Vinay Sinha, MD-India Sales, AMD, said outdated legacy systems and cost are two primary challenges commonly faced by CIOs across various industries in enabling a productive and protected remote workforce.
Firstly, in line with recurring nation-wide lockdowns, businesses were forced to abruptly implement an organisation-wide remote/hybrid work model. During this shift, it was discovered that outdated infrastructure and legacy systems were major hindrances to the efficacy of the remote workplace for three key reasons: (1) Incompatibility with external software and hardware systems, including personal devices that remote workers may use to access business systems, (2) insufficient bandwidth to handle the copious amounts of incoming data and connections and (3) increased security risks.
The second challenge is with regards to managing and allocating funds in the face of an unprecedented rise in IT expenses since the outbreak. To elaborate, costs are incurred in two forms: operating costs, and opportunity costs. Significant operating costs are being incurred by CIOs to enable an efficient, safe and protected transition to remote working, by modernising legacy systems and upgrading hardware and software security features for remote employees. Large opportunity costs are also seen as finite budgets disallow other transformation projects from being carried out.
The afore-mentioned challenges will never be one-and-done – legacy systems should be updated on an ongoing basis, within the company’s available resources. AMD works closely with CIOs and partners to address these challenges in a collaborative and sustained way to build agile and robust IT infrastructure without compromising on resilience.
Key priorities CIOs
If there is anything that 2020 taught us, it is that agility and resilience is key in the face of today’s unpredictable and volatile business environment. Therefore, digital transformation (DX) in multiple aspects, including legacy system modernization, increasing data-management capabilities and security enhancements are a few top-of-mind priorities for CIOs and IT executives in the next quarter.
CIOs have taken up the task of modernizing legacy systems and reconceptualising dated operating models. This not only empowers remote workforces, but also increases overall productivity by streamlining various other business processes with high-performance computing capabilities that bring about improved efficiency, flexibility and scalability.
CIOs are also incorporating measures that would ensure more efficient data-management capabilities. With the accelerating volume and velocity of data, it is absolutely pertinent for CIOs and IT leaders to reconstruct their data-management processes to allow the business to extrapolate actionable insights to guide profitable business decisions.
CIOs, who have recently embarked on the modernisation process, would have few factors to consider and as mentioned above, AMD works collaboratively with CIOs and IT leaders to determine the ideal infrastructure for their business needs. With technology like the AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors, CIOs can expect improved efficiency, value and performance. The latest AMD processors increase transactional database processing by up to 19 percent, improve Hadoop big data analytic sorts by up to 60 percent, and offer superb performance for flexible Hyperconverged Infrastructure – all of which help CIOs turn data into actionable insights faster.
CIOs and IT leaders will continue to advance security features and capabilities. With industry-wide rapid transformation, comes evolving security challenges and threats. Therefore, a key priority for CIOs would be to continuously and incrementally make software and hardware security updates to prevent malicious actors from misappropriating proprietary company and personal data. Protection is a key focus at AMD, with processors designed with security features in mind. Built-in at the silicon level, AMD Infinity Guard offers the advanced capabilities required to help defend against internal and external threats and keep your data safe with virtually zero impact to system performance.
Key enterprise IT trends
According to IDC, by 2023, over 65 percent of the APeJ will be digitalised, and this has activated and accelerated a number of notable enterprise IT industry trends, particularly in creating an optimal IT infrastructure. This includes the shift towards Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and the increased adoption of Cloud.
HCI consolidates traditional, hardware-based infrastructure into a virtualized, software-defined environment, and is a key IT trend to watch out for because this software-defined environment is typically easier to maintain and provides seamless addition of capacity, cost efficiencies, scalability and security features from existing systems. Therefore, to facilitate a speedy shift to an upscaled infrastructure, CIOs and IT leaders across all industries are compelled to modernise their data centers by moving towards HCI for its ability to help streamline operations, improve performance, and reduce costs.
This also goes hand-in-hand with the adoption of Cloud, which results in flexibility, cost effective scalability, and a well-managed space in which to innovate. AMD is working with ecosystem partners to help them address and adapt to these complex and emerging technologies, while keeping the IT infrastructure highly efficient. AMD EPYC processors are also powering a number of HCI and Cloud Environments with partners such as Dell Technologies and VMWare.
AMD’s value proposition for enterprises with AMD EPYC processors
AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su mentioned at COMPUTEX this year that billions of users rely on AMD EPYC processor-powered services because it delivers leadership performance in cloud computing workloads, offering high compute density, advanced security features and optimal business value. AMD EPYC is established as the new standard for the modern data center, and is winning not just in cloud, but across enterprise, commercial HPC and supercomputing.
A notable value proposition is with respect to AMD’s advanced security features. Embedded in 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors is AMD Infinity Guard, a modern multi-faceted approach to data center security features, which includes the latest advancement in AMD SEV technologies called Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP), adding strong memory integrity protection capabilities to help prevent malicious attacks.
