The COVID19 pandemic has led to the acceleration of the digital transformation process across organisations from working from home to adapting the latest technologies to make remote working possible for the employees and the businesses.
Organisations have done it all. Because of this, there has also been an increase in the demand for data centres.
But how does one fulfill the demands and how has COVID19 impacted the demand and the process of digitisation.
These points were discussed in detail at W.Media’s Digital Week South Asia panel discussion titled ‘Making Data Centre the focus- Key needs of the hour’.
Moderated by Savithri Rodrigo, Founder, Strayx Promotions & Media Concepts (Pvt) Limited & Stratyx Write (Pvt) Limited. The panellists included Rajendra Theagarajah, Independent Non-Executive Chairman, Digital Reality Pvt Ltd. Marco Brandstätter, Regional Director Middle East and South Asia, DE-CIX, Klagenfurt Wörthersee, Carinthia and Navin Peiris, Vice President – Enterprise Business and Large Enterprise Sales, Dialog Enterprise.
The year 2020 marked a huge shift in data needs. There was a widespread need of shifting to cloud services provided by data centres.
The digital needs became more demanding and the shift towards digitisation was growing throughout the year and this trend is going to continue, pointed out Savithri Rodrigo.
Impact of COVID on Digitisation
“It has shaped the behavior of individuals and businesses regardless of size, scale. Even the MSME and the SME sector which should have been focusing more on physical infrastructure have seen this as an opportunity to get into online so that has seen additional demand and that demand has not come from the conventional data and storage capacity because to demonstrate agility they have been looking at solutions and capacity they have been looking at a pay as you go bases, so cloud has become an interesting additional demand”, said Rajendra Theagarajah.
He further added that regardless of any industry, there has been a general reluctance due to the lockdown, the consumer’s fear of face to face interaction and an increased demand for contact less solutions. This has led to an increase in the demand of storage and retrieval capabilities.
The use of point of sale IPG and QR in Sri Lanka had increased three and a half or four fold in three to four months in the year 2020, which showed how consumers have adapted to new methods of payments.
Most businesses have also started looking at the m-commerce and e-commerce opportunities which has also given the rise to need for good quality connectivity, good storage, attractive pricing and also ease of retrieval, pointed Theagarajah.
“I think that COVID was like a turbo-boost for a lot of developments which were ongoing. If you think of a home office the possibility was already there but home school there was a possibility but nobody ever thought about it,” said Brandstätter.
A similar is the case for online events, e-commerce, amidst the pandemic just think about how many people went to home office where earlier companies did not allow it and now it is mandatory and it’s not going to leave us anytime soon.
The same is with home schooling, teachers are opting for home schooling wherever possible. COVID has brought it to the table and now it’s at a scale which we did not think of two years ago. This has led to a change of a lot of regulations and legislations is a lot of countries.
Cloud is becoming a commodity, think of what was the uptake of Microsoft Azure cloud has led to a tremendous growth on the data side. “We’ve seen a growth of 40 percent in a couple of internet exchanges worldwide. The same leads to a lot of growth on the data centre side.
The trend was already there going to the edge building data centres, the data centre investments have not started with COVID but I think they have proven to be right in COVID more than they used to be”, said Brandstätter.
He further added that the process of digitalisation has become the central point and has proven to be right and the process is faster than what it was expected to be.
Is Sri Lanka ready for the change?
“I would say yes from a great extent from an infrastructure perspective otherwise we would have all crashed because the demand side and the demand planning which was done prior COVID became redundant because of the shift in the working environment working from remote areas, working from home.
We did struggle, even for a teleco it is difficult to switch nods from large companies to people gathering online. However, the capacity investments were done ahead of time although we struggled initially but eventually we kept going ahead. It’s not only about Dialog but I’m talking about the entire telco industry in Sri Lanka had made some forward investments without which it would have been difficult to handle the load”, said Navin Peiris.
He further added that when it comes to COVID, the businesses that had approached them for hosting. COVID has moved digitisation forward by 5 years as earlier there were only plans and frameworks and no one was getting things done. COVID has forced teleco’s and other companies to adopt digitaisation as there was not choice left.
When you look at digitisation you look at it as journeys. A lot of companies focused on the way in which that journey could be fulfilled and that led to digitisation which included adapting to the virtual way of working.