Business continuation, cloud backup and storage optimization are the rising demands from Fortune 500 companies in India as data continues to grow amidst the digital evolution. Veritas reveals how their 360 Data Management Suite is satisfying their clients under the datasphere.

Balaji Rao, MD,India and SAARC, Veritas in an interview with BW Businessworld discusses the growing demands of companies and large enterprises in terms of data storage and optimization. He states that Veritas is witnessing huge potential in the nascent data storage and optimization market in India. With automation at the core of their strategy, data policies and management are processed with respect to the current needs of the data protection environment. Veritas today works with 82% of the Fortune 500 countries worldwide. 

• With new regulations out like GDPR and RBI, how is India reacting to the data protection environment according to Veritas?

GDPR is the first one to come on board from a privacy side on a large EU standpoint and its been followed by a lot of countries globally. Given the nature for stringent penalties for not adopting these policies or not following that gives it a very serious nature and customers who are doing business transactions in Europe have been taking the necessary protective measures on the same. At the same time, if you look at most customers in India and abroad I think the inability to know the kind of data they have in their enterprises are one of the hindrances we see in GDPR. Today as you can find in the databugs survey in and around data, useful data in organizations is very low. 85% of overall data is not required or do not need visibility into and 15% which is the last useful kind of data. Veritas steps in to work on data visibility issues faced by organizations and we are here to explain the landscape and segregate that information from harmful data. We also have the ability to park unwanted data in more cost efficient hoarding centers or move it to cloud where the organization can access it as and when they require. We then classify the data and create policies around it making sure our clients are not only compliant once but in the future as well. This is something we do for a living from an information stand point. 

• While cost for preserving data is increasing year on year, why should businesses in India see data as a positive item on their balance sheets?

Today, we are talking about structured and unstructured data. For a bank or a financial institution structured data is extremely important because that is the customer's database. But unstructured data is growing 10 times more. Industries have an archival of more than 10 years of data and the number of retention of years is growing. Analyzing the important data given that 60% of storage management cost and finding resources increasingly difficult in complex storage environment. For all secondary storage of data needs we ensure that there is high level of dedupe available, software defined storage for long term retention and the policies integrated with hardware and software both so you have an integrated comprehensive system. We not only provide visibility but we move that data into cost efficient systems and are largely scalable. Businesses in India can see data as a positive item on the balance sheets where we provide cost efficient methods to classify and preserve data along with providing visibility of the information being stored.

• How would you describe the data growth in India? Where do you see 'Big Data' and the future of digital transformation?

Absolutely, the data growth is phenomenal in India and a Fortune 100 company in a year would accumulate about 10 PB of data on an average. In India I see a handful of people inching towards that goal. While we probably might get there our companies would be bigger in terms of data as we are the second largest population in the world and I'm pretty sure that digitization will continue to disrupt the markets in this country. There is a lot more credence our CIOs have today with CEOs and thanks to the digital journey that most folks are taking, data has become the real oil and the biggest reserves are here in India. Big data is one of the key things that organizations are doing and this is directly aligned with the business. When you think of backup, it is a security need but Big Data is a business initiatives. Manly the purpose is to gather all the data from complex cylos under a central pool, analyzed to derive a business value. Hence, the future is heading towards intelligence and where it is stored and extract value along with intelligence for the future. 

• What are your thoughts on cloud adoption as a medium of data storage?

We see a trend both ways and as I said earlier, it depends on the regulatory environment and the nature of the business. One doesn't want to make a decision to blindly switch to cloud. One would want to validate the output to be gained out of that and the complex applications behind it. Not all applications require burst and there has to be a choice in the right candidate between elasticity and burst before switching to cloud. Cloud is more beneficial for startups and IT which are less regulatory compared to most businesses and are driven more out of customer contracts find it easier to play the opex capex game.

• 82% of Fortune 500 companies entrust their data with Veritas. What made this all possible over a period of 20 years?

We have been working with these companies for over 2 decades because in business we back up for several years. Most companies have a 10-11 year window of data backup but for most companies this happens over a lifetime. Putting up a business case in such a situation is a challenge because our spends would end up creating a loss for us. All these are challenges in different was to see and we are helping our customers with respect to long term retention. Our products and services are time-tested and in a multi cloud environment we have all the tools for our customers to move to the next era of cloud with Veritas.

• Many of the big sized companies, brands, financial institutions and government bodies work closely with Veritas's 360 Data Management Suite. How is this product specifically meeting the demands of your clients?

When you look at data management in the past was just backup and as it grew it brought along the complexities of data centers. The complexities grew from both the infrastructure and a data-szie standpoint including the ideators of the public cloud environment as well. The 360 Degree Data Management is our answer to the complexities in which our customers are moving towards. Data protection is a key pillar protecting the information. But then comes the resiliency and the business continuity which is extremely crucial in moving the data center to the cloud or in between two cloud networks. Given that there is a little bit of risk out there, protecting the data in such cases is important. Hence we move data in between cloud and DR to the cloud to make multiple copies that can be retrieved in case of any crisis. Business continuity is one of the other pillars that forms the 360 Data Management Suite. Data visibility and data compliance also contribute to retrieving any lost digital information. Hence we execute all these services from a long-term archival perspective which falls under the digital compliance strategy. We at Veritas also pay key attention to Data Visibility and Data Classification and of course comes the storage optimization having the ability to move the data to cloud. All these are facets of 360 Value Creation and at the core of it is the automation engine which helps discover and define policies. Without automation in today's world you can't run IT. At the heart of our system is the automation which processes policies, frameworks and  management. This is an extremely robust platform with more than 20 years of depth with respect to metadata management and now optimized for the multi-cloud era.