The Asian Age interviews Director and GM Mr Ripu Bajwa of Dell Technologies

Technological advancements and rapid adoption of new-age technologies have created a need for customers as well as businesses to secure and protect their data in a cost-effective manner. In an interview with The Asian Age, Mr Ripu Bajwa, Director & General Manager - Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, shares his perspective on how the data protection landscape has evolved over the years along with a set of data protection trends that will gain momentum this year. 

Q. How has the Indian Data Protection landscape evolved in the past few years?

Over the years, India has undergone a momentous transition to become a digital economy. This coupled with the rapid proliferation of emerging technologies such as AI, ML, IoT, analytics etc., has resulted in a data surge. As per a study*, it was found out that on an average, organizations in India are managing 6.42 PB of data. As organizations move ahead in their digital transformation journeys, they are increasingly recognizing the value of their data and the need to protect it. This has led to a constant evolution of the data protection landscape in the country. 

At Dell Technologies, we offer a holistic and robust data protection portfolio helping businesses to better protect their data as well as monetize it, enabling them to deliver better business outcomes.

Q. What are the new trends that will emerge in the data protection landscape in the year 2020?

The year 2020 marks the beginning of the next data decade. As data grows and becomes more critical to organizations, ensuring its protection has become their new business imperative. Looking at this evolution, there are three trends which will dominate the data protection landscape in India this year: 

• Focus on Disaster Recovery rather than Disaster Management: Loss of critical data has the power to cripple any business in no time. Therefore, going ahead, in order to protect their valuable data sets against external outrages or information loss, organisations will look towards imbibing disaster recovery strategies as a form of insurance. 
• Need for 24*7 Data Protection: Since most of the businesses are now operating on a 24*7 basis, there has been a significant increase in data generation. As organisations move towards putting more weightage on this data to derive valuable insights, it has become a priority for them to deploy robust data protection solutions which offer round the clock protection. Hence, we will see products that have the ability to create real-time backup and automatically send updates to the live data set. 
• Shift Towards Cost-Effective Solutions: With the growth of SMBs in the country, demand for data protection solutions is on the rise. There is an increased awareness amongst all businesses, both large and small, regarding the importance of these solutions. Hence, companies will start looking at providing cost-effective and holistic data protection solutions to cater to the needs of SMBs.

Q. Could you elaborate on the outlook of enterprises and customers towards adopting data protection solutions?

Today, Indian organizations are looking at data protection in a positive light. They have become more sensitive to how data flows between internal and external entities. As per a survey conducted by Dell Technologies, data protection adopters sprang forward from 12% in 2016 to 60% in 2018. This gives a clear indication of how organizations are increasing their focus on data protection. 

However, while these organisations have started acknowledging data as the new oil, they are still lagging behind in terms of adoption of data protection as a core business strategy. Having said that, given the growth of data in the country, we can expect organizations to invest heavily in data protection solutions in the next decade.

Q. What are the latest data protection advancements made by Dell Technologies that will help organizations better manage and protect their data?

Dell Technologies understands the various hurdles that organisations face while protecting and managing their data. Therefore, to enable businesses in simplifying their data landscape, better optimise their workload and secure their data assets efficiently, we offer a holistic and an innovative data protection portfolio across environments - from edge to core to cloud. Our latest addition is Dell EMC PowerProtect DD Series appliances that offer our customers the ability to simplify and provide operational efficiencies for data protection of multi-cloud workloads. Some of its key features are Faster Performance; Greater Efficiency; Scalability to meet future demands as well as Data Protection for multi-cloud workloads.

Q. What is the go-to-market strategy of Dell Technologies for the year 2020? 

As one of the largest technology brands in India, we have always worked towards spreading the importance of data protection for organisations by adopting a unique go-to-market strategy. Currently, our focus is to drive better customer engagement and reach. Through a host of approaches such as direct sales engagement, partner-led engagement and distribution led engagement, we are helping our customers manage their data capital from edge to core to cloud environments.