The physical data centres are also the point of genesis of the public cloud environment, private cloud environment, and shared / CO-LO environment
Automation can be a challenge where the design and configurations are dynamic and cannot be replicated from one instance to another, network configurations are solely dependent on the enterprise requirements
Kunal Bhatt, Head Automation Practice at CMS IT Service
What are the factors driving the Data Centres market in India?
The physical data centres are also the point of genesis of the public cloud environment, private cloud environment, and shared / CO-LO environment. For India, the driving factors are real-estate, connectivity, power and cost of each element, respectively. In the post-pandemic period, the availability of resources and uptime have gained more value in terms of nonstop availability from the cloud and the availability of green power and renewable energy is boosting the growth of Data Centres in India.
How automation is an influential factor for Data Centres’ growth?
Automation today drives the deployments, service optimization, SLAs & the OLAs. The function of automation is to have the work completed with zero-touch support and improve human efficiency with help of AI/ML. Just building DC infrastructure will not help, the customer is expecting an immediate ramp up / ramp down of services, the automation helps in zero-touch support that can be triggered by any person based on available SOPs.
What is your opinion on the growth of edge computing?
On the global front edge computing is a hot cake. In India, with the advent of 5G services, we will see a surge in the adoption of edge computing. From government bodies to PSUs to telcos, manufacturing, and BSFI, everyone who invests in edge computing is to benefit from this.
What is the road map of CMS IT Services in the Indian Data Centres market?
CMS IT Services is a focused service provider, while we are not providing DC from a real estate perspective, CMS IT Services offers DC and DR as a service in collaboration with partners. We are focussed on helping customers build data centres for the hosted environment or private cloud, we see the Indian Data Centres market doubling up in the coming 5 years, and so will the services that are needed to run them.
In your opinion, which are the sectors that are showing a faster adoption of AI?
The world sees the Indian market in the list of top ten in terms of AI adoption. From India’s perspective, every industry is in the race and there are front runners in each. Sectors like FSIs, micro-finance companies, Logistics, hospitality, healthcare, and advertising have taken a lead and leap in adopting AI.
In recent times, Enterprises have started automating IT Infrastructure support activities to increase their end-user productivity and minimize IT costs by reducing technical resources.
Yes, end-user support is the noisiest while it needs the most basic knowledge to support. Automation is the key here. Chatbots are replacing the level 1 service support team by managing routine queries and responding faster, chatbots are multi-lingual and available 24/7 to respond to queries, they also create a service ticket that helps in measuring productivity and adoption. Self Help and Self Heal solutions are other methods that enterprises are adopting to for users to do a few required guided activities on their own, thus further reducing the dependency on technical resources, this helps the technical resources to focus on the right issues and improve, add more solutions to the chatbot, Self Help and Self Heal solutions.
Kindly tell us about the key pitfalls of data centre network automation.
Automation can be a challenge where the design and configurations are dynamic and cannot be replicated from one instance to another, network configurations are solely dependent on the enterprise requirements. This is a major challenge in network automation, apart from this in a Data Centre environment the network
team is responsible for, device provisioning, de-provisioning, asset lifecycle management, patching and updating the devices, and moving from out-of-box configurations to custom configurations. Such dynamic requirements and configurations level tuning is a major pitfall for network automation.
How is end-user technology evolving and what are the areas where we can effectively implement End-User Support Automation?
Work from Anywhere, BYOD and multi-device access have blurred the lines of focused end-user technical support. Enterprises are adopting AI/ML-driven platforms to support the end user. EUS Automation can be deployed for Level 1 and Level 2 support on applications installation, access approvals, password resets, etc and for other routine tasks, this can be achieved with help of a chatbot, and self-help tools. Asset health monitoring, management, problem identification and resolution can be done by a mix of User Experience management tools and Self Heal tools.
What are CMS IT services’ key offerings?
CMS IT services offer end-user, Data Centre, network, cyber security and cloud services automation solutions that help enterprises achieve their goals in the journey towards being a complete digitally-driven enterprise. We are a pivotal System Integration and managed service provider to the India market.
