Data centre rationalises computing resources at Titan Company

Titan Company has a captive data centre. It is running on a hybrid mode. A few systems are hosted in-house and the rest are on the public cloud. The company runs systems such as Oracle, SAP, applications for the CRM, ecommerce, etc. The core systems – ERP is hosted in the data centre and the ecommerce is on the cloud and the CRM is cloud native.

On a daily basis, the amount of data handled runs into gigabytes/terabytes. The ERP is hosted on a dedicated infrastructure and it has been like that for many years. The other applications are hosted on a software defined framework. “We have over 300 VMs and across them, we host all the portals, BPM and other systems,” informs Krishnan Venkateswaran, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Titan Company.

The software uses the hardware efficiently in a software defined scenario. As a result, Titan has been able to rationalise the computing resources much better.

The data centre team has been adequately trained by the OEMs to run the software defined infrastructure.

In respect to the cloud scenario, self service capabilities haven’t been subscribed as yet. “The individual functions and business teams cannot create their own machines and capacities because our needs are not that intense,” states Venkateswaran.

Titan hosts a complex IT architecture. The in-store local systems talk to the cloud, which in turn aggregates the data from all the PoS’ from across the country and ships it to the core systems hosted in the data centre.

Titan has a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for green building, which covers the data centre too. The availability of the data centre is close to a hundred per cent. “Our unplanned downtime is close to zero,” says Venkateswaran. The DR site is based in Chennai.

The data centre has adequate perimeter protection with internal and external audits conducted regularly. There is a rigorous system of access control monitoring. The cross validation of staff accessing the company’s system is automated and the logs are generated for review. “A cloud proxy has also been put in place to secure the company’s systems when they are accessed outside of the company’s perimeter. The SOC has also been established equipped with automated log monitoring and pattern recognition,” Venkateswaran.

The future will belong to hybrid cloud and on premise. The private cloud is not going away. Companies, depending upon the personal requirements, policy, security and localisation concerns. On premise will be used for certain legacy applications, which are critical to the company. “Many payloads are already shifting to one or multiple cloud providers and companies will find it wise to distribute their computing assets across multiple cloud providers. Containerisation of applications is an absolute imperative,” mentions Venkateswaran.

The choice of Software as a Service (SaaS) for delivering functionalities will also be critical. The infrastructure, platform all come together in one package. The decision to adopt SaaS will be driven by the functionalities delivered by a particular vendor in certain technology areas.

The containerisation part becomes critical while evaluating Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The applications in a containerised environment can be moved from one cloud to the other in seconds. CIOs will also have to decide on the reasons to go for platform as a service (PaaS) to develop applications on the go. The platform should be able to keep the users independent and should be compelling enough to invest. These platforms enable to design applications faster than working on them from scratch.

As API usage to connect applications grow, the cloud model will also gain more traction.