Tata Communications: Empowering India and its highly regulated industries with a sovereign cloud – CIO

Rajesh Awasthi, global head of cloud and managed hosting services at Tata Communications, sees its sovereign cloud initiatives as an important element in the company’s longstanding work to transform India. Although designed to support the evolving needs of highly regulated industries like banking and financial services, government, healthcare and insurance, he notes that they benefit all citizens.

“Being a truly Indian company, Tata Communications aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society,” says Awasthi. “Our sovereign cloud offerings enable enterprises in regulated industries to build a resilient and self-reliant India by protecting the country’s critical infrastructure with smarter and more secure solutions. These are systems India’s citizens rely on each and every day – whether it’s when managing their finances and healthcare, or while interacting with government agencies.”

With a network that includes 30% of the world’s internet routes, the world’s largest wholly-owned subsea fiber backbone, and a tier-1 IP network that connects businesses in more than 190 countries to 80% of the cloud giants, Tata Communications’ global connectivity is extensive and enables the company to provide hybrid and multi-cloud services to businesses in virtually any location. Its extensive portfolio also ensures that customers are free to choose the infrastructure and cloud journey that works best for them.

“We enable enterprises to choose the infrastructure that best aligns with their needs, whether it’s to host legacy or cloud-native workloads or to best manage mission-critical applications and core systems like ERP,” adds Awasthi. “Regardless of if it is for a self-service or fully managed deployment, we have deep experience delivering secure, efficient, and outcome-oriented cloud solutions that give enterprises the ease of managing their entire journey through a single partner and a single pane of glass.”

He notes that the Tata Communications Sovereign Cloud Platform expands on this pedigree. It also reflects the growing need for cloud-scale capabilities in conjunction with robust on-premises systems and constantly evolving data protection regulations that require organizations to keep sensitive information “in-country” at all times.

“Many organizations are adopting hybrid cloud environments that combine public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure,” adds Awasthi. “Sovereign cloud technology plays an important role in these environments because it enables organizations to maintain control over sensitive data while leveraging cloud-scale compute and storage capabilities. Enterprises get the flexibility and control they want with the assurance that they will stay compliant with ever-evolving regulatory guidelines.”

He notes, too that Tata Communications streamlines this move to the hybrid cloud with its IZO™ Cloud platform built on VMware technology. It’s a platform that eliminates the data migration challenges many organizations face by enabling them to seamlessly expand their on-premises environments, and then expand to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment if needed.

“By being VMware Cloud Verified, and now having received the VMware Sovereign Cloud distinction, we ensure that our customers can keep managing their environments with the VMware tools they already use while augmenting their applications with cloud-native services,” he says. “Regardless of whether their cloud strategy revolves around cloud migration, extension or protection, they can achieve it faster with existing skills, tools, processes and familiar, proven VMware technologies.”

The demand for sovereign solutions reflects other imperatives as well. These include the desire to have greater control over data management and storage, and increased concerns around data privacy and security in the face of increasing cyber threats and geopolitical risks – as well as the efforts of many organizations and government entities to protect critical infrastructure.

Awasthi also noted that in highly-regulated industries within India, all data – including meta data – must never leave the country or be exposed to people outside of its borders. This includes when accessing customer service or support.

Indian law also requires compliance with a number of regulations, among them those from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, (STQC Audited), GDPR, and MTCS level 3 certifications, as well as industry regulations like RBI, SEBI, IRDAI, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, CERT IN, SOC ½/3, and Cyber Security Incident Reporting. Tata Communication’s Sovereign Cloud Platform addresses all of these requirements and more.

“Our secure and compliant Sovereign Cloud offers peace of mind to regulated bodies by ensuring data privacy and sovereignty that safeguards extremely sensitive and valuable data, with both user data and meta data deployed, monitored, and managed 100% in-country and governed by the laws of India,” says Awasthi. “It provides an enterprise-class, Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud, complete with an architecture designed with the API economy in mind. This cloud platform, ‘made in India’ and ‘made for India’ takes care of data sovereignty, residency, and privacy requirements of regulated entities.”

Learn more about Tata Communications and its partnership with VMware here.