Enterprise of the Future will be Edge-Centric, Cloud-Enabled, and Data-Driven: HPE

In this exclusive interview with Amit Singh, Bhawna Agarwal, Country Head – Strategy and Growth, HPE India, sheds light on the transformative power of Cloud Computing 2.0 and its impact on the technology landscape and digital transformation efforts across industries.

In what specific use cases and industry applications are technologies like serverless computing, edge computing, and AI integration making the most significant impact in Cloud Computing 2.0?
In a data-driven world, Cloud Computing drives digital transformation as it drives insights for business transformation. Hence the choice of compute is critical for the success of digital transformation efforts. As we enter Cloud Computing 2.0, compute should be engineered for your hybrid world with an Intuitive cloud operating experience, with security by design to deliver trust and optimized for various workloads.

The new-age workloads are taking center stage and we are witnessing a significant increase in analytics and AI-based workloads which are CPU and GPU-intensive along with container workloads and computing for data solutions and analytics. We can see a rise in the demand for edge computing, however, we are yet to see a large-scale adoption.

What are the potential benefits and challenges businesses may face when adopting and integrating Cloud Computing 2.0 solutions?
As the amount of data being generated and shared continues to increase and consumers demand more access to online services, it has become more difficult for companies to continue operating their businesses on in-house computing servers.

Moving to the cloud is giving organizations of every scale, the ability to move faster, be more agile, and innovate their businesses. The shift to cloud computing has completely transformed how we work, communicate, and collaborate and is soon becoming a necessity to stay competitive in today’s digital world.

Cloud Computing provides several benefits, including increased agility, flexibility, scalability, and reliability. One of the key challenges facing cloud computing is how to ensure that data is protected from unauthorized access and misuse. Another challenge is mitigating the impact of disruptions to cloud services, such as outages or natural disasters.

How does the Cloud Computing 2.0 paradigm influence the development and deployment of cloud-native applications and architectures, and what advantages does it offer to organizations?
Cloud Computing provides a platform that helps in increased agility for organizations. This means that organizations are reducing time to innovation. The availability of all application development resources at a click enables organizations to move to more agile methods of development, use Micro-services architecture and work on CI/CD pipelines with pace.

We are seeing good adoption of Containers for Application development for most Digital transformation efforts in the country. Many legacy applications are being containerized to ensure that the applications are easily deployable in a cloud environment.

The arrowhead of any digital transformation journey for organizations is applications and the adoption of DevOps to reduce the development and deployment lifecycle of software leading to faster innovation for business results.

Cloud Computing 2.0 can help organizations to adopt DevOps by providing a scalable and reliable platform for running applications.

What security considerations and best practices should businesses keep in mind when implementing Cloud Computing 2.0 solutions?
Security is core to any solution today and at HPE we believe that the threat landscape is widening and deepening. Hence, providing an integrated, comprehensive, Zero-trust based architecture 360-degree approach to security is the best way to handle today’s security needs for customers.

As an example, to help mitigate security risk and deploy technology, our compute solutions provide Silicon Root of Trust. It is a firmware technology that integrates security directly into the hardware level of HPE servers, making an immutable fingerprint in the silicon that provides advanced levels of protection against firmware attacks. It detects changes being introduced by cyber attackers and disables the server, so malicious code never penetrates and allows operations to quickly regain their original state.

Additionally, ensuring data protection and cyber resilience and making data available for business continuity is also important.

As some of the best practices, we have observed that organizations should ensure that they should:
• Deploy redundancies to security architecture
• Ensure that the security postures are constantly reviewed and monitored
• Use AI-based solutions
• Deploy Zero Trust Networks
• People’s preparedness and education in ensuring Security and recovery

Looking ahead, what future trends or advancements do you anticipate in Cloud Computing 2.0 that could significantly impact industry-specific use cases and business outcomes?
The world has become digital, and we are witnessing rapid changes in the overall usage of technology for solving business challenges. While the core applications have been the mainstay for most organizations, we are now in the next wave of digital transformation, fueled by apps and data where everything from edge to cloud is connected. The enterprises unlock value everywhere, revealing new opportunities, new experiences, efficiencies, services, and more.
We believe the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven with security being a foundational requirement.

Edge-centric: HPE’s strategy is to accelerate enterprises, helping connect all data from edge-to-cloud, delivering insights and added value across all industries. The intelligent edge is where data is generated and processed often for real-time or near real-time analysis and action, driven by IoT, AI, machine learning apps, and workloads.

Cloud-enabled: HPE has shifted from centralized and closed approaches in large data centers to many small centers of data everywhere which are highly decentralized and distributed. At HPE, we believe the cloud is an experience, not a destination, and apps and data live everywhere across edges, colocations, data centers, and clouds.

Data-driven: In the data-driven world, data is at the heart of everything we do at HPE, which determines how companies innovate, engage with their customers, and gain insights respectively. As per IDC, data will grow to 175 zettabytes worldwide by 2025. Therefore, turning data into actionable insights using modeling, simulation, analytics, IoT devices, and AI/ML means putting intelligence close to data sources to create real-time insights and action.