MUMBAI : Vineet Pol, CEO & MD, of Nashik MIDC based Avdhoot Heat Treat, that makes components for industrial furnaces had to spend almost 15 days without access to crucial financial data during the lockdown. All because the servers in their on-premise data centre (DC) collapsed and their business came to a standstill.
“We could not prepare orders for dispatch because all our data was inaccessible and we could not even generate receipts. We immediately decided to move to a co-located data center provider and decided to discard our on-premise servers because we never want to face this situation again," said Pol.
Pol’s IT team had to run pillar to post across the state during the lockdown simply to arrange spare parts for the faulty servers.
Pol wasn’t alone in making this decision as the extended covid-19 related lockdown forced many businesses to recognise the need for a stronger cloud presence. Enterprises realised that on-premise data centers were more of a hurdle as they don't necessarily have dedicated hardware specialists and spares to cope with the complexities. They are moving to co-located centres and as a backup to public cloud solutions as well now.
Sterling and Wilson which provides containerised data centre solutions for clients seeking to move to the cloud has noted an increasing frequency of demands from co-location DCs compared to the those seeking to set up their in-house DC. “We have seen requests from smaller enterprises which have already have their own in-house data centres are increasingly requesting for space in co-location and public cloud offerings. Which is why we are now engineer these projects which require global DC efficiency standards to be implemented on a larger scale," said Prasanna Sarambale - CEO, Data Center business and Group Head - Business Development, Sterling and Wilson.
A major chunk of these movement were orchestrated during or immediately after the lockdown. Most of the larger co-located data centre and cloud businesses were able to function seamlessly during the lockdown as the department of telecommunication had enabled them essential services passes along with the telecom operators. This was not possible for in-house data centre staff across businesses.
“Basically, during the lockdown businesses realised that they could not reach the location to resolve issues, there was no manpower, transport facility or even supply of spares which crippled their processes and online presence and hence the need to outsource this requirement. Customers are moving applications across end consumer experience and digital workspaces outside premise," said Piyush Somani, founder, CMD and CEO at ESDS Software which facilitated the cloud migration for Pol.
“Earlier, there was a reluctance to move production environments to the cloud (outside premise) but now they are considering migration of everything from core applications to production environments, critical platforms and underlying IT infrastructure. However, the migration might not be a one-time exercise and would be done in a staggered manner," said Preethi Menon, VP – Alliances, Practices and Pre-Sales, Clover Infotech which has recently migrated customers across food processing, a leading NBFC and a leading small finance bank respectively to the cloud during the lockdown.
Menon added that applications that facilitate processes wherein the mandates have been changed from compulsory physical presence of the customer to a more friendly digital authentication such as KYC processes are witnessing an increased demand for robust and secure cloud presence.
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