‘A data security breach always exceeds the data protection expense’: Hitesh Bhardwaj of Cloud4C

The CtrlS data center in Hyderabad

Cloud4C, a leading Cloud managed services player, was recently named a Visionary in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services for its ‘completeness of vision and ability to execute.’

According to the report, “the adoption of public cloud services has accelerated as demonstrated by a five-year compound annual growth rate of 20.7%. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have realized the business benefits of cloud-based solutions. Furthermore, organizations seeking to use public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other ‘hyperscale’ platforms engage with providers in this market to get the greatest transformational benefits from cloud services.” 

Sridhar Pinnapureddy, founder and CEO of Cloud4C, further noted, “Across industries, a greater need is felt for new skills, tool, strategies, and processes to materialize the transformation towards a cloud-native future.”

With presence in 25 countries and 52 locations and serving 60 of the Fortune 500 global multinationals, Cloud4C had also announced its partnership with CloudHedge to deliver next-gen application modernization service to businesses worldwide. By delivering cloud-native automation-driven agile solutions such as SHOP (Self Healing Operations Platform), Cloud4C has established itself as a trusted public cloud IT transforming partner in the global arena.

We talk to Hitesh Bhardwaj (pictured above), Head of Sales and Presales, Cloud4C, APAC, to find out about the threats to the data center industry and cloud services and the measures to be taken to improve the protection of these technologies.

What is the biggest challenge in data security?

According to the report by Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is expected to cost $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. It is predicted that cybercrime will be the future’s biggest threat  around the world for many individuals and organisations. This makes it crucial to  understand the vulnerabilities, threats, and opportunities of cybersecurity.

This makes cloud adoption highly crucial and refusing their move to cloud, is not an option for organisations. Every business needs a strategic approach to security – omitting the cloud completely is a risky business move as they miss out on maximising processes. What every organisation needs is a clear and visible understanding of how expensive is the cost of a security breach, including its reputation cost, and how far are businesses willing to spend on preventive security measures.

Can you elaborate on one or two of the most innovative solutions from Cloud4C?

Self-Healing Operations Platform (SHOP) is a low code platform built to integrate different tools and platforms required to deliver managed services to enterprises. SHOP’s objective is to bring dozens of operational platforms and tools including auto remediation and self-healing into the same system so that the infrastructure and applications can be managed in a single pane of glass while providing customers with a holistic view of their environments. This results in contextual analysis of threats and risk points, predict the impending threats, and engage in automatic preventive maintenance to improve the risk posture of the entire IT infra. The platform managed to improve efficiency while also allowing engineers with less experience to handle more complex tasks. Some of SHOP’s benefits include – being proactive at discovering problems, automating responses to real time.

But, this only highlights a part of our efforts. Being the leading automation-driven, application-focused cloud managed services provider in the globe, Cloud4C lays substantial emphasis on cybersecurity management. We have partnered with multiple cloud providers and leading enterprises to implement custom cybersecurity solutions and architectures for enterprises, regardless of environment size and complexity. Be it SIEM-SOAR, Managed SOC, EDR, MDR, Advanced Threat Protection, Threat Intelligence, DevSecOps, and more, we are constantly innovating and augmenting our capabilities.

That’s not all. Strategic frameworks play a huge role in the cybersecurity domain. Our Managed Security Services and Managed Detection And Response (MDR) are designed to ensure the safety of organizational data and employees data. It is crucial for businesses to obey the ‘Zero Trust’ policy of cybersecurity, especially in remote working. Our DHLP is unique as we empower businesses with information from our assessments on possible vulnerabilities and help them identify personalized solutions that meet their needs. MDR Benefits include – being able to identify vulnerable hosts for host systems, helping in mitigation strategy and creating a framework that manages data and IT assets to set high-security standards.

What are the ways in which Cloud4C helps a business to improve its data protection?

Cloud4C created a Center of Excellence that helps customers manage their end-to-end cycle of incident or threat which includes – Prepare, Detect, Analyse, Contain, Eradicate, Recover, RCA and Service Improvement Plan. Our team at Cloud4C provides CIOs and IT department heads of our customers a priority-based and focused set of action plans to help them mitigate and block new and current cyberattacks.

Enterprises can securely conduct their daily activities or tasks with cyber resilience, while Cloud4C secures their Perimeter, Networks, Hosts, Applications and most importantly Data. Cloud4C also offers a Virtual CISO on demand for enterprises with complex environments. A virtual CISO would start the practice and make it operational to adapt the organisation to the cybersecurity culture.

What are the Hyper automation solutions from Cloud4C? Can it be implemented for the Startups and the small business owners considering the budget and the infrastructure constraints?

Hyper automation allows for integrated automated solutions to be implemented into operational processes to achieve the full-stack transformation that improves productivity, efficiency, and lowers operational costs in the long-run. Companies with automation strategies usually have higher returns based on their capacity and cost reduction resulting in increased revenues.

Cloud4C’s turnkey hyperautomation solution portfolio helps businesses discover their right processes by extracting the right data to help automate complex task and strategically place them across the automation process helping companies transform their business further.

We have had our fair share of successes so far with our intelligent RPA or hyperautomation solutions, especially in banking, IT, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, retail, etc industries. We serve over 100+ use cases at 100% accuracy. Our RPA solutions have enabled 50X-60X faster processing of administrative functions, 25-50% cost reductions with 1.5 billion+ in processed payments, saving 1.2 million man-hours. We are excited with our hyperautomation innovation pipelines and the vision we have chartered for the same. 

How is Cloud4C managing the energy crisis that most of the data centers across the world is facing?

Cloud4C is run using Ctrl S’s hyperscale data center, Asia’s largest Rated 4 hyperscale data center. Ctrl S data centers are built to meet the demand of power mission applications with industry best uptime SLA of 99.995% or lowest design PUE of 1.38.

Cloud4C is also active in various environmental social responsibility initiatives. It recently led the development of an 100-acre solar farm for data centre energy needs to reduce the carbon footprint of data centres. Renewable energy resources usage within data centres requires a collaborative effort from all players including private and public stakeholders. Some of the ways in which the energy crisis can be tackled include governments developing a clear and transparent policy structure comprising incentives, in consultation with data centre providers. This can help the industry move ahead in a sustainable manner, ensuring the long-term growth and development of all players. 

Excerpts of an email interaction with Ujal Nair

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