• Thursday, March 28, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Schneider Electric’s new tech tool to boost digital economy

In race against fuel challenges, Schneider Electric canvass adoption of electric vehicles

In a bid to increase efficiency in Nigeria’s digital economy, Schneider Electric has released White Paper 281, “How Modern DCIM Addresses CIO Management Challenges within Distributed, Hybrid IT Environments” and a supporting TradeOff Tool, both available for immediate use.

The Middle East and Africa green data centre market are expecting growth at a CAGR of 14.81 percent from 2022-2027 as companies, cloud operators and colocation operators increasingly focus on efficiency and sustainability across their operations.

As the sector evolves, Schneider Electric Secure Power recognises the rapidly-changing role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and what an organisation requires from their Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software.

The new White Paper demonstrates how the success of a CIO is ultimately rooted in a solid foundation of maintaining resilient, secure, and sustainable IT operations. This goal becomes harder to accomplish in an environment of highly distributed hybrid IT.

“As digital transformation accelerates across the Middle East, CIOs recognise the importance of investing in greater capabilities focused on scalability, resilience, and security. According to IDC’s recent survey, 40% of organisations. in the region are actively investing in this area, demonstrating a keen awareness in the MEA region on the critical role a digital-first approach plays in aiding evolving business needs,” said Mouna Essa-Egh, vice president, MEA, at Schneider Electric Secure Power division.

“At Schneider Electric Secure Power, our mission is simple – transforming DCIM to truly bring value to the modern CIO through sustainable, flexible and powerful systems.”

“Business requirements are forcing CIOs to hybridise their data centre and IT portfolio architecture by placing IT capacity in colocation facilities and building out capacity at the local edge – sometimes in a big way,” said author Patrick Donovan, Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Centre.

Read also: FG spends N22.5bn on social investment in Edo – Farouq

“CIOs have always been tasked with managing and maintaining resilient and secure operations, but generally have been focused on core data centre sites. Now, on top of having many more distributed sites needing resiliency and security, they are also being asked to report on the sustainability of their IT operations. This marks a real sea change in terms of their responsibilities.”

The need for resiliency, security, and sustainability in the 16-page paper, Donovan describes the evolution of enterprise IT portfolios and explores the resulting management challenges.

He explains how modern DCIM software has evolved and is more optimised for increasingly distributed environments. Distributed IT makes security a top concern along with the need for improved resiliency and tracking and reporting of the IT operation’s environmental impact.

An opportunity to “trade off” various DCIM scenarios with new calculatorA new Schneider Electric TradeOff Tool, the DCIM Monitoring Value Calculator for Distributed IT, supports the White Paper and provides user-selectable inputs and adjustable assumptions to perform “what-if” scenarios to see the ROI/payback of monitoring software. It considers factors like downtime, staffing, security and environmental incidents, and cash flow.

“We wanted to create a useful framework to help customers quantify the potential value of DCIM in their operations and we are excited for them to try our tool,” said TradeOff Tool creator Wendy Torell, Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Centre. “We designed it to be user friendly and it easily adapts to the customer’s specific environment and level of maturity.”