Engineers' Day...

Engineers' Day

Every year India celebrates Engineers' Day in honour of Bharat Ratna Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, one of India's most notable engineers. Born on September 15, 1860, Sir MV, as he was popularly known, was knighted as a Commander of the British Indian Empire by King George V for his myriad contributions to the public good.

Vijay Mhaskar, vice president, Information Management Group, Symantec, shares his insights on how India can offer innovations in the sunrise sector of cloud computing

It is engineers' day on September 15 -- a day to celebrate the creative and technical spirit of Indian engineers, who have contributed towards India's rising success globally. Engineering excellence touches every aspect of life today – from the alarm on smartphones, to the gadgets that allow access to information at any time.

Technology is triggering a shift in the way people and organisations interact, especially with the advent of cloud computing, virtualisation and mobility. In addition, the growth of digital devices and all time access to information is contributing to an information explosion leading to the Big Data phenomenon.

In this time of change, there is an urgent need to stay relevant in order to continue the technology-leadership that India has created for itself. And engineers need to be at the vanguard of this shift, leading the way as the rest of the country navigates new technologies and trends. Just as we took advantage of Y2K to firmly establish our dominance in the software space, cloud, virtualisation and mobility today present great opportunities. Preparing for these opportunities, however, is no easy task.

For example, the cloud represents a great leap in a distributed model where the location of data and applications has become irrelevant. It brings access, cost-efficiencies and scalability to an organisation, and is unsurprisingly becoming a very popular technology delivery model. From an engineering standpoint, cloud questions the fundamental principles and attributes that have been the de facto system for the past 30 years. Designing systems and applications that are operated and accessed on the network is a paradigm shift from developing them on-premise. Engineers accustomed to developing applications for computers that are static/hard-linked now need to account for a more dynamic and heterogeneous environment.

Cloud moves the computing or storage remotely and the end-user may not have any visibility into this environment. The distributed nature of cloud computing brings into focus network connectivity -- wide area networks (WANs), performance, bandwidth and availability have become critical. Engineers who are qualified to create, maintain and operate high-performance networks are therefore in great demand.

Posted By-IIMT MCA IT Comity