Digital Engineering - A Norm for Business Wanting to Stay Afloat Even During Crisis
Having completed his degree in Production Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Ram is a seasoned IT professional with an extensive career spanning close to four decades in the IT space. Prior to joining Virtusa in 2021, he has successfully handles key roles across companies such as Cognizant, iNautix, TCS and L&T, to name a few. In a recent interaction with Siliconindia, Ram Meenakshisundaram, Chief Technology Officer, Virtusa Corporation shared his insights on various aspects pertaining to digital engineering from today’s business view point. Below are the key extracts from the exclusive interview
How did the covid pandemic impact the digital engineering landscape?
The global covid pandemic had brought every business across almost all industries to a stand-still, resulting in pushing companies to look at new strategies and avenues to remain operational even during times of such crisis. As a result, post covid, a majority of business are looking at ways to digitally strengthen their organization to serve their customers more efficiently. Thus, I strongly believe that embracing digital transformation is no more an option, but a norm for businesses across all verticals; lest they would definitely cease to exist during the times of unforeseen crisis.
Tell us about a few latest technologies that are currently disrupting the digital engineering space.
Cloud and data have always been the key fundamentals that are driving digital transformation across all industries. Most organization that currently have their systems on premise are now looking forward to move their systems & applications to cloud wither in a virtual or a non-virtual environment. Cloud has now enabled businesses to streamline all the available data, store it securely and make sure that the entire data is available to be taken advantage of in a holistic manner during their decision making process. Then come the frontend technologies and engineering capabilities – the way in which we access information, be it through a mobile, on web or any other channel. Despite trending in the market quite some time now, AI and ML are still enjoy a monopoly in terms of cutting-edge tech advancements that are disrupting the digital transformation phenomenon. With the advent of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM), technology is now being embedded into the systems and applications to either drive growth or transformation.
What are some of the effective strategies to have a successful digital engineering in an organization?
For an effective implementation of digital engineering, organizations must follow a three-pronged approach. First is to get the data in order and ensuring that we have data which is well presented and well integrated. Having a good data governance framework is very important in order to full advantage of digital engineering. Second is to ensure that we have the right kind of architecture (hybrid cloud, multi cloud or single cloud) in place to achieve the desired outcomes in the most optimal way. Then based on the cloud you adopt, you need to choose the underlying technologies to use as part of this technology stack. Lastly, writing code which ensures that the infrastructure is secure is another key strategy that organizations must adopt to drive successful digital engineering.
Briefly explain the importance of data security and compliance in digital engineering.
When you’re dealing with an on premise architecture, the kind of security measures that you need to implement are slightly different than the ones that you should have once you start hosting application on cloud. To ensure that your application are secure enough and don’t have any vulnerabilities, it is important to build stringent data governance policies within the application itself during the entire development process and not keep it as an option towards the end of the process. Also, it is critical for companies to conduct periodic penetration testing when they are implementing digital transformation using the digital engineering principles.
How do you expect digital engineering to evolve in the days to come?
The future looks extremely promising for digital engineering in India. Currently, India is at the forefront of tech adoption globally. In addition, it is also home to a large pool of skilled manpower who can offer exceptional service to clients at very reasonably cost price. Also, with the encouragement from our government through programs like Digital India, we are witnessing a tremendous adoption of digital transformation today within the Indian business ecosystem to take full advantage of the digital backbone that the government has provided in terms of modern infrastructure development.
