Planning for disruption is now the norm: Balakrishnan Anantharaman, VP & MD – Sales, India & Saarc, Nutanix

BALAKRISHNAN ANANTHARAMAN, VP & MD – Sales, India & Saarc, Nutanix

Work-from-home (WFH) has added security concerns beyond the datacentre and ransomware attacks have increased significantly since the pandemic with a plethora of connected devices. Data volumes are continually increasing both due to remote workforces and more digital customer services. For these reasons, as well as the existing regulatory and security requirements specific to financial services, multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies are especially helpful, says Balakrishnan Anantharaman, vice-president & managing director – Sales, India & Saarc, Nutanix. “By maintaining locally required, sensitive and personal data on private clouds, and providing access to generic and non-sensitive apps and systems via public cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments have enabled BFSI organisations to operate efficiently and profitably,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interview. Excerpts:

With changing customer expectations, especially since the pandemic, how can banks and NBFCs compete with fintechs and digital startups on agility?
Banks, NBFCs and fintech firms are in a race to bridge gaps in customer expectations and the opportunities arising thereof. Most fintechs are born in the cloud and their regulatory framework is still evolving as compared to the regulatory framework, governance, and mechanisms at established banks and NBFCs which are custodians of customers’ money. To improve their agility, banks and NBFCs are already modernising and upgrading their application ecosystem. With hybrid and multicloud computing, banks can increase agility through DevOps and automation, while making use of existing business critical applications and building new microservices. Moreover, since the pandemic, there has been a pivot to everything-as-a-service (EaaS) and subscription models. The economic advantages are enormous, as EaaS enables a focus on innovation at the core business, which in turn helps clients achieve better customer outcomes.

With more BFSI customers using digital services, how are organisations managing the sudden increase in workloads? And what disaster recovery (DR) mechanisms can organisations have in place to ensure minimum disruption?
To support increased customer demand during peak periods and to offer differentiated experiences, most BFSI organisations have been building microservices-based applications at the front-end and automating their systems to scale elastically. The challenge is in scaling automation, managing infrastructure, databases, applications, their security framework, regulation and compliance – for millions of customers. They need a simplified control plane with a platform that can support both legacy processes and new applications. Hybrid and multicloud architectures are providing the path to a simplified and customer-responsive organisation, which is why it is not a trend or niche technology anymore.

Planning for disruption—be it from cyberattacks, equipment failure, or natural disasters—is now the norm. The goal of any business continuity plan is to ensure 100% availability for customers and end-users, as downtime correlates to negative revenue impact. The latest generation of recovery tools incorporate DR directly into the IT architecture. Nutanix technology makes it easy to duplicate existing IT operations and enable rapid DR, along with our tools like Nutanix Xi Leap for disaster recovery and Nutanix Mine for data protection. Nutanix equips customers to first detect threats, then protect sensitive data, and lastly guide them to recover the data in a short period in the event of a security breach.

What technology paradigms will create further efficiency, and greater opportunities in India’s BFSI sector?
The EaaS model, intelligent edge computing and cloud-based automation hold substantial promise in improving customer experience and business agility in BFSI. In today’s subscription and consumption-based economy, the buyer’s journey will continue to evolve, and EaaS will free-up BFSI companies to consume software and technology on a need basis.

From a customer perspective, edge computing and analytics will be a differentiator as customers expect hyper-personalised experiences via digital platforms and services more than ever. And finally, as the BFSI sector embraces hybrid and multicloud, as well as technologies like edge computing and AI to enhance customer experience, cloud automation will help streamline the entire organisation, enabling a greater focus on business growth instead of routine management.

For example, thanks to greater automation, scalability and reliability, and by leveraging Nutanix Era (a database management automation solution) RBL Bank was able to take better advantage of business opportunities and respond to customers’ needs in an agile manner at speed.