[gallery size="medium" td_select_gallery_slide="slide" td_gallery_title_input="‘Change, a vital aspect on the way we do business'" ids="123693,123694,123695,123696"] By L. Ramnarayan "We have to be open for change. We have to be open for change on the way we manage our business, for the benefit of our wellbeing and for our business health. Things are changing and technology is becoming a very important, vital aspect of the way we run our business today," said Area Vice President of Commvault Middle East and Africa Bassam Hemdan in a telephonic interview with Saudi Gazette. He was responding to a question on the current economic climate, his recommendations to clients on how to tackle costs and what are the benefits of using the cloud, its tools, and applications for IT firms only. "Cloud computing has completely transformed business. IT organizations have more agility and efficiency than before enabling them to identify new IT service delivery models, and businesses are seeing value in using cloud to test applications and archiving while also seeing the advantages of using cloud for backup and recovery," he said. "Take for example, this call that is being recorded digitally, that would be used now and maybe you would need to go back to this data at a later stage and has to be saved somewhere. This is at a personal level for you. I do not know how many recordings you have, but just look at the amount of data taking space, now you might have saved thousands of conversations and how many storage devices or voice recorders you would need. "Let's say the you have that. But if you want to search within these recordings, it would be tough. If I can give you a tool or software that analyzes the interview, that indexes it, searches it and puts it in sequence, then it would be beneficial. This is the type of technology of what data protection could offer you. It is not only about backup anymore, but I need to manage it in much more intelligent way. To do that, I need software. I need a computer to do the analysis. You can't have a point solution to do your backup and another one to do your indexing and another one to do something else. Imagine the enterprise of several pieces of the data in site. "This is where we come in, you don't need that much of extensive hardware to protect your data — one for protection, one for analytics, one for something... but one platform that manages all these things for you. This is where we come in, with our software. What we are asking is be open to change, explore how it'll affect your business and see the paybacks it'll give you and go ahead with it," Hemdan added. On cloud computing taking roots in this region and Saudi Arabia, Hemdan said that the acquisition of our service to cloud solutions is increasingly picking up especially in the last three years. "As you know the whole world and also this region is going through very cost efficiency exercises that's due to the economic transformation map of the sources and hence transformations need to be done accordingly to the way we do business, the way we manage our assets, and to comply with our future plans. "Everybody knows now that for Vision 2030 and transformation of the economic structure, there's a need to effectively manage costs, need to become more advanced when it comes to digitization as well, this is where our technology can come and serve the region and this is where cloud is picking up, and the reason being that data growth is exponential and is not slowing down, whatever the state of the business, whatever the economy... the growth is not slowing whatever the perspective and transformation of technology has always been around managing that growth and managing data. "The old way of doing business where the companies would be dependent on disc-based structures, hardware structures, would be getting more compute, more stores, more data protection and as the data grows needing more upgrades, enhancing infrastructures is passé and that'll eat into a big portion of the budget and it is increasingly demanding (a shift to cloud) from a standing perspective from year after year after year. "And technology to solve these matters, we are realizing, cannot be the same and has to be managed in a different manner. Software-defined solutions are needed, it means that the intelligence of the whole operation would be tackled by the software. You'll have a commodity of hardware soft compute or network or connect or secure or store that would be underlined. There are several data layers that could be held in the cloud, and this is where the cloud comes in. "The cost efficiency would definitely be much more mature, because now you are depending much more on software, way cheaper than managing the hardware. When you have centralized software-defined platforms your administration costs would go lower, your hardware spending would go lower and software spending goes lower etc. The other thing is that when you have an in between layer of on premise and off premise you can take the data for research now and keep it on the cloud, move it back on premise or keep it between cloud and on premise. That's the flexibility that one needs in business because now you do not need to buy hardware for all your operations. For example, if I need to test something, I'll put it on cloud, test it for two months before I put it in operation or shut it down, depending on my needs. "This is exactly where we come in across all layers. What Commvault offers is very unique. Commvault is the software-defined platform for data management. Now every single data from every source is becoming very important and if I can gather them all together then I can raise it, analyze it and it will give me a lot of indicators on how my business is being run and find out what, when and how, and also my consumers attitude towards my business and will allow business leaders to take many decisions. Thus protecting this data has become very important, and you can find out how market was reacting to it was to have point solutions for every issue. "Now Commvault comes in as a software platform such that all of your data points is consolidated in a virtual repository. It'll consolidate and index for you, such that you'll have a repository that you can analyze as well without moving it from its place, you do not need certain hardware to depend on, you'll have a consolidated chart to manage the layers of administrations as well. You'll have a platform that'll give you cost efficiency, and tests have proven that the savings have sometimes exceeded 60%. This is where we come in and this is how we align cost efficiency and data management at different layers." On best practices for data protection and recovery in cloud, specially with most firms in the region using hybrid cloud strategy, Hemdan was of the view that first you need to find your trusted service provider. "A brand that is trusted, a brand that protects you data according to your own .... It'll not manipulate your data and it will protect your data the way you are protecting it locally. That's why one of the main reasons we managed to secure the partnership agreement with STC. STC is not only a Saudi brand, but is a leader in this region, and how rigid they are of always putting customers first. Second, he said, you should have the flexibility of having a tool that manages to move your data between clouds and is multi capable. After trust, flexibility the third thing is to find out what data would be there locally on premise and what would be off premise and how you could integrate everything together, so you would be ready if you want to move from a source provider tomorrow and you want to get all of your data so you would have the flexibility of keeping control on your data and not in the hands of others. Hemdan, while relaying what Commvault is doing with STC to improve data management in the Kingdom, said, "Our solutions enable you to protect your data locally, because instead of buying several devices etc., I'll give you a link that'll enable you to set up on cloud, that'll give you an backup and indexing capability, that'll prove very cost effective for you. You are worry free, am saving you time by acquiring, maintaining and securing this stuff. I'm saving you money. It's a whole end-to-end view. I'm giving you one single platform to do the whole thing and how to manage things without confusions or contradictions. "This is what we are giving to our customers, a platform, a singularity, that touches all your data needs, giving what you want for data protection with much more advanced capabilities. It is hardware agnostic and 100% user defined. It is seen by Gartner as one of the leaders." Answering the question about how firms in Kingdom compare with firms in the region in data management and which market is the fastest growing in the region, Hemdan said, "From a growth perspective, at least from our side, they (the Gulf countries) are all growing. Growing from the technology aspect that we deal with. Why, because even with the economic challenges that the region is facing, there's a need for technology acquisition in order to achieve those merits of diverse economy, cost efficiency etc. and digitization could help them acquire the technology they need to do so. And the growth (technology) is absolutely phenomenal. The overall shift makes much more sense business wise. "Yes Saudi is the largest market, regardless of the challenges and I like the way Saudi Arabia is managing these challenges in a very, very, very smart way. They are recovering quite rapidly, they are doing the right thing. And the investments are going to the right places to help the Vision 2030, especially the speed of the executions of the points is phenomenal." When asked whether growth means new personnel and whether Saudi Arabia has qualified personnel to manage or sustain this technology, Hemdan stated, "I think it needs a two-way strategy. Technology has to be easy enough, user-friendly to be managed by simple technicians. If it is very complex nobody will be able to use it. This is where Commvault comes in, it really drives away the complexity of interfacing and managing. It is so easy that it could be done by very low technological site and not complex data platforms etc. The other thing is education and level of sophistication and the quality of education this region has is quite phenomenal." Hemdan rounded off by saying that corporates need to look at how numerous solutions could cost to protect this data while a software platform offered by his company could drop the cost on administration, infrastructure and software spend and increase the ability to protect data, lower downtime and increase efficiency that makes technological sense. "We in Commvault offer all that and show how you do it, we help you in overall savings and the benefits of such solutions."
