BENGALURU: State Bank of India (SBI) , the largest public sector bank, is soon going to become cloud compliant, becoming the biggest adopter of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) in the world. The process is under implementation and comes in the wake of a huge security lapse in the country’s banking system when thousands of credit and debit cards were compromised.
Milind Yedkar, General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan, Cloud Client Computing, Dell, tells us that demonetisation has been followed by increased transactions and banks need to invest in upgrading their infrastructure which makes VDI critical. “You need to use machines and improve security. It’s like building a wall for the house, you need to secure everything and keep your data in one place,” he points out.
Dell is also in conversationwith the defence players after defence secrets were leaked recently and expects other government departments to move quickly. VDI is the practice of hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine (VM) on a central server.
However, Dell does not have a local cloud data centre in India, unlike other global cloud providers like Microsoft, IBM and AWS (Amazon Web Services), “We are happy to work with others to provide access. I take away my data centre and use one which somebody else has, so if I am using Amazon my investment goes down. I can pay them per PC or per gigabyte of data on a monthly basis. My data is in some other place and I need to be comfortable about it. This is a decision every company needs to take. In the backend if you want Amazon, IBM, Microsoft or Oracle, we are happy to work with them, that is not our space,” he said.
However, Dell now makes one of the best storages and Yedkar says that they are obliged to make it work for customers even if they do not have a local cloud data centre. While most emerging banks and others like HDFC and RBL are Dell clients, public sector banks are yet to catch up. But this is set to change with SBI upgrading its security to cloud.