By Srinivas Tadigadapa – Director, Enterprise Solutions – Intel South Asia
In a recent seemingly sci-fi incident, a first of its kind cyber-attack grounded a Polish airline completely paralyzing its ground operations and forcing a cancellation of 10 flights from Warsaw!
An even more unexpected attack was successfully carried out when hackers broke into a large, global retail giant’s network through the remotely managed HVAC system(!) and stole its customer data for commercial gain. While outsourcing the function of energy management is common practice among large retail companies, the thought that baffled many in the Industry was how hackers find the most vulnerable points of entry to steal data or manipulate networks for financial gain.
One would image that given the scale and size of the entities in question, significant investments would have been made in creating a robust and secure back-end and while this is actually the fact, the attacks jolted the community at large to realize how complex the security environment is increasingly becoming and how vulnerable we really are.
Panning in on India and how the digital universe here is fast evolving to catch up with the evolved economies of the west, the threat of increased and complex targeted hacks/ attacks only poses more real and present danger! Be it the personal data we add on our devices to the appliances we control through our cellphones, with every digital element we add to our lives, we remove one more barrier between our privacy and the hacker lurking in the digital blur.
What then is the right way to go, especially in an era when all of India is looking forward to being a part of the Digital India dream and the connected devices revolution!
‘Digital’ is the new normal!
Digital is the new mantra to work, play and grow in a connected world. Today the whole nation is experiencing a new transition as it moves towards being digitally one. Digital India is not just an ambition but the only way to effectively exploit technology to benefit the larger society.
In such a scenario, imagination is the only limitation to the endless possibilities that connected technology can bring and the way it can change our lives.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the back bone to this connected world and the wonderful amalgamation of new age technology within devices can bring alive the devices to help them talk to us. Data is the reality that is driving critical decisions and together with data centres and smart devices we can build a whole new smart and connected world. This will seamlessly connect citizens across India to each other thus, connecting the country into one combined universe making Digital the only new normal.
The data center as the critical backbone
As the Government of India marches forward towards making the Digital India dream a reality, the digital economy in India is only expected to grow multi-fold. In addition to this, the Government’s ambition of creating an IoT industry of $15 billion by 2020 will further compound this digital economy growth as connected devices are expected to increase from around the current 200 million to over 2.7 billion by 2020.
All of this put together is indicative of the kind of data deluge we can expect to be engulfed in over the next 12-16 months and the investments that urgently need to be made to build out our current data center infrastructure and make it available and ready for the revolution to come.
The big picture of a connected India rests on a robust inter-connected backbone of datacenters to monitor, control, optimize and sustain the inflow of unstructured data from all the connected devices. To attain this vision, the datacenter of the future needs to be re-architected to help derive insights from data collected and make it usable to develop new services, enhance productivity and efficiency, improve real-time decision making, solve critical problems, and create innovative and unprecedented experiences.
However, as more devices connect, the challenge of increased fragmentation, interoperability, and security will also arise. And hence, the solution lies in delivering integrated, scalable hardware and software solutions specifically designed to meet diverse market needs that seamlessly integrate into existing infrastructure to enhance security, reliability, and efficiency. The intelligent gateway will determine how every devices talks to each other in a smooth way and making internet of things come alive to create smart services to enhance the quality of life for citizens.
Collaboration is key to go-digital
A digitally connected economy will offer India many opportunities to drive economic value and social change. And to be able to take advantage of this opportunity, the need of the hour is to have an end-to-end platform for connecting the unconnected—allowing data from trillions of devices, sensors, and databases to be securely gathered, exchanged, stored, and analyzed across multiple industries.
With security, inter-operability and connectivity forming the three main pillars for a robust and scalable digital infrastructure, it is essential for developers and technology providers to collaborate and work at the center of a vibrant ecosystem speeding its development. It is only with collaboration that we can successfully bring together a range of expertise and abilities required to create the solution focused value chain that can connect devices and cloud services, and turn raw data into useful information, ultimately benefiting Industries and the economy at large.