 2018-2028, globally.

Data center and its security
Security is one of the most important criteria while designing and finalizing the layout of a data center building. Data Centers should be treated as national assets and need to be safeguarded with the highest security standards against both physical and cyber attacks to its infrastructure, software and networks. A wide range of processes, products, people and strategies are implemented to prevent outside interference and protect data from attackers trying to invade the network by hacking the firewall or cracking passwords. There are various security measures that data center providers can put in to place for safeguarding their data from malicious intentions. Below I have listed few of them –

Physical security
A DC building should consist of a limited number of doors and windows and constructed with thicker walls. It must be structured and built in a way that it can withstand physical damage from calamities like natural disasters, terrorist attacks or industrial accidents. The building spot must be at some distance from airports, chemical facilities and power plants. Before acquiring the land, the company must ensure that the location is not prone to hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. Enhancing infrastructure security also includes CCTV monitoring, fire protection and hiring professionally trained security staff.

Limited access
Restricting the entry permit for unauthorised personnel by use of two-factor authentication to enter the building, personal identity verification (PIV) cards and personal passcode are some of the other things to consider. Employee badge readers and biometric systems, such as fingerprint readers, iris scanners and facial recognition, may also be effective. Coined by analytics firm, Forrester Research, Zero Trust Architecture is another security model that doesn’t trust even internal teams or systems by giving default access and always verifies credentials for everyone and everything before allowing access to the system. This is a more secure and cost-effective alternative to traditional security systems and is relied on by Europe’s largest industrial manufacturer, Siemens as well as tech giant Google.

End point/Server security
All devices such as mobile, laptop, servers can serve as a potential access point for attackers. Therefore, it is imperative to identify the underlying vulnerabilities within the system, and deploy an overarching security infrastructure. Customers who have occupied racks and do not adhere to security standards may put the entire data center at risk. Having detailed, strict and documented security guidelines and procedures to follow, will help to maintain and safeguard the data center and the data within. Extensive measures such as offline data backup and recovery, data encryption, implementing the latest regulations for data protection and constant traffic monitoring will help to protect data stored in a data center from evident threats such as hacking, malware and spyware.

Layered security
Virtual and physical environment, networks, application and infrastructure, everything must be secured to curb the risk of being attacked. Creating secure zones in the network by 24×7 monitoring, automated intrusion detection and prevention are some ways to layer security in a data center. With the rise of cloud computing, visibility into data flows is a necessity, since ransomware could be concealed among otherwise legitimate traffic. Every facet of a data center security should work in alignment with other components as part of an extensive, layered structure, that way a potential intruder will have to go through various layers to breach before reaching the utmost valuable data in the data center. Even if the intruder manages to breach one-layer, other layers may prevent the compromise of the entire system or alarm the management of the breach.

In 2020, with companies moving towards highly complex digital infrastructure to store their critical workloads, data centers are likely to be high priority targets for attackers. Thus, it’s crucial that all security aspects are taken into consideration right from the inception of the data center rather than as an afterthought.

Source: https://www.crn.in/data-center/getting-your-data-center-security-right

Is India the Next Hyperscale Data Center Destination?

Posted on October 24, 2019October 4, 2022 by yotta

Data consumption and data generation in India is growing exponentially. We’ve seen unprecedented growth when it comes to mobile internet penetration due to cheap data tariffs. The internet penetration of the country crossed 30% and is increasing rapidly. As per a recent study by Ericsson, data traffic per month will grow at a CAGR of 23%, from 4.6 exabytes in 2018 to 16 exabytes in 2024. This means, almost 18 GB data per user per month will be generated and will be majorly fuelled by rich video content.

Data explosion is further driven by various digitisation initiatives of the Indian government such as Smart Cities and Digital India, and rapid digital transformation of various industries such as financial services, telecom, online food delivery apps, e-commerce and even the manufacturing sector.

On the enterprise side, Public Cloud adoption is disrupting the traditional data storage and management practices. IDC reports that by 2022, 40% of new enterprise applications developed in India will be cloud-native and by 2023, the top 4 clouds (”mega-platforms”) in the country will be the destination of choice for 50% of workloads. In addition to this, as Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning get increasingly woven into enterprise fabric, there is an added load on applications which is driving the need for data centres.

As the volume of data that is generated rises, enterprises, OTT and cloud players will be required to have a robust backend infrastructure which can effectively cater to the demand of the users. Availability, Scalability and Reliability, the age-old tenets apply but the magnitude of dependence on them has significantly increased.

Adding to this demand is Data Localisation. This means, companies are now required to store critical data of Indian users within national boundaries. This regulatory requirement will help in better management, access and sovereignty of the data but at the same time will require the OTT players, Cloud Service Providers, social media, E-Commerce, Global offshore centre and Search engine players to partner with Indian data center service providers to meet their infrastructure needs.

Across the globe, data is exploding at a high velocity and there are no signs of data generation slowing down in near future. Scalability is thus an absolute necessity for data infrastructure. Hyperscale data centers as a phenomenon are gaining popularity worldwide. In 2015, there were 259 Hyperscale DCs globally which currently stands at approximately 450 DCs and is projected to cross 628 by 2021. Nearly half of hyperscale data center operators are located inside the U.S. India has much to catch up to but the outlook is very positive.

In the present scenario, the existing players are seen reacting to the demands and have been adding capacities (both space and power) when need arises rather than building purposeful Hyperscale Datacentre Parks.

However, the situation will improve drastically as some of the biggest Indian conglomerates such as the Hiranandani Group and Adani have announced their plans to come up with integrated, hyperscale Data Center parks. These organizations bring in strengths such as ownership of large land parcels across India, construction capabilities and a scalable power generation/distribution infrastructure.

Adani Enterprise has announced plans to build large data center parks in Andhra Pradesh over the next 20 years. International data center firm, Colt, has announced an upcoming facility in Mumbai to build a 100MW IT hyper-scale data centre facility. Ascendas-Singbridge Group will also be making an investment of $1bn in new data centre builds across India over a period of five years. Many others are certain to join the bandwagon.

At Yotta Infrastructure, we have laid out a plan to build 3 data center parks with 11 hyperscale data center buildings with a combined capacity of 60,000 racks in the next 5-7 years. Our first data center will go live by end of December 2019.

Market analysis firm BroadGroup believes that the data centre capacity in India is set to increase by almost 68% from 2018 to the end of 2020. Over the next few years, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad will witness major investments in DC infrastructure by local and international players in the market.

As India goes through a complete digital transformation, right from its public sector to private companies, and internet users increasing at a breakneck speed, majority of this growth will be linked to hyperscale data centers to accommodate and process the large volume of data generated.

Decoding Hyperscale Data Centers

Posted on October 17, 2019October 4, 2022 by yotta

You might not realize it, but the amount of data we are consuming and creating is leading to a data explosion. According to the latest report by DOMO, ‘Data Never Sleeps’, by 2020, for every person on earth, 1.7 MB of data will be created every second. Storage giant, EMC claims that there will be around 40 trillion gigabytes of data by next year. These staggering numbers almost feel unreal and abstract. Much like the data centers where all this data is physically stored.

Data Centers – The Unsung Heroes

Data centers, across the world, have been in the background doing their work round the clock, while we have been busy surfing the internet, using instant messengers or binge watching on Netflix. Not too long ago, data centers were treated more like a processing and storage space around the world. However, with the advent of cloud, big data and analytics, data centers are finally taking center stage in the IT world.

Hyperscale Data Centers are the cool kids on the block.

But What Exactly Are Hyperscale Data Centers?

Well as the name suggests, hyperscale is an ability to scale at a hyper speed to meet hyper demand. It is the ability to scale, in order to respond to the increasing demand. Hyperscale demand means ability to add capacity quickly and efficiently, with speed to market being a priority. Increased space, power, computing ability, memory, networking infrastructure, storage resources with optimized performance, is how one would generally define hyperscale data centers.

For example, while a data center (DC) may support hundreds of physical servers and thousands of virtual machines, a hyperscale facility will be able to support thousands of physical servers and millions of virtual machines. While IDC defines a facility as hyperscale if it has at least 5,000 servers and a total size of no less than 10,000 square feet, hyperscale data centers are generally much larger in size and area.

To give you a perspective, Microsoft’s hyperscale DC in Quincy, Washington, has 24,000 miles of network cable, which is nearly enough to go around the earth, and the Azure data center in Singapore is twice of that, as well as has enough concrete to build a sidewalk from London to Paris. Facebook is planning a mega-hyperscale data center in Singapore that will be 11 stories tall and will have an area spanning 1.8 million square feet. Yotta is going live with India’s largest data center at 8.2 Lakh sq.ft and 7,200 racks.

Going Beyond Scale

Apart from sheer size, one of the biggest advantages of a hyperscale DC is upward scalability. For a legacy system to scale up at a rapid pace is a big challenge. A hyperscale data center on the other hand will be able to handle horizontal or vertical scaling efficiently with minimum fuss. It will improve uptime and load times for end-users and run high-volume workloads that also require substantial power easily. A top layer of analytics and machine learning is added in a hyperscale DC.

As efficiency is the mantra of a hyperscale DC, automation is inevitable. Generally, companies that build and operate these DCs focus a lot on automation and self-healing processes. The system thus created is so controlled and automated that the inevitable breaks and delays in an environment will correct themselves, encouraging significant efficiency from the data.

Power efficiency is another pillar of a hyperscale data center. A hyperscale facility will have maximum optimization of its power architecture, bringing the costs and the environmental impact that it has significantly down. A hyperscale data center optimizes airflow throughout the structure. It ensures that the hot air flows in one direction and often reclaims the heat from that exhaust flow for recycling purposes. The Power usage effectiveness (PUE) of a hyperscale facility is much lower than the traditional DCs and much greener.

A Gold Standard: Here to Stay

According to a whitepaper by Linesight called ‘Hyperactive Hyperscale: The next step of the digital revolution’, these facilities are expected to account for more than half of all data centre traffic within the next two years, as data storage requirements grow by 40% annually. JLL reports that the hyperscale market is expected to grow at an annual compound rate of 26.3 percent to $80.6 billion by 2022.

Currently, the hyperscale market is dominated by giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. However, with prominent Indian conglomerates joining the data center bandwagon, hyperscale DCs will become a norm rather than a trend.