This year saw businesses placing greater trust in the cloud. With employees working remotely, it only made sense to migrate business applications to the cloud. Helping many such organisations do so is Pennsylvania-headquartered Unisys. An end-to-end cloud service provider, Unisys assists organisations in seamless and effective migration to cloud, in decision making, cost optimisation, and in ensuring security for different processes and applications on the cloud. Some of the clients include Bank ABC, Hershey, Somos, and the Georgia Technology Authority.
Analytics India Magazine caught up with Sumed Marwaha, Regional Services Vice President and Managing Director for Unisys India to understand more.
Unisys’ Services
“Unisys is basically a cloud solutions company. A business may need storage or compute power using the cloud. The leadership may be willing to go through the drill of migrating its application and processes on the cloud but may not be able to estimate how much to pay or what services to avail in this regard. Hence, comes the requirement of a service provider that helps the business take such decisions and provide services accordingly with other security and compliance offerings. And that is where Unisys steps in,” explains Marwaha
He further adds, “We have our own IP, products and services. We offer a range of services that include — cloud advisory, digital transformation services, cloud migration, cloud application services, data service centres, and management and operations, among others.”
In 2018, the company introduced a new offering called the Unisys CloudForte, which is a platform that provides all sorts of end-to-end cloud services to our customers. Some of the most prominent modules in the CloudForte include:
- CloudForte Advisory: Through this module, Unisys aims to provide consultancy and advisory services to enterprises on achieving their business objectives through the cloud. Unisys offers solutions and expert advice on a range of pressing issues that an organisation may have — what to move to the cloud, how to optimise performance, and how to manage cost.
- CloudForte Navigator: This helps in building, operating, and optimising secure and high-performing multi and hybrid cloud systems while keeping it cost-effective. It also provides review, assessment, remediation services for an enterprise’s cloud platform.
- CloudForte Management and Digital Migration: Unisys offers rapid migration techniques using infrastructure and application modernisation. For applications that cannot be directly moved to the cloud, this module helps in modernising them for easy migration.
- CloudForte Cloud Management Platform: Enterprises no longer stick to just one cloud provider for their businesses; they opt for multi and hybrid cloud platforms. Through this module, Unisys provides single window access to all the business infrastructure of an enterprise, be it AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
- CloudForte Cloud Optimisation: As per Unisys’ own internal survey, it was found that two-thirds of the organisations feel that they are not optimally utilising their cloud. It then devised its own IP for cost optimisation, under which Unisys assesses whether the enterprise is using the cloud effectively and efficiently.
- CloudForte AIOps: Unisys uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the entire process of managing the cloud effectively under its AIOps module. It follows a four-step process: collecting operational data; feeding this data to the machine learning engine; driving specific output from the ML engine; feeding the data into governance.
‘Stealthy’ Security
Marwaha believes that there are three things to consider when we speak of security over cloud:
- A business is as secure as its weakest link
- The safety of the whole network, including the endpoints must be ensured
- Running regular compliance and security reports are of paramount importance.
Models on these building blocks, Unisys has introduced ‘Stealth’, a micro-segmentation that ensures the safety and security of businesses.
Under one of the functionaries called the Stealth Core services, Unisys creates a ‘community of interest’ for the processes of their client businesses. These communities of interest are hidden from each other. “Suppose there is an attack on one of the communities of interest, it doesn’t spread to another as the attacker won’t be able to see beyond a particular community of interest. The surface area of the attack is considerably reduced,” explains Marwaha.
As an additional layer of security, Stealth Core offers ‘Dynamic Isolation’ with these communities of interest. Meaning the attack will be limited to only a few affected systems and nodes and will not spread within the entire community of interest.
Further, other modules of Stealth include — Stealth Identity and Stealth Services. With Stealth Identity, Unisys offers modern, simple, and cost-effective biometric-based security solutions spread over modalities such as facial, iris, fingerprint, or voice recognition. On the other hand, with Stealth Services, Unisys offers hands-on planning and design services, customised to business needs.
‘Cloud Is Here To Stay’
“Even before the pandemic situation, we saw a massive increase in the number of organisations moving to the cloud; after COVID, this migration has only accelerated. So if organisations are still thinking about moving to the cloud, they are too late. The cloud is the present and is here to stay,” iterates Marwaha. He further adds that 99.9% of Unisys’ own systems and processes run on the cloud. “Most of the migration to the cloud happened well before the pandemic hit. So we virtually incurred no major loss on that front when organisations around the world were forced to abandon convention work and business patterns and embrace a more remote set-up.”
With newer innovations such as hybrid- and multi-cloud, edge computing, and cloud-edge hybrid systems, the future for the cloud does seem bright.
