2012
Suresh Kumar, Grant Thornton India (1,200 EMPLOYEES)
FINALIST
Grant Thornton is one of the oldest and prominent accountancy firms with over 1,000 professionals in India. The company generates a plethora of client engagement data and other business critical information that had to be streamlined—and stored centrally for regulatory compliance. Suresh Kumar, CIO and partner, Grant Thornton, deployed an automated business data collation solution which allows fast, secure, and optimized data collation over the corporate network without disrupting users. The solution is built on open source technologies. The system is scalable up to any level—without any software licensing costs. The solution also offers automated backup storage with zero user intervention. It also sends e-mail reminders to users who have missed backing up their data. The system allows synchronization of user data using Rsync protocol which is initiated and controlled using a custom developed client application installed on every corporate laptop. At present, the project has achieved compliance requirements of storing business critical information centrally on a fully redundant and highly available NAS/SAN.
Kishore Hirani, Gujarat Gas Company (600 EMPLOYEES) Gujarat Gas Company (GGCL) distributes gas to about 360,000 industrial, commercial, and domestic customers; and CNG to over 181,600 vehicles. Although the company had a disaster recovery (DR) setup for its mission critical applications, it suffered from worryingly high recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). A previous disaster had left the company with days of downtime. Under GM-IT, Kishore Hirani’s watch, GGCL invested in an enterprise-wide business continuity strategy. Hirani and his team designed a DR setup, reducing GGCL’s backup window of 24 hours to less than 12 hours, drastically shrinking RPO from 48-96 hours to zero, and delivering 99.9 percent uptime. The setup was established with three-way data replication for near-line and far disaster recovery sites. The real-time replication from the production site to near-line storage helps the business achieve zero-data loss in any eventuality. Additionally, it brought significant cost savings due to simplified and automated replication and recovery. It also helped GGCL achieve an almost 50 percent performance improvement in business applications like SAP and billing.
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S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLD
VOL/7 | ISSUE/11