In an exclusive interaction with CXO News & APAC News Network, Harsha Ram, Head of Network Business, Sify Technologies elaborates on the role of Sify’s Deep Edge data centers, its leverage of AI to improve network performance, and the future of Internet exchanges.
What are the solutions and services currently in Sify’s digital infrastructure portfolio available in India?
Sify’s digital infrastructure portfolio largely focuses on providing mission-critical networks for banks, manufacturing companies, GCCs and technology companies, telcos, cloud, and content providers to and within India. The portfolio provides a comprehensive suite of services to help connect these customers to their users, branches, offices, data centers, and clouds through both public and private network options. The technology options provided to our customers allow them to make choices around latency, resiliency, and security that are ideal for the application they intend to deploy.
Sify’s network provides services across more than 1600+ cities and towns – these services are delivered across this footprint using wired and wireless access. The wireless access network is deployed over 3500 base stations. Sify also provides a dense fiber network across 22 Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities where the bandwidth requirements are significantly higher. In addition, Sify’s global network reaches 6 countries (8 global POPs) allowing both Indian enterprises to reachglobal destinations as well as supporting global companies in India.
How would you elaborate on Deep Edge data centers and what are the use cases of their deployments in India?
The edge is a point in the network architecture where one of the following areas is impacted:
i) Lower costs through aggregation
ii) Improved end-user experience
iii) Reduction in latency.
Most webscale applications are designed to work in a multi-dimensional mode – large-scale computing at an origin and then performance improvement at the edge. Most cloud providers have deployed cloud nodes in India across the cities ofMumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Noida. In India, the deep edge will start to develop in Tier-2 cities. Some of the key Tier-2 cities in India have significantly large populations that they support and network traffic that potentially rivals entire countries such as Germany, etc.
How does Sify leverage AI/ML to mitigate problems around network automation and network cybersecurity?
Sify has deployed machine learning at scale to identify problems around network performance and cybersecurity – the plethora of devices, and logs that they generate have all been fused with the logical/topographical view of the network to make sense of the vast amounts of data in a meaningful way.
The machine learning models then provide the engineers with
- the ability to quickly determine the root cause,
- make sense of the real and impacting issues from all the noise that is generated, and
- in making multi-modal decisions rapidly.
Sify is still in the process of deploying the next phase – there will be AI-driven models that will take the data and then make decisions that loop back into the network to mitigate the problems. Sify is investing in training and developing the models to support AI Ops at scale.
What best practices would you recommend for an enterprise to adopt an MPLS service provider?
From our perspective, we would recommend enterprises to check and verify an MPLS service provider on the following criteria.
- Reach of operative areas
- Density of the operations
- Verticals supported
- Confidentiality of the data within the operating environment
- Criticality/Regulatory environment around the data handled.
Which are the key verticals where Sify is witnessing maximum traction currently in India? Which are some of the referenceable marquee deployments and what are some of these use cases?
Currently, the maximum traction is coming from the following sectors.
- Hyperscale cloud and content providers
- Banks and other financial institutions
- NBFCs
How does India rank globally in terms of public peering and connectivity? How do Internet exchanges help on this front?
India has improved significantly in terms of public peering and connectivity – we now have the world’s largest carrier of mobile data in terms of Jio. India will also be the largest market outside of the United States for many of the cloud/content providers, given our large mobile-enabled population. Enterprises in India are also not far behind and will continue to adopt cutting-edge technologies driving up data usage.
To support this exponential growth of traffic, a few progressive data center operators and IXs have developed a robust eco-system that supports the peering strategies of both networks and content providers.
What are the key pillars on which Sify’s GTM strategy rests in India? What are some of the key initiatives under this strategy?
Sify’s GTM is built around four pillars:
- Increasing wallet share with existing customers as they look to consolidate complex networks
- Increasing fiber footprint in metros to support high bandwidth requirements
- Geographical expansion into new Tier-3 and Tier-4 cities using the wireless network
- Developing low latency long haul solutions for cloud and content providers
What are going to be Sify’s key focus areas in the next 12-18 months?
This is going to be along the same lines as envisioned in our GTM strategy.
Rajneesh De, APAC News Network
