Tag: data center

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.

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.

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/