Western Digital addressing the growing surveillance needs with its offerings

Khalid Wani
Director – Channel Sales India, Western Digital 

Business opportunities  

We have seen storage technologies being adopted increasingly by various new verticals. Surveillance is one such segmentthat is creating a huge impact on storage trends. As the number of criminal cases reported increase, the importance of surveillance in India is also increasing. This has created urgency in consumers to seek out better solutions. 

Western Digital has been an integral part of the Smart Cities Mission in India. We were closely associated with the Smart Cities Council of India while working on a survey that focused on surveillance part of smart cities. During the survey we identified the requirements and best practices of surveillance with reference to smart cities.

Good data for a Good Brand Strategy 

A couple of years back, no one could have predicted the importance of storage in everyday lives of consumers. However, there has been a drastic change in how the storage and surveillance sector has evolved from then. We no longer rely on floppy disks but have moved to more advanced versions of hard drives and flash-based storage. As emerging technologies such as IoT become more and more common, the demand for storage also increases with them. Even on the consumer end, the increasing adoption of smartphones, growing internet penetration and 4G rollout have intensified the demand for more advanced storage solutions. 

And to keep up with these increasing demands, storage technology has undergone massive developments. Storage has come a long way - from dual drives, a category of storage created to address the demands generated by the increase in smartphone adoption, to flash storage, a recent innovation in storage technology that combines high performance and efficiency within a compact size to store and manage increasing volumes of data.

Impact of Digitization on Businesses

As India takes a step towards digital transformation through initiatives such as Digital India, and AADHAR, there has been a continuous growth in content generation. Every daythe amount of data getting generated, accessed and worked on continues to increase, especially with the growth of the smartphone market, the expansion of the gaming industry and technologies such as 4K coming forth. We aim to address these growing needs of consumers through continuous innovationand by coming up with better storage solutions.

The SanDisk iXpand flash drive for instance is one solution that enables iPhone and iPad users to easily free up space on their device. We also have a range of internal SSDs and HDDs, including WD Black HDD, WD Blue SSDs and WD Black SSD to name a few that adhere to the growing needs of the gaming industry and provide them with a seamless gaming experience.The all-new My Cloud Home storage device plugs directly into your Wi-Fi router at home, so you can easily save, organize and control all your digital content in one central place and wirelessly access it all from anywhere.

On the enterprise side of the business, we have been working towards coming up with solutions related to big and fast data, and these solutions cater to the growing storage needs of almost every sector. 

R&D driving Growth

Western Digital has always considered R&D as an important core of our business and we continue to focus on it. In India, our employees in the Bangalore R&D centre isworking to come up with many innovative solutions. Majority of these teams have been focused on consumer flash storage. Apart from that our R&D centre also focusses on enterprise storage technology and embedded flash storage as well- which is primarily storage used inside cell phones and tablets. Along with this we also have teams that are working towards developing client-side solutions as well.