What does "Digital" or "Digitalization" really mean? We started getting digital the day we converted physical files into binary data. One of the early examples of large scale digitalization was when we converted mails to e-mails. Thereafter, communication became digital, commerce became digital, and even learning became digital. We had been seeing this for few decades now.

So why is the word "Digital" trending now?

It is just that the fuel for the process has gotten better and digitalization today, is moving at exponential speeds disrupting and challenging many traditional ways of doing things. The fuel comprises of cloud, internet of things (IoT), mobility, social platforms and real-time analytics.

In the wake of these technology developments, more and more opportunities to digitalize have opened up and the race amongst enterprises has begun. For instance, assessing a customer's driving style using the GPS coordinates and calculating his vehicle insurance based on that wasn't possible a few years ago. Customers want to do most of their tasks such as bill payments, event registrations, etc. just with few taps on their mobile devices. Government and Corporates are looking at removing heaps of paper files and manage documents in digital format and leverage low-cost storage options for archival. Sensors, actuators, microcontrollers and system-on-chip devices are becoming highly affordable to build robots, drones at cheaper prices. BYOD/C (Bring Your Own Device/Computer) trend demands Consumerization of IT.

Enterprises are forced into this disruption while most of their IT infrastructure is still legacy. The next decade will see far more technology growth than the last four decades put together. End users will demand always-on and high-performance experiences of applications and services, data volumes and velocity will thereby multiply. Perimeters have to be broken to expand to newer geographies or enable much tighter B2B integration, there will be more machines talking to each other than humans talking to machines, and machines will continuously learn, identify patterns and predict events.

At the core of digital is data. A consequence of the accelerated growth in digitalization is the new demands placed on datacenters. Traditional application architectures are not flexible enough to adapt to the heavy data velocity, volume and variety. In addition, the IoT is driving decentralization of datacenters and data security in borderless enterprises is taking new forms. The heavy ingress of data (Velocity) and explosive growth on storage (Volume) and new price vs performance standards are all adding to the pressure on datacenter networks.

The new age datacenter eco-system must thus respond to the emerging business conditions dictated by a digital world. This means bringing renewed focus to speed of deployment, availability, flexibility, scalability, agility, maintainability, security and affordability.

Govindaraj Rangan - Head, Datacenter Innovation Office, Datacenter Practice, Wipro, Ltd.

Govindaraj Rangan (Govind) is the Head of Datacenter Innovation Office, part of Datacenter Practice at Wipro. He has 19 years of industry experience across the breadth of the technology spectrum - Application Development to IT Operations, UX Design to IT Security Controls, Presales to Implementation, Converged Systems to Internet of Things, and Strategy to Hands-on.

Prior to Wipro, he spent over 10 years at Microsoft as Technology Strategist, working with some of the large Enterprise customers in India. He has also worked in the CIO/CTO organizations of Texas Instruments, Automatic Data Processing, D. E. Shaw & Co. and PCL Mindware.

He has an M.B.A. from ICFAI University specializing in Finance, M.S. in Software Systems from BITS Pilani and B.E. (EEE) from Madras University. Professionally, he is MCSE, CISSP, PMP, ITIL Foundation certified.