Pure Storage recently achieved a significant design win with one of the top four hyperscalers. According to a company press release, this industry-first milestone marks the expansion of Pure Storage’s DirectFlash technology into large-scale environments currently dominated by hard disks.

Pure Storage describes this as the ‘beginning of a transformative shift in the industry’. Historically, hyperscalers have relied on commodity disk storage, representing nearly 70% of global hard disk drive purchases—an estimated 700 exabytes per year.

“This is the first-ever design win to provide flash for standard hyperscaler storage and it is the vanguard for flash storage providing all online storage in major hyperscale environments in the future. For reference, the hyperscale market is responsible today for 60% to 70% of all Hard Disk Drives purchased globally,” Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo said while announcing the hyperscaler win on the company’s third quarter FY25 earnings call. 

Pure Storage has been contending that by 2028, practically no new all-HDD storage systems will be sold for data center computing. In fact, HDD shipments have seen a sharp decline over the past decade. From a peak of over 651 million units in 2010, shipments dropped by nearly 71%, reaching 166 million in 2022, according to Statista.

The India Story

Ramanujam Komanduri, Country Manager for Pure Storage India, emphasized how the hyperscaler win is driving the transition to flash storage.

“Hyperscalers are possibly the largest data consumers, and they have been using commodity disk storage simply because there hasn’t been an alternative that offers comparable economics—until now. Recent improvements in flash media density, its ability to scale higher and lower power consumption have been game-changers in recent years. Our design win signals that hypercalers can manage extremely large data footprints with high-capacity flash storage at economics similar to what they have been used to in the past.”

He emphasized that the design win will add to the momentum for the replacement of hard disk drives (HDDs) in the market.  

India accounts for a significant share of the market, generating nearly one-fifth of the world’s data. “Flash storage is a more sustainable way for hyperscalers to store the growing volumes of data. With Pure’s Direct-to-Flash technology, we can provide hyperscalers better performance, reliability, and significant power and space savings compared to hard disks, all at a comparable or lower total cost of ownership,” Ramanujam maintains. 

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Moving to the cloud can greatly improve your organization’s flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. However, achieving a successful migration demands meticulous planning and execution. Here is an in-depth step-by-step guide to assist you in navigating the cloud migration process efficiently.

Step 1: Evaluation and Preparation

Start by evaluating your existing IT infrastructure, applications, and data. This stage is essential for gaining insight into your current assets and their interdependencies. Identify the motivations driving your migration—whether it’s to reduce costs, enhance performance, or access advanced features. Set specific objectives and deadlines to ensure the project stays on course.

Identify Existing Resources: Assess your current systems and applications.

Establish Migration Goals: Identify the outcomes you intend to accomplish through the migration process.

Select a Cloud Provider: Investigate various cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, to identify the one that best suits your requirements.

Step 2: Migrating the Data

After establishing a clear plan, concentrate on migrating your data by transferring it from your current environment to the cloud platform.

Choose a Migration Approach:

Real-Time Data Transfer with Online Migration: Seamless Continuous Replication

Offline Migration: Transferring large datasets using physical storage devices in bulk.

Keep in mind factors such as data volume, transfer costs, and bandwidth limitations when selecting your method.

Step 3: Migrating the Application

Subsequently, transition your applications in line with the selected cloud strategy. You can choose from several approaches:

Lift and Shift: Transfer applications without making changes.

Replatforming: Implement small modifications to enhance cloud optimization.

Refactoring: Transform applications to take full advantage of cloud features.

Update configurations and dependencies to ensure compatibility with the target cloud environment.

Step 4: Establishing Network and Connectivity

Set up secure network configurations in the cloud environment to mirror your current setup. This entails:

Establish Secure Connections: Utilize VPNs or Direct Connect to ensure secure communication between your on-premises infrastructure and the cloud.

DNS Management: Modify DNS records and oversee IP assignments to ensure smooth connectivity.

Step 5: Ensuring Security and Compliance

Ensuring security during migration is crucial. Assess and apply security protocols specifically designed for the cloud environment:

Identity and Access Management (IAM): Establish rules to manage user access.

Data Encryption: To maintain confidentiality, ensure that data is encrypted both during transit and while at rest.

Perform a compliance evaluation to ensure adherence to applicable regulations throughout the process.

Step 6: Conduct Testing and Validation

Ensure you comprehensively test all migrated components before launching.

Application Testing: Ensure that applications operate correctly in the new environment.

Checking for performance issues or bottlenecks: Monitor and evaluate system efficiency.

Perform security testing to detect any vulnerabilities that may have emerged during the migration process.

Step 7: Launching Live

After completing testing, you can move forward with going live.

Last Data Synchronization: Conduct a final data sync before transitioning.

Track Performance: Once the application is live, diligently observe its performance and gather user feedback.

To conclude

Transitioning to the cloud is a transformative process that demands careful planning and execution. To ensure a seamless migration, follow these steps: assessment, data migration, application transition, network configuration, security measures implementation, testing phase, and launch. Embrace this opportunity to boost your business operations by achieving greater flexibility and efficiency in today’s digital environment.

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Cloud repatriation or cloud exit are terms that we heard quite often in 2023 and will likely continue to command our attention in 2024. Is the cloud-first mantra, which was once widely touted as the future of all business operations, losing its luster? 

Thanks to several factors, CIOs are relooking at their public cloud strategies. While enterprises have greatly reaped the benefits of public cloud over the years, they are beginning to reassess their cloud-first or cloud-only strategies, opting instead to migrate certain workloads back to on-premise environments. Cost remains a key factor for this cloud repatriation.

A 2023 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey reveals that almost all enterprises (94%) report “avoidable cloud spend” or what is known as ‘cloud waste’. 

“Cloud was at one point the biggest buzz, which took a long time to gain traction. Then it moved to a matured level of usage – a point after which many users realized that the costs were going immensely high. Strangely, accordingly to any law of technology, the cost should always come down as usage increases. Cloud has been the only exception to this rule,” says Sunil Mehta, CIO & Partner, BDO – a global professional services firm.

This, he adds, has led to ‘mixed feelings in the CIO community and the tech community at large’ about the future of public cloud as a platform of choice.  He was talking on the sidelines of Tech Saga 2024, one of the biggest gatherings of Tech visionaries, hosted by CIO Klub Pune chapter. 

“Strangely, accordingly to any law of technology, the cost should always come down as usage increases. Cloud has been the only exception to this rule,” says Sunil Mehta, CIO & Partner, BDO.

But is the public cloud aura really disappearing? Or is it the inherent evolutionary curve that  every technology will go through? 

Tech leaders emphasize that some key benefits of public cloud continue to be appealing and there are still quite a few takers for public cloud. Ashok Mandlik, SGM – IT, Deepak Fertilisers, vouches for the flexibility, scalability, agility, and the ease of innovation that comes with public cloud. 

“Most of the IT solutions today are available only on cloud platforms. Traditionally on-premise applications like ERP are also now moving to cloud. There is very little opportunity left to maintain these systems on-premise. That leaves organizations with no choice. Besides, an on-premise model is often not able to match the flexibility and agility that the cloud technology provides. The innovations that are rolled out by cloud players often compensate the downsides.”

Nevertheless, CIOs are increasingly going in for a workload-based approach as opposed to a platform-centric approach. They assert that certain workloads and applications are just not meant for the public cloud. 

“What we have typically seen is that CIOs want to put everything on the cloud without realizing what really needs to go there. That resulted in a lot of static data sitting on the cloud, which contributed significantly to the cloud cost upsurge. This trend was accelerated during COVID,” adds Mehta. 

“If the organization has clarity on the compute and storage parameters, the cost component can very well be controlled,” reiterates Mandlik. For many organizations, especially if they are not the very large enterprises, cloud is in fact ideal for balancing cost, performance, and security. 

“Traditionally on-premise applications like ERP are also now moving to cloud. There is very little opportunity left to maintain these systems on-premise. That leaves organizations with no choice,” says Ashok Mandlik, SGM – IT, Deepak Fertilisers.

According to Mandlik, security is still a strong reason for many firms to go in favour of public cloud. “For an on-premise model, enterprises will have to continue to invest on a wide-range of tools for risk mitigation and it’s an ever-evolving scenario. That is perhaps why security remains one of the strongest reasons for enterprises to go for public cloud. Add to that the need for backup & disaster recovery, and the availability of skilled manpower to manage the data Center, and many CIOs realize that cloud TCOs are in fact comparable with that of on-premise models,” he underscores. 

CIOs might often feel that they are walking on eggshells. They are falling back on the many learnings they have had over the years in finding the right fit. Hybrid and private clouds will see more adoption going forward as enterprises strive to control cost and maximize performance. Many ‘public-cloud only’ strategies are widely being shaken and revisited. 

“Hybrid cloud will certainly dominate. We will also see increased adoption of private cloud that provides the experience and security of a public cloud with better manageability and optimized cost,” believes Mehta. 

On-premise data centers still have very strong use cases in the manufacturing sector, Mandlik adds. Especially in process-heavy manufacturing establishments, the huge volumes of time-series data generated by OT systems still reside on-premise. But manufacturers leverage the cloud to analyze these data sets to derive business insights.

With more and more expensive AI workloads in the horizon, how are enterprises relooking at their cloud priorities? 

Enterprises’ cloud strategies are sure to get more nuanced – they are exploring a combination of public cloud, private cloud, industry cloud and co-location services, as they try to reassess each workload and place them in the right infrastructure. Cloud repatriation might be an obvious fallout of this reassessment. 

For the major hyperscalers who have long dominated the market, this is a decisive moment in their growth journey. Even though the pay-as-you-go model of the cloud is beneficial for fluctuating workloads, it can result in unexpected expenses when usage suddenly spikes. 

“There seems to be an increased interest towards Indian datacenter hosting companies and they could give the big hyperscalers a run for their money. Because cost is going to be a big differentiator in the cloud game,” states Mehta. 

Mandlik feels that the change is already happening. “Cloud providers now have become mindful of the fact that CIOs are increasingly conscious about cloud spending. Their dynamic pricing models (pay per use), simplified management mechanisms with flexible dashboards allow organizations to utilize the workloads and cloud services more meticulously,” he says. 

Above all, CIOs are relooking at their cloud strategies which they derived a few years ago. In today’s fast-paced world, one cannot expect a tech strategy to work for five years. Cloud is a perfect example of why our tech roadmaps should be versatile, according to Mehta.

“With cost becoming prohibitive, tech leaders must now go back to the drawing board and understand what needs to sit on cloud and what shouldn’t—and this must be done a lot more frequently now than before. Because the role of CIO is not about doing what everybody else is doing. We need to be a strategic leader than a blind follower,” he sums up. 

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The adoption of hybrid multicloud environments has become imperative as organizations in the APJ region reassess their cloud strategies, said Aaron White, GM and VP, APJ Sales, Nutanix. 

During its Q1 FY24, Nutanix observed three key trends across the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region that saw customers moving from public to hybrid multicloud and leveraging the potential of AI. 

Data security, according to Nutanix, is one of the biggest drivers of the accelerated adoption of hybrid multicloud. Hybrid multicloud allows organizations to maintain the necessary security measures for their sensitive assets while taking advantage of the public cloud’s agility and cost-efficiency, said Aaron in a recent APJ media roundtable. 

Nutanix has been quite vocal about cloud repatriation – a trend where companies move their workloads back from public clouds to on-premises or local cloud infrastructure. A 2023 Nutanix market study highlighted that over 46% organizations plan to repatriate some applications to on-premises datacenters to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead. 

“Organizations realize they must learn from past experiences with public cloud and develop a strategic plan to avoid the need for cloud repatriation. To prevent cloud repatriation, it is essential to consider the benefits and suitability of hybrid multicloud instead of following the herd back to public cloud,” Aron remarked. 

He also spoke about how enterprises’ AI strategies are evolving with data security and governance taking precedence over cost in AI decision-making. Enterprise AI adoption will catalyze a wave of initiatives focused on data governance and mobility. Nutanix’s interactions with customers also reveal that many enterprises are struggling to identify the most efficient path to modernize their infrastructure to be able to support AI workloads. 

“AI technologies, and growing requirements for speed and scale, are likely to bring edge strategies and core infrastructure deployment to the forefront of IT modernization,” Aaron concluded. 

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The Snowflake Summit 2023, the company’s annual user conference, witnessed a number of LLM-based announcements and a host of enhancements to the company’s Data Cloud platform. The most notable one, perhaps, is its Document AI which stems from Snowflake’s acquisition of Applica (Sept. 2022) and leverages its purpose-built, multimodal LLM.  Document AI, which is currently in private preview, will enable businesses to extract and leverage unstructured data from documents. 

Over the next five years, over 90 percent of the world’s data will be unstructured in the form of documents, images, video, audio, and more according to IDC2. This massive volume of unstructured data is routinely stored by organizations, however gaining valuable insight from it has historically required manual, error-prone processes and limited expert skillsets. Snowflake’s built-in Document AI will make it easier for organizations to understand and derive value from unstructured data and documents using natural language processing, said Murad Wagh, Director of Sales Engineering at Snowflake, while addressing the Indian media.

Some of the use case examples include the ability to easily extract content like invoice amounts or contractual terms from documents and fine-tune results using a visual interface and natural language. Snowflake is starting with Document AI and plans to expand these capabilities to more types of unstructured data.

Additionally, the company also announced updates for Iceberg Tables, which will enable organizations to work with data in their own storage in the Apache Iceberg format, whether that data is managed by Snowflake or managed externally. Snowflake also announced that its platform will support a broader set of advanced analytics capabilities including pre-built machine learning functions for SQL users (public preview), and is expanding its unified governance and privacy with new data quality metrics and classification features (both in private preview). 

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In the banking sector, the only thing that remains constant is change. And, some of the biggest changes in the sector, over the years, were driven by customer behaviors. Banking isn’t any more about patiently standing in a queue to get your job done. 

It’s digital, it’s personal and most importantly, it’s omnipresent. 

The emergence of ‘embedded finance’ has further expanded the scope of financial services to new realms. In simple terms, embedded finance is defined as the integration of financial services into non-financial services. 

Embedded finance encompasses a broad range of platform, technology and ecosystem play, including open banking, banking as a service, and API with data and cloud playing crucial roles. 

This trend is predicted to transform the future of finance. 

But, what does it mean for consumers and what does it mean for the ecosystem players including the legacy banks- Prasad Rai, Vice President, Strategic Clients Group, Oracle India, sheds light. 

Could you give us an overview of the embedded finance market, its potential and some growth figures? 

We experience embedded finance innovations in our everyday lives — oftentimes, without even realizing. A retailer offering financing options at the point of sales or a ride-sharing app embedding payments in the app are all simple examples. 

 The value of the global embedded finance market is expected to generate $230 billion in revenue by 2025, over ten times more than 2020’s figure of $22.5 billion. This new trend will drive financial inclusion for millions of Indians in the next few years and create long-lasting value for other stakeholders. It will provide opportunities to the customers to have access to financial services when it is the most needed – just like YouTube allowing users to shop for a product directly on a live stream.

We have observed that embedded finance is quickly emerging to occupy the mind space of consumers globally. It has now become mainstream very quietly and provided a level of convenience to both the vendor and the buyer. It has transformed the way purchase has happened. 

How are the legacy banks waking up to this trend. In some way, do they see this as a threat which compels them to give up the direct control they have had on the customer? 

Banks have realized embedded finance is not a choice, but a necessity, because the consumer is used to the convenience and speed of it. Embedded finance is therefore absolutely vital for financial organizations to improve their market share and achieve growth. The consumer is now driving that.

It may look like banks have been disintermediated from the customer as many of these financial services are now directly offered to the consumers by non-banking entities.  But, the biggest advantage that financial services organizations will have is the access to data. That’s a great opportunity for them to offer new products, reach out to new customer segments, cross-sell, up-sell and so on. For example, embedded finance allows banks to provide loans at higher volume in a much more efficient manner. 

Just having closeness to the data is a traditional thinking. Banks have recognized that.

How is Oracle’s conversations with Indian banks in the embedded finance space evolving? 

Embedded finance is the front and center in every conversation we are having with banks today.  Banks have now crossed that tipping point when it comes to embedded finance and are investing rapidly on cloud-based ERP, API, platform as a service, CX and so on to be able to link up to the ecosystem players. 

In India, some of our key cloud applications customers in the BFSI sector are Federal Bank, ICICI, Kotak Mahindra Bank, SBI Card, AU Small Finance Bank to name a few.

How should banks and the other ecosystem players relook at their technology stack as they embrace embedded finance, especially since banks have a lot of legacy technology? How is Oracle helping them? 

It is a huge transformation for these banks. Technology plays a part in it, but they have to take that huge leap forward. The good thing is, most of the organizations that we are working with want to get there. 

Factors like security, regulatory compliance, performance and data integrity are going to be critical in successfully transitioning to embedded finance. Users expect instantaneous performance out of their datacentres and networks. 

You talked about legacy. Over the last 20 years, they have built robust systems that work for them. Now, they look at how these new emerging technologies fit into the broader ecosystem. 

Oracle has decades of experience working with financial services companies across over 100 countries. The largest banks run their core banking on Oracle database. The billing and key systems of most telcos run on Oracle database. 

There are a couple of steps we do in helping them make more confident in taking this step forward. We have created an ecosystem of global banking customers for better knowledge sharing and peer learning. For example, the UPI model from India is something that financial services sectors across the globe are inspired by. 

Secondly, our architecture team works closely with teams within banks to architect industry-specific products and solutions. We also have teams that comprise of experts from different industries from leading consulting companies in the world working with customers to create a road map. So it’s not just the technology conversation that we are bringing to the table. We are creating a platform knowledge sharing and bringing experts together globally. 

We are also extending the partnerships beyond the financial services companies to organizations that are key in taking this model to the market. With this consortium approach, the risk is shared and the potential of taking a great product to the market is improved.  

What would be the one biggest change that embedded finance enable for financial services organizations? 

The biggest change we will see is in anticipation. Emebedded Finance opens up the ability to anticipate the potential for an ‘invisible customer’ to go after. The next frontier in finance is this anticipation. A consortium of players can now leverage the most legitimate data sets to define new customer target groups, offer better services and enable new experiences to them. 

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New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Q1 enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services exceeded $63 billion worldwide, up by well over $10 billion from the first quarter of last year. 

The year-on-year growth rate was 20% in Q1. While this is well down from previous years, it was similar to the level of growth seen in the previous quarter. Q1 spending was up by 4% from Q4, similar to the quarter-on-quarter growth rate seen in Q1 of last year. 

There is no doubt that the current economic climate has constrained some growth in cloud spending, but the market continues to expand at a healthy rate despite those short-term challenges. 

Among the largest cloud providers Microsoft and Google had the stronger year-on-year growth numbers, resulting in both increasing their worldwide market share by a percentage point from the first quarter of last year. Their Q1 worldwide market shares were 23% and 10% respectively. Meanwhile market leader Amazon stayed within its long-standing market share band of 32-34%. In aggregate the three leaders accounted for 65% of the worldwide market. Among the tier two cloud providers, those with the highest year-on-year growth rates include Oracle, Snowflake, MongoDB, Huawei and the three main Chinese telcos.

With most of the major cloud providers having now released their earnings data for Q1, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services) were $63.7 billion, with trailing twelve-month revenues reaching $237 billion. Public IaaS and PaaS services account for the bulk of the market and those grew by 21% in Q1. The dominance of the major cloud providers is even more pronounced in public cloud, where the top three control 72% of the market. Geographically, the cloud market continues to grow strongly in all regions of the world. When measured in local currencies, North America, APAC and EMEA regions all grew by well over 20% year over year.

Economic pressures are crimping cloud spending in some quarters, but the foundational benefits of cloud adoption continue to drive the market to ever-higher levels. The large Chinese cloud market has also returned to growth, though it is the telcos who are benefitting more than the traditional main internet companies. And, as the US dollar pulls back from its recent historic highs, that now provides some tailwinds for cloud growth metrics in the EMEA and APAC regions, which together account for over half of the world market.

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Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 21.7% to total $597.3 billion in 2023, up from $491 billion in 2022, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. Cloud computing is driving the next phase of digital business, as organizations pursue disruption through emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (AI), Web3 and the metaverse.

“Hyperscale cloud providers are driving the cloud agenda,” said Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “Organizations today view cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation, which is requiring cloud providers to offer more sophisticated capabilities as the competition for digital services heats up.”

“For example, generative AI is supported by large language models (LLMs), which require powerful and highly scalable computing capabilities to process data in real-time,” added Nag. “Cloud offers the perfect solution and platform. It is no coincidence that the key players in the generative AI race are cloud hyperscalers.”

All segments of the cloud market are expected see growth in 2023. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 30.9%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 24.1% (see Table 1).

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.
Source: Gartner (April 2023)

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on cloud as the fundamental underlying platform. 

“The next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital and business outcomes and the virtual-first world,” said Nag. “Emerging technologies that help businesses interact more closely and in real time with their customers, such as chatbots and digital twins, are reliant upon cloud infrastructure and platform services to meet growing demands for compute and storage power.”

While cloud infrastructure and platform services are driving the highest spending growth, SaaS remains the largest segment of the cloud market by end-user spending. SaaS spending is projected to grow 17.9% to total $197 billion in 2023.

“The technology substrate of cloud computing is firmly dominated by the hyperscalers, but leadership of the business application layer is more fragmented,” said Nag. “Providers are facing demands to redesign SaaS offerings for increased productivity, leveraging cloud-native capabilities, embedded AI and composability – particularly as budgets are increasingly driven and owned by business technologists. This change will ignite a wave of innovation and replacement in the cloud platform and application markets.”

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Thales announced the release of 2023 Thales Data Threat Report, its annual report on the latest data security threats, trends and emerging topics based on a survey of nearly 3000 IT and security professionals in 18 countries. This year’s report found an increase in ransomware attacks, and increased risks to sensitive data in the cloud.

Half of IT professionals surveyed in India believe that security threats are increasing in volume or severity with 52% reporting an increase in ransomware attacks. The figure from India is higher than the global figure of 47% of IT professionals believing that security threats are increasing in volume or severity, while 48% indicated an increase in ransomware attacks.

More than a third (38%) of respondents in India (37% globally) have experienced a data breach in the past 12 months, including 23% (22% globally) reporting that their organisation had been a victim of a ransomware attack.

Respondents identified their cloud assets and IoT devices as the biggest targets for cyber-attacks. 53% of respondents in India said that their IoT devices were the biggest targets, followed by Cloud-based storage (41%) and Cloud delivered applications (SaaS) (40%). At the global level, 28% respondents said SaaS apps and cloud-based storage were the biggest targets, followed by cloud-hosted applications (26%) and cloud infrastructure management (25%). The increase in cloud exploitation and attacks is directly due to the increase in workloads moving to the cloud as 75% of respondents globally said 40% of data stored in the cloud is now classified as sensitive compared to 49% of respondents in 2022.

These are just a few of the key insights from the 2023 Thales Data Threat Report, conducted by 451 Research, which surveyed both private and public sector organisations. It reveals how businesses are responding and planning their data security strategies and practices in light of a changing threat landscape and the progress they are making to address threats.

Human error and the impact of ransomware

Simple human error, misconfiguration or other mistakes can accidentally lead to breaches – and respondents identified this as the leading cause of cloud data breaches. For those organisations that have suffered a data breach in the past 12 months, misconfiguration or human error was the primary cause identified by 52% of respondents in India and 55% globally. This was followed by the exploitation of a known vulnerability (21% in India as well as globally), and of a zero day / previously unknown vulnerability (21% in India and 13% globally). The report finds that identity and access management (IAM) is the best defence, with 28% of respondents globally identifying it as the most effective tool to mitigate these risks.

Meanwhile, the severity of ransomware attacks appears to be declining, with 35% of 2023 respondents globally reporting that ransomware had a significant impact compared to 44% of respondents reporting similar levels of impact in 2022. The global spend is moving in the right direction too, with 61% reporting (in India and globally) they would shift or add a budget for ransomware tools to prevent future attacks – up from global figure of 57% in 2022 – yet organisational responses to ransomware remain inconsistent. Only 48% of enterprises in India (nearly same as 49% globally) reported having a formal ransomware response plan, while 82% (67% globally) still report data loss from ransomware attacks.

Addressing the challenges of digital sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is becoming more top of mind for data privacy and security teams. Overall, the report found that data sovereignty remains both a short- and long-term challenge for enterprises. 82% (nearly same as 83% globally) expressed concerns over data sovereignty, and 44% (55% globally) agreed that data privacy and compliance in the cloud has become more difficult, likely due to emergence of requirements around digital sovereignty.

Emerging threats from quantum computers that could attack classical encryption schemes are also a cause for concern for organisations. The report found that Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (“HNDL”) and future network decryption were the greatest security concerns globally from quantum computing – with 62% and 55% reporting concerns respectively. While Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) has emerged as a discipline to counter these threats, the report found that 62% of organisations globally have five or more key management systems, presenting a challenge for PQC and crypto agility.

Ashish Saraf, VP and Country Director, Thales – India, comments: “Enterprises continue to see a serious threat landscape in India and globally. The findings of our report indicate good progress is being made in certain areas, including Multi-Factor Authentication adoption and increased use of data encryption. However, there is still a lot of security gaps regarding data visibility. In an increasingly cloud-first world, where cloud based storage is being perceived in India as one of the biggest target for cyber-attacks by the report, organisations must maintain better control over their data so they can serve their stakeholders with greater safety and trust. With half of the organisations surveyed in India observing an increase in cyber-attacks, businesses need to focus on implementing robust security measures to protect against.”

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Nutanix, the hybrid multi cloud company, kicked off the calendar year 2023 with its flagship event “From HCI to Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix 2.0” across multiple cities. The Bangalore chapter, held on the 17th of March at The Ritz-Carlton Bangalore, witnessed unprecedented participation from the company’s customers, partners and IT leaders with over 400 people in attendance. 

Faiz Shakir, Managing Director – Sales, Nutanix India & SAARC, who delivered the keynote, highlighted the India growth journey to the top as an economy and drew parallels to Nutanix’s success story as one of the fastest growing brands. 

“India’s emergence as the 5^th largest economy in the world, surpassing even the UK, has been remarkable. We are soon to become the third largest economy in the world and is home to the second largest internet user-base in the whole world. Such an outstanding success is built on the foundation of “freedom of choice” – the exact same ethos that Nutanix stands for, right from day one.” 

He emphasized that Nutanix’s long-standing strategy to enable technology choices without vendor lock-in has been instrumental for its success. “We have made massive strides in India in the past two years. 10 out of 10 banks in India use Nutanix products. India’s largest insurer is our customer. So are the largest airline, ITeS companies, retailers, hospitals and so on. We know we have come a long way since we started our operations in India and we are indebted to our customers for this success,” Shakir added. 

JG Premkumar, Systems Engineering Lead – Strategic Business, Nutanix India & Sri Lanka, who gave an overview of Nutanix’s innovation journey, stressed upon the fact that IT leaders today want to create scalable, resilient, repeatable, and do-it-yourself solutions. Proprietary software and vendor lock-in often come in the way of achieving these goals. “At a time when technology leaders are constantly prioritizing ‘how to do things differently’ to provide the best customer experience, the right cloud strategy has become all the more critical,” he added. 

An insightful panel discussion moderated by Amit Sharma, Head – Customer Advocacy, Nutanix, featured senior technology veterans from the industry. The panelists deliberated on how each of them led impactful transformation within their organizations, set the stage for next phase of growth and made competitive advantage. They talked about how the right cloud infrastructure helped them drive business results and disruptive innovation.  

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