Green IT Strategies: Harnessing the Power of Sustainable and Secure Cloud Storage – Techstrong Con 2023

Clever one. I'm Bonnie Schneider and I am the sustainability contributor to the tech strong group. And I'm so pleased that everyone is here joining us today for Textron con 2023 and I would like to talk about my panel now and introduce you to my esteem panelists.

Well, first of all, you want to welcome you to this panel session green, it strategies harnessing the power of sustainable cloud storage for Tech strong con 2023. I'm Bonnie Schneider, and I'm also the author of the new book taking the heat how climate change is affecting your mind body and spirit and what you can do about it published by Simon and Schuster and as the sustainability contributed to the tech strong group. I'm focusing on that intersection between sustainability and Technology.

I am thrilled to be joined by three distinguished panelists who will share their expertise and insights on the intersection of sustainability Cloud security and digital transformation and now I'd like to introduce our panel. First Taruna Gandhi who leads product marketing for the Evergreen subscriptions portfolio at Pier One and Pier 1 at Pure Storage Denis Nwanshi the chief digital officer at nitroscale. And Roman Arutyunov the co-founder and SVP of products at xh security to Runa Dennis and Roman.

Thank you so much for being here today and to get started even though I've introduced you. I'd love to hear for our audience in your own words a little bit about yourself and your position and the your role that you have in sustainable cloud storage. First let's start with Dennis.

Hello, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Denis Nwanshi. I'm the founder and chief digital officer for natural scale.

We provide a range of digital related services to financial services clients as well as other high-regulated Industries, very strong folks on cybersecurity cloud migration as well as resilience and all the kind of functional and non-function requirements large Enterprises typically need to address as they embark on digital transformation. Thank you. All right, Serena.

All right. Thank you, Bonnie. And hello everyone.

Thanks for joining. My name is Taruna Gandhi. I am at Pure Storage.

I need product marketing for the storage as a service and other storage subscriptions at pure Pure Storage is the leader in all flash storage Technologies, and you know, very pleased to be at this panel because at pure sustainability is an integral part of our technology people in operations and everything that we do we do have a certain bias towards making sure that we bring you the most energy efficient flash storage on the planet. Thank you so much. That sounds really interesting and Roman from zage security Now joining us.

Let's hear what Roman has to say? Yeah, good morning everyone. This is a Roman Arutyunov Bonnie.

Thank you for having me on this event. So what's age does is as age protects operational Enterprises and protects all the various interactions between users applications machines and data across their up Regional domains Enterprise domains and Cloud domains, really unifying them with a consistent security policy and enforcement. I'm a co-founder at age and I'm heading up products.

That's great. I'm so pleased that all three of you are here with your interesting backgrounds. And and thank you for those introductions to your work and what you're doing in this area.

Now. I'd like to dive into our discussion according to a recent report by the International Energy agency. The global data industry is projected to consume around $200 billion kilowatt hours of electricity by 2028.

That's the equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 70 million homes in the US. So my question to all the panelists is what are some specific steps that organizations can take to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Well also maintaining the security and reliability of their Cloud infrastructure Dennis.

I'll start with you. Well, the good news is there are lots of solutions out there. So the major Cloud providers are building sustainability.

In fact their position. It has one of their get primary. I want to give primary objectives and that kind of provides a whole range of solutions for organizations to adopt certainly with different Industries.

You're going to find that there's different cardboard common Footprints one the chance, you know that today is that there's a lack of standardization when it comes to measuring a carbon footprint. But again, there are technologies that are helping to improve that process. And so I think it's all about having the right strategy and making sure that you actually adopty and building into the organizational the way that actually conduct business make that possible the organizational culture sustainability has to be at the Forefront and then you can Leverage The technologies that are available today.

Excellent point Dennis and taruna. What is your perspective on this? Um, you know, I think Dennis brings up a couple of really good points, right?

If you think about how data protection was traditionally viewed in the data center. It was all about redundancy. It was all of our safeguarding your system.

So you would have all of these multiple redundancies sitting there idle consuming energy. I think as we are moving to more modern approach to Data Center security with an eye towards sustainability looking at technologies that are inherently more secure and inherently more efficient is the way to get started. But that's also think about what companies can do to become proactive about both of these initiatives.

This is where AI in which you learning plays a very big part and understanding how you can actually inculate that culture that Dennis brought up as well. Make sure that there's transparency and awareness on what people are doing in this field. That's a good point and a Roman.

Yeah. Yeah, I think as part of that equation here. We also need to consider.

How do we enable renewable and sustainable energy in the first place? Right? And how did that energy to do Cloud type of environment so was age does is they works with a renewable energy operators think large wind farms large Solon Farms to secure their operations enable them to exchange data with us.

Okay, that's a good points on all of that. I think we're gonna be able to ask some specific questions now to each panelist. And the first question I have is for taruna and turn it as you deliver next-gen data storage Technologies focused on outcomes instead of infrastructure.

Can you discuss some of the latest Ai and ml technologies that you that can be used to solve business issues related to sustainability and in Cloud native technology. I think Trinity you mentioned a little bit about this and I'd love to take a deeper dive into it. Oh, yeah.

No, absolutely Bonnie. I I think EI and machine learning is top of mind for everybody. Right?

But the question always comes as how are you going to apply it to a business problem? Right? So we cure like a multifaceted approach to this.

So first of all are all flash technology inherently is more energy efficient and customers are able to get more dense environments. But then what we did was we get we went around collecting data so that we could apply that Ai and machine learning to it and the data tells us what good looks like once we know we can actually analyze it we can Surface up not just a transparency about where the current status is for a customers environment compared to their peers and compared to best practices. We can also start giving them recommendations and more than that.

We can actually get proactive right? So one of the things that machine learning Us do is show them Trends on what is happening in their data center. So if you have a trend that's going in the wrong direction.

This is where this technology can actually get you more proactive about it. And then we at pure winter steps further and we said okay, not only are we going to give you inherently better architecture more modern all flash storage. We are going to give you this Ai and machine learning layered on top of it.

But now that we know what good looks like what guarantee is can we give our customers especially our storage as a service customers and this is where we recently introduced and Energy Efficiency. And that SLA means that we guarantee a certain watts per terabytes that customers get and if you don't meet those guarantees actually undertake the remediation work. We may even give customers service credits on it.

That's a good point and Roman. Let's go to you now and your experience working with Industrial and Commercial Enterprises. What are some of the most effective strategies for implementing zero trust access and data security in the cloud.

And also if you can share some success stories and lessons that you've learned from these deployments. Yeah, sure bunny. I think a statistical strategy really needs to take into account the requirements of this industrial operational Enterprises.

So one of the things we need to keep in mind is that these companies energy companies manufacturing forms. They have, you know, really millions of Assets in their environments. These are machines right?

These are machines that do physical things. They may be particularly controlled. But yet they do physical things pumps actuators Transformers robotic arms.

We we now have applications in the Enterprise applications in the cloud that need data from these from these assets in order to really perform data driven, you know operation and Peter driven optimization. so Being able to deliver access to that asset and access to that data needs to take into account the requirements of of security really, how do you secure that and that involves a realizing the fact that many of them don't have internet activity. So, how do you get the data?

Right you don't have they may have multiple Network on activities only throw an approach it gets you into that up into that asset layout at a time to be able to extract data and and take it to the cloud ensuring data authenticity ensuring data privacy ensuring proper access control the data itself the to the assets and an identity of a user or an application and right so some of the examples of this that's just customers. I'll name a couple examples one in renewable energy setting where you have data being generated by micro grids. that Exchange It's exchange energy with each other.

These These are communities that exchange energy with each other sustainable renewable with each other. How do you protect data? with racial data and financial data, how do you separate the two?

So that's not visible in the in that Marketplace so that property since and proper actions can be taken. So sage has enabled not a crop. Across a number of installations additionally, we worked with manufacturing companies to enable access for their remote employees at vendors and contractors through cloud services down into deep down into the operational environment enabling this remote first thinking driving animation collaboration and and remote work.

Roman for that and Dennis how do you envision the impact of cloud native technology on sustainability efforts in highly regulated Industries such as finance and compliance as you guide institutions to deliver Mission critical digital platforms products and automated infrastructure. Um, well there's tremendous opportunities these days as mentioned earlier on I think the technology landscape is what makes significant advances, you know, so when it comes to things like Automation and you know kind of technologies that are effective designs to minimize the common footprint, although the initial goal is to actually transition to automated procedures but in so doing what happens. Typically you find that there's less carbon emissions simply because there's less kind of intensive processes involved which means less string being put on the underlying infrastructure.

This is where Cloud can be quite significantly improved in making improvements be on-prem or In the cloud the reality is when you move to the cloud you have the opportunity to actually fine-tune how you stack up your applications. 999 availability, you can certainly achieve that these days and you know, there's a whole range of Technologies at each level of your both application at the infrastructure level and and the whole range of apis that you need to connect to data sets in remote locations as well. So that's that's the Technologies.

That's certainly Okay, great. All right. Well, let's get a question now to all the panelists appreciate each of those individual answers.

Well, you know last year in 2022, there were 18 weather and climate disaster events which with losses exceeding one billion dollars and that affected the United States. So in light of the increased risk of extreme weather events caused by climate change what steps are being taken to improve Disaster Recovery plans for cloud infrastructure and to protect sensitive data. Let's start with taruna on this one.

Sure bunny, I think I go back to thinking about business outcomes, right and you know and taking a more proactive approach to these things. So if you think about business outcomes, this is really an exercise in figuring out your recovery Point objectives and recovery time objectives what we call rpos and rtos, right and it's not just about safeguarding your systems in the event that something happens. It's about using modern technology to proactively prevent downtime and data loss in your systems, right?

So so I think you know what we recommend at pure is to take like a multi-faceted approach to something like this. You can never be sure of what's going to happen, but you can be very well prepared for it. And so we talk to our customers.

We tell them to take a look at you know how fast you can recover to use the best technology so that you can rapidly recover at scale. We also asked them to take a look at this data gravity problem, which is you know, business resilience over distance, right? So, you know, how are they doing deduplication is their data protection on this on how fast is their application and then, you know, we offer customers multiple choices of where they actually back up their data.

We have something called Cloud Block store where customers can back up their data to Azure or AWS any of the Native public clouds, but we also work with a large ecosystem of you know, backup and Recovery vendors, you know, some of the common names in it. So these customers have a big choice of how they want to go about it based on what their business objectives are. Thank you so much to Runa dentist.

Let's go to you now. Yeah, I think that sort of like a great point there and certainly at the certainly vertical level. There's certain Solutions which enable you to make improvements as well.

So for example, let's say Financial Services with open Bank of open finance the massive amounts of data that's available to you means that you're able to actually analyze that data using AI machine learning and understand where there may be opportunities to actually drive efficiencies and that also speaks to building Disaster Recovery capabilities as well in the olden days. For example, we didn't have the ability to run Disaster Recovery test with that impacting or potentially impact and production on production environments these days with the cloud for example, you're able to actually simulate what could go wrong despite the fact that you have geographically dispersed workloads and data around the world. He actually adds to that whole process of running the tests of Disaster Recovery plan and making sure understand the full life cycle of your business process.

So that speaks to this community as well as Disaster Recovery, you know, so again Solutions exist, you just have to write the stretch to have the right strategy in place to be able to actually put them into action. Thanks, Dennis and Roman. Yeah, I think I'd like to take turn this question, you know around just a little bit and then how and that how can Cloud enable collaboration when weather disasters do hit I mean when when things happen like hurricanes like the the weather issues we had in Texas this year.

There are outages that happened throughout the energy grid for example, and often to take care of those outages you need collaboration between multiple utilities cruise for multiple cities and utilities come out to help and and recover the grid and at that time, you know, simple challenges start are becoming become very notable such as how do I get access to it? What is the password to this asset so I can fix it, right? How do I get in?

So these are different entities. They don't have access so ability to create Solution that enables collaboration access and visibility into the data. It's quite helpful those types.

And that's that's what Sage really provides a cross multiple parties to be able to securely grant them access to the right asset to the right data at the right time. Thank you so much Roman. Well, I'm gonna have another question now and I'm gonna also integrate a someone who's watching named Zachary.

Thank you for your question. I can incorporate it into this one. So here's the question for all panelists as more businesses view the cloud as a way to help them meet their sustainability targets.

How do you see the intersection of sustainability and cloud storage evolving and what role do you see in data storage companies playing in promoting sustainable practices in the industry. And so that's kind of a future forward question. Zachary is asking specifically for this year how much you think that AI will be involved and I know that something taruna had mentioned a little bit about as well.

So Serena, why don't we start with you? If you can answer the future forward how we're looking towards sustainability and and also the role AI will have this year. Yeah, no, absolutely and thanks for for the great questions Zachary.

So, you know AI is obviously top of mind for everybody but you actually have to look at what is behind that AI right which is the data which is we know there is only growing in in order to store that data in order to access that data in order to protect that data organizations need to take different steps. And this is where I think the storage vendors can come in and actually help and I think I touched on this a little bit right? So one of the things you could look at is not just look at AI which will help you predict and prevent and get become more proactive but actually start from the ground up and pick the technology that will actually make this whole piece of your data center more efficient.

So give you an example. So at your storage we have our direct flash technology, which delivers Unparalleled density and efficiency from Flash and in fact, you know Pure Storage arrays are 85% more energy efficient inherently. So if you think about data that's always constantly growing if you start out by storing it on something that is inherently more efficient that gives you a leg up but I think the secret sauce does come in that Ai and ml technology because it's not a once and done kind of a thing you have to constantly evolve it and that is where the latest techniques can help you understand where you are on your current consumption and your current energy consumption and how that correlates to, you know in the storage world.

We talk a lot about performance and availability. Now one way to get efficiency is to just turn it off, but that's not what you want. What you want is performance availability and energy consumption could be correlated.

And this is where Ai and ml can help you so you are looking at that performance curve. A specific energy consumption and getting the best out of it and it can help you with both getting proactive recommendation as well. As you know an automation framework so that you can constantly make those changes as needed.

Thank you to Runa and Dennis. How do you see the intersection of sustainability and cloud storage evolving and also going back to Zachary's question. What do you see the role being for AI specifically this year?

Yeah, and I'll actually I'll go back slightly Beyond just cloud storage because I think there's also not changes to roping Cloud security as well. So for example, if we come back to the application Level you think about all the best practices available today? So for example, there's programming language like Russ which give you both efficiency as well as performance without necessarily A compromising security though.

So I know it's a challenge for certain large traditional Enterprise with monolithic large stats of Legacy applications, but certainly as you build your digital ecosystems, it's worth leveraging those Technologies because it gives you the ability to actually build best practices from the get-go. So in other words the application is efficient and we're building a security mechanisms that makes it much easier to then deploy the application and not to have you know, the kind of compromise or at least the loopholes that typically introduce or expand their attack surface so in doing so you also making it more sustainable. Why is that well the application if it's written in a very clean Right, he's gonna be more efficient because it uses less resources.

So I think application stack is certain level to look at when it comes to the middleware and integration level through apis, there's opportunities again to use code and best practices to to make sure you have the right Frameworks and the efficiencies and that will give you both to security aspects as well as the ability to actually store data securely knowing that if the base is in transit that rest is secure without any within it without any doubts. Great. Thank you so much.

Let's move on to Roman. Yeah, I I think that there's a role here for the convergence between really the cloud and Edge Computing as well. Like I mentioned earlier many of these Assets in the field are producing the data are deployed over you know, low banana with types of networks.

And it's really impossible to really pipe all that data into the cloud. It's inefficient and it's it's often just impossible. That like I mentioned some of them don't even have network connectivity.

In fact, most of them don't and so creating an edge compute type of platform that's deployed out in the fields that can process data and and then send up results up into the cloud securely is is an architecture. That's been that's been taking hold now you have this Edge compute out. They it's it's sitting out there.

It's Gathering data. You got to use it for processing right? It's it's part of its sustainability equation for sure if you got an asset out there use it and And again that creates a much more secure and much more robust architecture as well because you what you're doing there is you enabling a multi-hop approach for the data to get into the cloud.

That's that takes into efficiency and security all the way through. Roman appreciate that and so I want to do kind of around Robin where I'm going to ask you for a brief answer to the following question since especially since this panel is started starts entitled with the words green it and I think everyone is wondering as technology advances and we keep getting new devices new things. How do we dispose responsibly end of life?

5 of electronic waste is actually recycled and the majority is either incinerated or dumped into landfills this highlighted by a report from the world economic Forum. So if you were to each give at least maybe one tip of how we might do a better job and responsibly disposing of end of life. It assets.

I'd love to hear from each of you and let's start with taruna. Oh sure. That's actually a brilliant question Bonnie.

I I would actually turn it around a little bit and I would say, you know invest in it infrastructure that actually does not increase that electronic waste so I'll give you another example so at your storage are evergreen architecture, it does not go it does not get wasted at all. So unlike the regular, you know, three to five years storage refresh you throughout your old gear you put new gear in our Evergreen architecture is always current and it's always maintained and this is this is one way to get started but then you know, you could also look at different business models. So for example in storage as a service a lot of the equipment is upcycled and in a way the vendor takes on the responsibility of reducing that yeast if you read some of the studies Like, you know various industry leading analysts one of the ways that storage as a service reduces E-Waste is because of the business model itself lends itself to always making sure that you're getting upcycled equipment and you're using it as efficiently as possible.

You're only buying what you need. You're not powering on what you don't need and just kind of overall taking a larger approach not just focusing on what's what the E-Waste is but starting from the architecture all the way to the business model. We have like a quick kind of two sentence answer for this one of any quick tip on how to dispose responsibly for it waste.

So I actually build on that a good points from tuna. I think the other the other side of the coin as well and is to look at how you can actually leverage virtualization and multitude of waves. So for example, you know, do you necessarily need to actually have Hardware, you know, we think about we talk about software service.

We also have platforms and service and we have infrastructures the service all these different Cloud models enable us to move more access to the cloud and given the security mechanisms and guardrails available. It's possible to actually do the risk assessment determine which workloads which assets. Can you move to the cloud and does it necessarily provide opportunities for sharing or you know, are there ways to actually, you know remove that extra Capital cost of Hardware.

So I think personal to look at still in says to look at see how you can use the the cloud as a solution but have a very holistic view look across the Enterprise maybe some of the infrastructure can move into the cloud Maybe platform service can point to the cloud and then you can use apis to build that kind of Enterprise connectivity that you need to make sure that business is still sustained. And final word on your your tips on how we can be more sustainable with end of life it. Yeah, I think the best way to become more sustainable here is is to really extend the life of the asset, right and the industries we're dealing with in fact such as manufacturing energy Transportation.

Their assets are designed to last 10 15 20 years, right? So there the life is really extended the challenge that becomes is that well, the security landscape is always moving. Is there new threats their developed all the time.

How do you protect an asset that maybe 10 15 20 years old against the modern security landscape and so Zach has created an overlay architecture. That's flexible that deploys right in requires. No rip in the place works with current assets yet is software driven can protect assets and and change over time when with the you know with the new attacks and the type of threats that are becoming that the new types of threats that come up all the time.

You so much Roman and each of you. Those are very helpful tips. I'm sure we're going to be going back and checking on those as a Time continues on well that is completely end in the conclusion of our panel session called Green it strategies harnessing the power of sustainable cloud storage or Textron con 2023.

I'm Bonnie Schneider, and I'd like to thank our three panelists. Taruna Gandhi who leaves product marketing for Evergreen subscriptions portfolio and pure one at Pure Storage. Denis Nwanshi she the chief digital officer of nitro scale and Roman origin of the co-founder and SVP of products at zage security for joining me today for this informative and insightful conversation.

Thank you to three of you for being here today. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, and thank you for watching us and joining us on Tech strong con 2023 and stay with us throughout the day. We have a lot going on great sessions and informative opportunities as well for networking.