Interview: Seamless Data Protection From Edge To Cloud

In an exclusive interview for BW Businessworld, Ranganath Sadasiva, Chief Technology Officer, Hybrid IT for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India spoke to Rohit Chintapali. The interaction saw the technology professional elaborate on the importance of modernizing data protection and more.  

Edited Excerpts:

With the rapid growth of data, what are the challenges that organisations face in modernizing data protection today?

The rapid growth of data today is beyond comprehension. For organisations, we are seeing data grow on the edge, core, data centres and also in the cloud. So, it’s important to ensure that there is a significant amount of data protection. According to IDC, close to 60 per cent of data will be on the edge as we move forward. This means that the scale of geography, where your data resides is changing very dramatically. And the second challenge that I see is in terms of volume and diversity of threats. 

Earlier, there was a notion of fortifying your infrastructure, for a fort-and-moat kind of a concept, but that is now gone. Today, the threat can come in from anywhere.

Your data protection needs to be as deep rooted as possible because the threat also can be very deep rooted. Certain threats can actually work at the lowest of your hardware level – even at a chip level. So, you have to ensure that protection is through and through, across the board. 

Ransomware are actually exposing a lot of ineffective protection that's in the marketplace today. They are not good enough to handle cyberattacks. You need to be keen on ensuring that there is data protection of the highest order today. And it’s also becoming a C-level priority for organisations. 

If you look at data losses and any kind of downtime, they are not very acceptable today as it means bad headlines, it means disruption of business, and it means loss of revenue. There are so many other things that are happening also because there are a lot of fragmented technologies, fragmented solutions being used by organisations today. People will have to look at modernizing data protection, especially in the wake of growing data and threat landscape.

Speaking of disruptions, down times can be hugely disruptive to companies and they can cost businesses millions of dollars. So, how can companies minimize them?

The cost of downtime is not only about physical and revenue losses. In this competitive world, you could always lose more, like a lot of customers as well. It could impact employee productivity also. If you want to minimize this, it can be done by design. This way, you can enhance availability and build resilience.

In the context of data protection, one needs to have a data protection strategy that is backed up by the right kind of technology. Because technology also can confuse you today. Hence, right technology and the right strategy becomes important. For instance, HPE speaks of the three-to-one policy in terms of data backup, which is essentially having three copies in two different medias and one offsite. Those kind of policies and strategies can be implemented. 

From an HPE perspective, we go out to the market space today and we speak of continuous data protection. It is a technology where you backup continuously over a period of time. What it delivers is – minutes to seconds kind of recovery point objective (RPO) in organisations. It is a single solution, which essentially works across the board and helps organisations mitigate downtime and disruption. This solution is called Zerto. It works across the board and covers all kinds of data protection. And it works in all kind of environments including on-prem scenarios, cloud (multi-cloud also), and even cloud-native environments. 

The threat landscape is changing so rapidly. But the best you can do is, by design, ensure that you are protected against any kind of disruptions. 

Apple has recently introduced passwordless as the future of security. What is HPE’s approach to security?

We look at security more comprehensively across all the stacks of a given organization. When Apple is talking about end user security, we build our security and data protection or cyber protection programs that includes end users and go right up to an application to hardware to even chip. We would be open to put all of that together in case it is making sense to the end customer. From our perspective, where applications and data reside, there still is a lot of data protection capabilities that we build in. Silicon root of trust is something that is a technology which is integrated onto every server that we sell. Essentially, it ensures that you can look for any kind of malware or ransomware, right from the CPU to the smallest components within the server. And this way you build a zero-trust architecture. 

If you're looking at the portfolio that we build around the server, there is zero-trust architecture, which also to an extent covers the operating system as well as a virtual machine or a container. From there on, other components of the stack fall in place. We build a lot of security in our networking portfolio as well. So, it is like a Lasagna. Every layer needs to be built on a zero-trust fundamental today. And that is what we are able to kind of consult and deliver to organizations. It is going to be interesting to see how this manifests as we move forward.

Around the topic of data protection, what is HPE's vision?

Any digital transformation is data transformation for us. We strongly believe that our focus in data protection works towards seamless data protection from edge to cloud. It is today important to ensure that we have seamless data protection, which is across the geography of an IT.

As far as our vision translating to an offering goes, we have GreenLake for data protection, where you are able to really back up and harness the true value of your data. The way we approach data protection is that whatever is the kind of data you have, if you have an SLA for that – that SLA should be met. It should be as easy as you get into the cloud from a cost stand perspective. Your upfront expenses need to be as minimal as possible, so that you're not over-provisioning. It should be available on demand. It should be cloud-native and you should have all the recovery services to ensure that you are able to meet your RPO and RTO demands. 

We recently acquired and brought into our IP, a company called Zerto. And with that CDP IP that we have, we are essentially breaking free the paradigm of data protection.

We are saying that we can protect your data wherever it is and ensure that RPOs are completely met and are in line with the business requirements that works all across the board, whether it is data in the cloud, or on-prem, or on any infrastructure. Essentially, it is kind of religionless that way and helps enterprises with data protection across the board to usher them towards seamless data protection.