The fundamentals for adaptive resilience in 2025

A conversation with Jay Subramanian, GM of Core Storage Platforms, Hitachi Vantara

With the advances in technology and growth of complex hybrid clouds has come an explosion of applications, data sources, and data. How do IT leaders drive innovation and stay on top of security and resilience with so much at play?

We sat down with Jay Subramanian, our GM of Core Storage Platforms, to get his thoughts and some practical insights. 

Jay, what are the biggest challenges facing organizations today?

Organizations are dealing with diverse distributed environments as well as a mix of new and legacy applications… I speak to some customers who are still running mainframes! At the same time, people are layering in the cloud with microservices architecture. And people are accessing the data infrastructure from all over, so the network must be secure, while accessible. These diverse environments  combined with the need to keep data moving between locations while maintaining the right visibility and resilience introduce complexity.

Would you say this complexity is making it harder to innovate and stay secure?

Absolutely. When you have a diverse environment like this, everybody has a unique need. And trying to meet different needs causes different problems. Innovation must happen faster…and it can be very ad hoc. I'm going to use the word unstructured, because innovation is not something you always plan for. But you need the right structures in place, without which there will be holes, and this is where security problems come in. Structured thinking is needed to ensure security policies, compliance, and so forth. It’s a case of continuous improvement, balancing the structures needed to protect the infrastructure with the unstructured thinking that allows for the innovation that is critical for moving forward. 

We know that increased complexity brings increased security risks. In our recent survey, 74% of IT leaders said if they lost data through a mistake or attack, the results would be catastrophic¹. How can IT leaders mitigate the risks?

Spam emails and phishing are rife, and the techniques are becoming much more advanced, catching out even the tech-savvy. By being more aware of the ramifications of these threats, IT leaders can build an environment with resilience at its core – and this means ransomware detection, proactive monitoring, and so on. As applications become more divergent and innovation continues, more potential security ‘holes’ are going to appear. This is why continuous improvement, continuous analysis, and continuous monitoring across the entire environment are crucial.

With so much data, is there a role for it in helping to build adaptive resilience for organizations as they innovate and progress? 

Yes, there absolutely is. First and foremost, data (particularly unstructured data) must be addressed, making sure it’s properly categorized and tagged to support predictive analytics and the like. Data must be accurate, visible, and in the right place to enable the tools that can detect downtime and failure before it occurs.

Here are some more fundamentals, leaning on the advances in technology available to us, that can help IT leaders achieve the adaptive resilience that’s crucial for progress.

1. Seamless cloud integration with storage to scale seamlessly when needed, and enabling efficient recovery of operations in case of an outage or disaster.
2. Automate the disaster recovery architecture so that in the event of a failure or outage, AI-driven systems can redirect workloads to backup locations in the cloud, ensuring continuous operations with minimal additional resources required.
3. Put AI-driven security and analytics tools to work to detect unusual network activity and threats before they turn into breaches, providing guardrails and protection against unintended consequences from inside and outside the business.
4. Monitor the health of physical assets with AI-powered analytics and predict failures before they occur to prevent downtime.  
5. Model various crisis scenarios and make more informed decisions with AI simulation tools to drive resilience in all manner of unanticipated events.
6. Deploy Edge AI to predict anomalies and implement corrective actions in environments ranging from factories and distribution centers to oil rigs; maintaining operations at the Edge even if the connection to the core cloud is temporarily lost.

If you’d like to hear more from Jay, he recently took part in a virtual conference with CIONET ‘Mastering Complexity - Thriving in the Era of Data Explosion’ which you can watch, on-demand, right here.

Source ¹ State of Data Infrastructure Global Report 2024 - How AI is Shifting Data’s Foundation