Tell us about EMC’s hybrid cloud initiative.
EMC is a big believer in private cloud as a stepping stone towards hybrid cloud. Customers wanted to reduce their IT costs, so they moved to private cloud. Here it is all within the customer’s four walls, but you also want to leverage technologies that make IT more self-service-oriented. You want your users to be able to go to an online catalogue, select a service and have that service order deployed, and then charge that back to their business unit with very little human intervention. The goal is to take as much operational expense out of managing IT as possible. Hybrid cloud is simply the next step in that evolution. So whether it makes sense to run the workload on the customer’s premises or in a different location or on a public cloud, we give them the option to seamlessly move their workload, when, why and where they want to.
Most small and medium enterprises operate on a tight budget. How do EMC service smaller enterprises?
When we go to market for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), it is usually with VSPEX, which is one of our converged infrastructures. There are two components to that. One is our reference architecture programme. This is designed to achieve business outcomes rather than just selling EMC gear, so it includes components from alliance partners such as Cisco, HP, Brocade and Dell. These can all be customised, and are all targeted towards a range of different sizes. We build them, test them, validate them, and then we give the partners those blueprints, so that they can customise them to reach the right price-point for these SMEs.
The other component is our hyper converged infrastructure appliance, called VSPEX BLUE. Here all the functionality that you would get from a server, software or storage array, is all-in-one device. This is really attractive for SMEs, because you are able to start with a single appliance, it is relatively inexpensive, and when you need more capacity you can purchase another one and cluster them together. So you do not need a big upfront investment; you can basically pay as you grow.
Technology adoption can reduce cost and time. How has EMC achieved this for its clients?
The reason why we do testing and validation documents for our partners is because we want to accelerate the time to value. We want to take the upfront architecture planning and test phase, and shrink that down so that the customer sees the benefit as soon as possible after they make the purchase. We have a number of case studies where deployment times have shrunk from months to weeks. Similarly, in the high end, our converged infrastructure solution VCE is pre-built and ready to use when it arrives at the customer’s premises. Then VSPEX BLUE is built using EMC technology and VMware technology, so you are able to take this appliance, connect it to your network, turn it on, and in about 10 minutes you are ready to start provisioning your workload. This is unprecedented ease of use, and unprecedented time to value. We are talking less than an hour, and you are ready to go. That is the way the world is moving, especially in the SME segment.
What is your sense of the technology change in EMC’s Middle Eastern markets?
The converged infrastructure segment in the Middle East region is growing surprisingly well, and is adapting more quickly than many countries in Europe and even Western Europe. Saudi Arabia and Dubai have been very fast adopters of converged infrastructure, both from the VCE V block perspective, as well as VSPEX reference architecture. We are currently working with our channel partners in the Gulf to expand our footprint with VSPEX BLUE for hybrid-converged.
In this age of cloud computing, how does EMC guarantee data protection?
There are no guarantees in life, but we have come to understand that protecting the perimeter of a data centre is not sufficient. You need to protect the data, not only through encryption, but also through access. It is about detecting intrusion and bad actors in real time. But even in real time, it is a matter of preventing it, or stemming the flow, or stopping it as soon as possible. You look at some of the companies that have had data breaches, and their conversations with us are almost always the same. They say, “We do not want to be the next article in the Wall Street Journal that says we lost 10,000 users of data. We have to be comprehensive about our security.” It is not just about authentication and encryption, it is also about things like mobile device management. Users want to bring their own devices. We cannot stop that. So then we need security and access-controlled technologies that do not feel as intrusive to the end user, but still are going to protect the data. EMC has a product called CloudArray built into the VSPEX appliance, which allows you to share data up to a public storage cloud, whether that is Amazon or Google or whatever. The key is that the encryption takes place on your site, so the data is encrypted in flight and on the public cloud. Importantly, the customer retains those keys; the service provider does not.
Can that be enforced?
For CloudArray it can. What you cannot enforce is human behaviour. So no technology will 100 percent protect all data. There have to be behavioural changes, there have to be organisational changes. You have to understand that just by a person being in your facility, they have unprecedented access to your data. I saw a sign from another company that had a picture of a woman and said: “Janice has access to 10,000 personal health records. Janice works at the coffee shop at the hospital.” She is inside. She has access. So no technology can be completely foolproof. The users are human beings. They are the most irrational piece of the equation.
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