Nowadays, all companies are tech companies because all of them are data firms — and data is business currency. “Business goals require technology enablement; that is why we are witnessing the role of CIO evolving to provide that strategic business enablement,” Ravi Naik, CIO & executive vice-president, Storage Services, Seagate Technology, tells Sudhir Chowdhary, in a recent interview. Excerpts:
How can organisations harness data to derive value, increase efficiency, and boost scalability in their business models?
For too many organisations, data is an underused, intangible asset that’s unseen on a balance sheet. This way of treating data fails to account for its power to improve revenue sources, customer experiences, and operational efficiencies. There is no lack of data in India to analyse — quite the opposite. India’s enterprise data’s annual growth rate, projected at 45.2% (2022), is the third fastest worldwide, according to Seagate’s Rethink Data report.
Technology should not be treated as merely IT territory. Regardless of industry segment, all companies are technology companies because all companies are data companies — and data is business currency. Business goals require technology enablement; that is why we are witnessing the role of CIO evolving to provide that strategic business enablement. As they play more proactive roles in innovation, IT organisations can scale up the technology stack, help run the business, and provide ideas to build new businesses.
That’s what’s happened at Seagate. Seagate’s data analytics team played a critical role in shaping our storage-as-a-service business. We first developed these storage and analytics businesses to solve our own multicloud data problem—the unpredictable, prohibitive cloud economics and other sources of multicloud friction. Within a two-year period, through the analytics framework developed by the team, we saw significant efficiency increase in our wafer cycle time. We anticipate an additional three-fold increase as our analytics framework advances within the Lyve Cloud Analytics platform over the coming years, resulting in significant capital savings.
How is Seagate ensuring data security throughout its platforms and products?
Seagate leads the way in data security, thanks to our long history with data storage that has given us an edge with self-encrypting drives and Seagate Secure (the always-on data protection technology that protects your data at rest). We believe customer data belongs to the customer. Sounds simple, but it’s not a given these days. With zero backdoors and high-level security features, Lyve Cloud puts the customer in full control of their data.
The storage-as-a-service was built with data security and privacy in mind, as demonstrated by its ISO 27001 and SOC-2 certifications. By design, data encryption cannot be disabled within Lyve Cloud. This means data is always encrypted at rest and in flight. Furthermore, ransomware protection safeguards data from malicious attacks while object immutability protects data from accidental manipulation or deletion.
How is cloud storage-as-a-service gaining ground in India?
The increased adoption of multicloud storage-as-a-service (StaaS) has been a key trend in recent years. Enterprises in India are pursuing multicloud storage as their data management strategy in order to enable innovation. According to Seagate’s Multicloud Maturity Report, 88% Indian senior business and IT leaders (compared to 78% worldwide) noted it is critical to pursue a multicloud storage strategy to achieve long-term business and technology goals.
Without storage friction, companies can control data costs and scale innovation for business success. Invariably, companies that win are the ones that keep down multicloud data-related costs while scaling data-driven innovation. This frees up business data as it makes its journey from creation to insight, from insight to innovation, from innovation to market—and finally from market to greater business value.