The pandemic has highlighted the fundamental role that mission-critical digital infrastructure plays within business, enabling organizations to maintain operational continuity. But with a growing remote workforce and many businesses accelerating their digital transformation strategies, managing greater volumes of geographically distributed IT sites has become a major pain point.
I recently sat down with Angel Castaño, Technical Director Energy Efficiency , Cad&Lan Spain for the Schneider Electric IT Channel Perspectives podcast series, to talk about some of the measures that end-users are taking to help mitigate power outages and IT failures. We spoke also about the transition to remote management and digital service-based business models, and how increased visibility and data driven insights have become a business’s greatest ally.
The Uptime Institute‘s 10th annual data centre survey, for example, found that outages are occurring with disturbing frequency and are becoming more damaging and expensive. A third of survey participants admitted to experiencing a major outage in the last 12 months, and one in six claimed it had cost them more than $1m (+850,000€).
What’s interesting is that 75% of respondents said that their most recent incident could have been prevented with better management, training and improved processes. This creates a compelling business case for power protection and remote management.
Process automation and real time monitoring
Digital services, data analytics and remote monitoring have long-been business critical tools, but have become particularly important during the last 18 months. Angel says Cad&Lan’s proximity to its customers to help meet their changing needs during the pandemic has been vital.
“We have noticed an important progression in technologies that quickly facilitate decision-making, which allows us to automate the IT environment and both control and protect infrastructures in real-time,” said Angel Castaño, Technical Director Energy Efficiency, Cad&Lan Spain. “Adapting to remote work, process automation and real time monitoring have been key to maintaining continuity.”
Schneider Electric has worked to support Cad&Lan throughout this process: From configuration – helping them to design the data centre or edge computing solution – to monitoring it. This is a process we continue to follow, working closely alongside many of our partners throughout the lifecycle of the project; from design through to specification and monitoring. Such an approach enables you to develop a closer long-term relationship with the customer and to increase the potential for recurring service revenues over the full cycle of the project.
Real time insights
From in-store retail systems to data centres, real time insights are critical, especially when managing a large number of distributed sites. Whether the customer is looking for remote, on-site or a hybrid IT model, Cad&Lan has developed a turnkey solution that helps to keep them connected.
“Among our clients, we have a company that has a wide network of supermarkets in Europe, to which we monitor their energy consumption and the quality of the electrical installation,” continued Angel. “We also work with a well-known network of opticians, that require remote monitoring and support for their networks and IT systems to obtain flow data. These in-store analytics improve the performance of the points of sale (POS).”
“In everyone of these cases Schneider Electric remote monitoring software helps end-to-end communication, and integrates with all types of IoT-enabled equipment, so that everything is included within a single platform and which the customer can view as needed.”
A full view of infrastructure
Another key consideration is to have a joined-up approach, from the outset. One that focuses on the customer’s vision or ambitions. This means connecting products and teams, creating and integrating software solutions and driving automation for real time insights.
“It’s important to maintain a solid customer, installer and manufacturer chain. If one of the links is weak, the solution itself is not successful,” said Angel. “The customer benefits the most from the alliance as they have the support of all stakeholders, whenever they require it.”
Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure suite provides power monitoring, building and infrastructure automation, while enabling partners to connect to any software and hardware on any platform or environment.
This means Cad&Lan now has the ability already to offer real-time insights and differentiate their services, while providing exceptional value to the customers. And by working together and providing remote monitoring alongside the hardware and service aspects, they can enable a complete view of the customer’s infrastructure, which reduces risk, lowers costs and helps anticipate potential failures. Furthermore, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities analyse the data, enabling customers to make data-driven decisions, while mitigating downtime.
You can listen to the latest IT Channel Perspectives podcast “Creating a compelling business case for power protection and remote management”, featuring Cad&Lan here.
To learn more about the new mySchneider IT Solutions Provider Partner program – visit the website.
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