Express Computer (Vol. 26, No. 1) January, 2015

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GOVERNANCE IN THE AGE OF IoT E

THE BEST RESULTS CAN ONLY COME WHEN WE TAKE STOCK OF THE PRESENT DIVERSITY IN THE MARKETAND ALLOWTHE MOST SUITABLE TECHNOLOGY OR STANDARD TO EMERGE THROUGH A NATURAL PROCESS.

arlier the Indian government had been struggling on how IoT may have an impact on economy and governance. But now some new ideas have started emerging. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has released a draft IoT policy, which takes a look at the ways by which IoT can transform governance through development of low cost platforms for connecting people, places, processes and data. DeitY defines IoT as “a seamless connected network of embedded objects/ devices, with identifiers, in which M2M communication without any human intervention is possible using standard and interoperable communication protocols.”

One of the key objectives of the government, according to the DeitY’s draft IoT policy, is to facilitate the development of an IoT industry in India of $15 billion by 2020. Initiatives will be taken for capacity building in IoT specific skill-sets and for the development of IoT products in the spheres of “agriculture, health, water quality, natural disasters, transportation, security, automobile, supply chain management, smart cities, automated metering and monitoring of utilities, waste management, oil & gas, etc.” The draft IoT policy draws the conclusion that IoT will make a seminal difference to the way business and governance are conducted.

The billions of things connected to the Internet will lead to many new opportunities for the government to energise the economy and develop better systems for governance. But every shift in the way of doing things will entail pain. It will be tempting for the government to resort to framing of regulations that might lead to short term alleviation in the pain of moving away from the traditional way of doing things. However, the government must move cautiously in developing regulations for IoT. A hastily conceived regulation can miss the target, introduce costs and delays and eventually stymie the growth of a vibrant IoT ecosystem.

Some kind of standardisation might be needed to ensure that the things connected to the Internet can seamlessly communicate with each other, and with the government agencies and the people, without any risks of invasion of privacy or loss of data. But standardisation through government regulation is not the right way.

The best results can only come when we take stock of the present diversity in the market and allow the most suitable technology or standard to emerge through a natural process. Too early regulation from the government will inhibit the emergence of better technologies or standards through the process of trail and error in the market. anoop.verma@expressindia.com

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“WE MUSTSAFEGUARD THE ENVIRONMENT, BUTNOTATTHE COSTOF DEVELOPMENT” “The environment exists for the benefit of humans, humans don't exist for the environment. If humans are unable to live, then of what use is the environment?” says Anant Geete, Union Minister of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises.

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feature

MANAGED SECURITY

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“Despite the growing importance of mobility across organisations, security around it is often overlooked as a bolt-on and treated as an after-thought.”

MANAGING THE IT PROTECTION

VIRTUALIZE,BUTWITH CAUTION

Should organisations shift their IT security to the managed security model or should they take care of security related issues by themselves?

A look at security vulnerabilities that accompany virtualization and how enterprises are gearing to build safeguard against the risks.

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feature 16

TECH TURNS IN 2014 The advances in technology involve years and years of incremental effort. The work that has happened in a single year is hard to detect.

But in this feature we have attempted to accomplish the difficult task of fixing the spotlight on a single year—2014.

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interviews

Y2K & THE MAKING OFA CIO

THE GREAT INDIAN PSUS

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SHANKAR AGGARWAL Shankar Aggarwal, Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India.

Smart Cities will be a game-changer for Indian economy 14

Case study 36

RURALSHORES SCALES MULTI-LINGUALVOICE BUSINESS WITH OZONETEL RuralShores has successfully expanded its business by using a cost-effective cloud based communication solution for zonetel

DR.AJAY KUMAR Director General, National Informatics Centre (NIC); Joint Secretary, Department of Electronics & Information Technology.

Creating Transformational eGovernance Systems 35

ALOK OHRIE President and Managing Director – Dell India

“Digital India will become a catalyst for new investments”

EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA 2014

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SMART INNOVATION, NEW IDEAS & BRIGHT FUTURE New and emerging IT solutions are changing the way the Public Sector Undertakings manage their operations.

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MUMBAI Shankar Adaviyar The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 2nd Floor, Express Tower, Nariman Point Mumbai- 400 021 Board line: 022- 67440000 Ext. 527 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com Vol 26. No. 1. January, 2015 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Editor Anoop Verma* Chief of Product Dr. Raghu Pillai Delhi Heena Jhingan, Pupul Dutta Copy Desk Aditi Gautam Mumbai Jasmine Desai Bengaluru Pankaj Maru DESIGN National Art Director Bivash Barua Deputy Art Director Surajit Patro Chief Designer Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rushikesh Konka Layout Vinayak Mestry, Rajesh Jadhav Photo Editor Sandeep Patil MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West Prabhas Jha - North Sanghamitra Kumar - East Dr. Raghu Pillai - South Marketing Team

Branch Offices NEW DELHI Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division Express Building, 9&10, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi- 110 002 Board line: 011-23702100 Ext. 668 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Fax: 011-23702141 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com CHENNAI Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division New No. 37/C (Old No. 16/C) 2nd Floor, Whites Road, Royapettah, Chennai- 600 014 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com BANGALORE Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 502, 5th Floor, Devatha Plaza, Residency road, Bangalore- 560025 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com HYDERABAD Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 6-3-885/7/B, Ground Floor, VV Mansion, Somaji Guda, Hyderabad – 500 082 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com

Shankar Adaviyar Navneet Negi Ajanta Sengupta Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Rohan Thakkar PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia

KOLKATTA Ajanta Sengupta The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division JL No. 29&30, NH-6, Mouza- Prasastha & Ankurhati, Vill & PO- Ankurhati P.S.- Domjur (Nr. Ankurhati Check Bus Stop) Dist. Howrah- 711 409 Mobile: +91 9831182580 Email id: ajanta.sengupta@expressindia.com KOCHI Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Ground Floor, Sankoorikal Building, Kaloor – Kadavanthra Road Kaloor, Kochi – 682 017 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com COIMBATORE Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd No. 205-B, 2nd Floor, Vivekanand Road, Opp. Rajarathinam Hospital, Ram Nagar Coimbatore- 641 009 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com AHMEDABAD Shankar Adaviyar The Indian Express Ltd 3rd Floor, Sambhav House, Near Judges Bunglows, Bodakdev, Ahmedabad - 380 015 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com BHOPAL Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd F-102, Inner Court Apartment, 1st Floor, GTB Complex, Behind 45 Bungalows, Bhopal - 462 003 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com JAIPUR Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd S2, J-40, Shyam GHP Enclave, Krishna Marg, C-Scheme, Jaipur - 302 001 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com

IMPORTANT Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. The Indian Express Limited cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.

Express Computer Reg. No. REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, RNI Regn. No. MAHENG/49926/90 Printed for the proprietors,The Indian Express Limited by Ms. Vaidehi Thakar at Indigo Press, (India) Pvt. Ltd. Plot No. 1c/716, off Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027 and Published from Express Towers, 2nd Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021) Editor : Anoop Verma (*Responsible for selection of News under the PRB Act.) Copyright @ 2012 The Indian Express Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, electronic or otherwise, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited.

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INTERVIEW ANANT GEETE UNION MINISTER OF HEAVY INDUSTRIES AND PUBLIC ENTERPRISES

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“WE MUST SAFEGUARD THE ENVIRONMENT, BUT NOT AT THE COST OF DEVELOPMENT” “The environment exists for the benefit of humans, humans don't exist for the environment.

If humans are unable to live, then of what use is the environment?” says Anant Geete, Union Minister of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises. In conversation with Anoop Verma…

In your opinion what is the key challenge that the Public Sector Enterprises in India face?

One of the major challenges that the Public Sector, and the country in general faces, is environmentalism, which comes in the way of every development project.

To those who are environmentally conscious, I would like to say that there is nothing wrong with being concerned about the environment. I too am concerned about the environment. I too would like do something to ensure that the balance of the environment is maintained. However, we must accept that the environment exists for the benefit of humans, humans don’t exist for the environment. If humans are unable to live, then of what use is the environment?

There is the view that while Western countries are taking significant steps to safeguard their environment. India is not doing enough.

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We need to realise that the Western countries started promoting environmentalism only after they had fully developed their own society. India is not a developed country. We can’t afford to practice the kind of environmentalist views that are emanating from the Western world at present. How can we ignore the fact that currently more than 70% of the country is living in the rural areas, where people lack most of the basic amenities that the West takes for granted! We need to ask ourselves the question—who is funding those who are bringing this extreme brand of environmentalism to this country?

Obviously the money is coming from the foreign countries. Now we need to ask ourselves, what is the intention of those who are providing the funds to these socalled environmentalists? Are these environmentalists working with the aim of safeguarding the environment or is their real intention to thwart the development of India?

What steps is the government of India taking to ensure that this brand of environmentalism does not become a stumbling block in the country’s development?

Lot of serious discussion is happening in the government on this issue. Since the NDA government came to power, the Ministry of Environment has granted speedy clearance to many projects that had been blocked by the earlier government due to the pressure from various environmentalist groups. Many of these blocked projects, were related to defence of the country. The projects for the defence of the nation are of great importance, we can’t block them for any reason. There is need for us to think on these issues with a broad mind. I am all for safeguarding the environment but not at the cost of development. If environmentalism comes in the way of development then it must be regarded as a conspiracy against India and Indians.

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INTERVIEW ANANT GEETE UNION MINISTER OF HEAVY INDUSTRIES AND PUBLIC ENTERPRISES

The government of India has launched the Make in India campaign for making India a global manufacturing hub.What steps can the Public Sector in the country take to ensure the success of the Make in India initiative?

My ministry is striving consistently for ensuring the success of the Make in India campaign. We have taken a number of initiatives to ensure that the CPSEs are in position of having production of global quality standards. We are trying to attract substantial capital and technological investment in India.

Recently we sanctioned Rs. 930 crore for a pilot scheme that will enable industries in the capital goods sector to be globally competitive. The government of India’s contribution in this pilot scheme is Rs. 581.22 crore and the balance amount is coming from a consortium of industries.

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In the Department of Heavy Industry,we have started eOffice as a pilot project.In next two years,the scope of eOffice will be expanded further and we will have a completely paperless system of working.

What are the main components of this pilot scheme?

Under this scheme we will be starting centres of excellence for technology development at IIT Delhi, IIT Mumbai, IIT Chennai and IIT Kharagpur. For this the sanctioned amount is Rs. 312.5 crores.

In Bangalore we are starting an Integrated Industrial Infrastructure Facilities Park for Machine Tool. For this the outlay is Rs. 400 crore. Then two Common Engineering Facilities Centres will be developed. The first will come up at Surat, Gujarat, and for the second we are in process of finalising a suitable location. The budget for this is Rs. 61.2 crore. We are also planning a Testing and Certification Centre for construction equipment and earthmoving machinery, for which we have budgeted Rs. 100 crore, and a Technology Acquisition JANUARY, 2015

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Programme, which has a budget of Rs. 50 crore. The work on all these projects has already been started. In my opinion, this pilot scheme will be very effective in promoting the small, medium and micro industries.

remain in service till the retirement age of 58 or 60 years, they will get in their VRS settlement.

BHEL, which comes under Department of Heavy Industry, is doing very well in the area of R&D. It is filing almost one patent per day. But even BHEL is suffering due to Chinese competition and shortage of orders.What else can BHEL do to stay competitive?

As far as quality of manufactured goods is concerned, BHEL is far ahead of China.

They have very good internal systems.

Their ERP is world class. The company is not doing as well as it should because of the problems in the coal sector. The power companies are not running to their full capacity as they lack coal, and hence they are unable to place orders for new plants with BHEL. Today BHEL is running at 50% of its installed capacity because of the coal related problems in the power sector. However, things are going to improve in next 5 to 6 months.

The problems in the coal sector have been sorted out. After the Supreme Court judgement, the cabinet has made an announcement that the coal blocks will be reallocated.

Today the Chinese producers are making major inroads into the manufacturing sector of almost every country, including India.

What steps can be taken to ensure that our Public Sector can compete with the Chinese manufacturers?

Today the Indian industry faces a substantial threat from China. When I went to New York for attending the UN General Assembly at the time of the 11th Lok Sabha, I discovered that the green coloured Statue of Liberty, that many shops there sell for $10, were carrying the “Made in China” label. In India, some of our Public Sector Enterprises are facing tough competition from Chinese manufacturers. There is pressure on BHEL. There is pressure on steel companies. The Public Sector can compete with China only when we empower their managements to take the appropriate decision for growth of their organisations. We are already doing that. It is in the national interest to empower our Public Sector so that they can become globally competitive.

There are 32 Public Sector companies under Department of Heavy Industry.

Out of these 11 are not doing well.What steps are you taking to revive these 11 companies?

Out of eleven PSUs that are not doing well, we are planning to close down 5.

The proposal for closing these PSUs after providing VRS to the employees has already been sent. For rest of the PSUs that are loss making, we are currently conducting a process of evaluation. Those PSUs that can be revived will be retained, the rest will be closed down. However, I would like to clarify that we are determined to safeguard the interests of the workers.

Whatever the workers can earn, if they EXPRESS COMPUTER

We will be starting centres of excellence for technology development at IITDelhi,IITMumbai,IIT Chennai and IITKharagpur.

What steps is the Ministry of Heavy Industry and Public Enterprises taking to implement IT for improving internal management?

We are making efforts in that direction.

Information Technology is important because it brings efficiency and transparency. Many Public Sector companies under my ministry have already implemented ERP systems.

In the Department of Heavy Industry, we have started eOffice as a pilot project. It In next two years, the scope of eOffice will be expanded further and we will have a completely paperless system of working. We are paying lot of attention to this. Today world is moving in the direction of eGovernance, eBusiness and e-commerce. The PSUs in the country can’t be left behind. anoop.verma@expressindia.com

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INTERVIEW SHANKAR AGGARWAL MINISTRY OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

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“SMART CITIES WILL BE THE GAME-CHANGER FOR INDIA” “It is important for cities to get smarter to meet the rising expectations of the urban population.

Cities must find ways of deploying technology for increasing efficiency, reducing expenses and improving the quality of life,” says Shankar Aggarwal, Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India. In conversation with Express Computer The government is initiating programmes like Digital India, Smart Cities and Make in India. Effort is also being made to start electronics manufacturing in the country.

Do you think that India is on the cusp of an IT revolution?

Absolutely. There is no doubt about it.

Today we have a government that is stable and capable. We have a leadership that is passionate about nation building.

We also have the knowledge derived from experience of last few years that if you want to bring real positive change in India, you have to facilitate large-scale deployment of technology. When I talk about technology, I am talking about ICT. We are regarded as a world leader in IT software. Our private sector IT companies are doing very well. Now it is the time for us to take the major step for implementing ICT in the public sector and ensure a holistic development of the country.

The Ministry of Urban Development has taken the initiative of building 100 smart cities in the country.What is the vision behind the smart cities project?

As the population in the country grows, more and more people will move towards the cities. We need more cities for catering to the needs of the new generation of urban dwellers. So the key idea behind Smart Cities is to create many more jobs for the people, revitalise the economy, and to improve the quality of life substantially. When I say quality of life, I am essentially talking about the creation of high quality urban infrastructure, in which cutting edge technology is used to provide all the basic services that people need. ICT is already available, expertise is available, knowledge is available. Lets now take advantage of those resources and create EXPRESS COMPUTER

many more jobs in the country. Many new jobs can come up in the 100 Smart Cities that are being planned.

What will be the key features of the Smart City?

A Smart City can have different meaning for different people. But the foundation of a Smart City is made out of the judicious amalgamation of competitiveness, capital and sustainability. For efficient delivery of life’s most basic needs, the Smart City must use latest technological innovations for providing water, sanitation, reliable utility services, transportation, healthcare, etc. It is important for cities to get smarter to meet the rising expectations of urban India. Cities must find ways of deploying technology for increasing efficiency, reducing expenses and improving the quality of life.

Do people living in a Smart City also need to be smart? By smart I mean digitally literate.

People are generally smart. That is not a problem. They can acquire digital literacy.

Knowledge and expertise can be acquired.

The key theme behind the Smart City project is to create an environment that is conducive for personal as well as economic development. Hence the Smart Cities must also be seen as a vehicles for promoting economic activity in the country.

The success of the Smart City projects will ultimately depend on the amount of private investment that these projects can attract. But the experience of the private sector of investing in infrastructure projects in India has not been good.What initiatives can be taken to encourage private sector investment in Smart City projects?

This is exactly what we are trying to figure out. How to attract private investment? People are enterprising in this country; if they see a good opportunity in Smart City projects, they will come forward to invest. Even outside the country, people are willing and they want to make investments, especially in the area of infrastructure. In return they need two things. First, they don’t want to take any policy related risks. So they want to have a stable policy. And as I said earlier today we have a very stable government and a very outstanding leadership—so under these circumstances people are willing to invest. Secondly they want some kind of assurance from the government that they will get their licences, clearances, NOCs in time. Today the approvals take too much time and at times the investors get so harassed that they loose interest in the project. But if we can have in place a regime of good governance in India, then the private sector will be encouraged to invest. This good governance can only come from eGovernance. Why eGovernance? Because eGovernance guarantees transparency and efficiency.

Is land an issue for the success of Smart City projects?

Land is an issue because this is a very populous country. But the problem of land can be solved, because lot of land is already available with the private sector.

If we can develop a policy that allows land pooling by different entities, then the problem of land will be solved to a large extent. People will be able to get together and develop Smart City on their pooled land. The Smart Cities project will be a game-changer for the Indian economy and we are focussed on ensuring the success of this project.

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INTERVIEW DR. AJAY KUMAR DIRECTOR GENERAL, NIC

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CREATING TRANSFORMATIONAL EGOVERNANCE SYSTEMS “If you are only automating the existing government systems, then you are not achieving much. The focus should be on doing transformational things,” says Dr. Ajay Kumar, Director General, National Informatics Centre (NIC); Joint Secretary, Department of Electronics & Information Technology.

NIC is the country’s foremost body for execution of eGovernance projects.What kind of contributions is NIC making in the Digital India initiative?

During the last three months many key projects under Digital India have been executed by NIC. MyGov, which is a prestigious and unique project, for fostering partnership between citizens and the government, has been spearheaded by NIC. Today the project has more than 4 lakh active users; it is serving the purpose of encouraging citizen participation towards good governance. People can share their ideas in the form of text, pictures, audio and video and these can then serve as a vehicle for improving the various policies, programmes, schemes, etc. It is a matter of pride for us that NIC has launched MyGov in just 3 to 4 months.

A biometric attendance system has been launched by the NIC.What are the main advantages of this system?

We started this project in last week of August and it is already operational in more than 150 government departments in Delhi.

In a matter of little over a month, NIC was able to develop the applications, procure the devices and have them installed. All the employees were enrolled and the training was imparted and the system became operational from 1st October. Anyone can log on at http://attendance.gov.in/ to have a broad picture of the time at which the employees are arriving at office and the total number of employees that are present or absent. For having the specific data about who is present and who is absent, the person must have the valid user ID and password. Currently we are working with a plan for enabling all central government offices to have this system of attendance by December 2014.

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Is this biometric attendance system scalable? How difficult is it to add new departments to the system? Also what is the cost of implementing this system?

The beauty of this biometric attendance system is that it is highly scalable. In the phase 2 of this programme, we plan to offer the platform to the people who can themselves procure the device. As this is a cloud based solution you can keep on adding new departments, organisations, etc., into the system. Any organisation can join in just 2 hours of time. If you want to give attendance, all you need to do is put your finger on the device. In case, someone has a fingerprint challenge, he or she can give attendance through iris scan. The tablet device that we are using costs about Rs. 10000 to 12000, and the finger print scanner costs only Rs. 2000.

NIC has been responsible for the creation of the Jeevan Pramaan project – digital life certificate for pensioners. Please tell us about this project?

The Jeevan Pramaan is the third major project that NIC has launched in record time. This Aaadhar-based Digital Life Certificate for pensioners could eventually benefit over a crore pensioners. All pensioners are required to give a life certificate every year. If you don’t give your life certificate on time, your pension can stop. So under the existing system, the pensioner has to go to the bank or the pension disbursement authority to give the proof of life. The proposed digital certification will do away with the requirement of a pensioner having to submit physical life certificate every year. It has a system that works though a combination of a biometric device and a software application. Key details of the pensioner, including date, time, and biometric information will be

uploaded to a central database on realtime basis, ultimately enabling the Pension Disbursing Agency to access a Digital Life Certificate. This will conclusively establish that the pensioner was alive at the time of the authentication.

NIC has started a portal through which greetings created by ordinary Indians can be sent. How did you come up with idea for providing such a service to the citizens?

The idea for starting the e-greetings portal came to us on the Independence Day, when the Prime Minister said that we should send online greetings in order save nature and money. The objective of the portal is to promote a contemporary and eco-friendly method of sending Greetings. The portal allows users to select and send a greeting from several templates available for an occasion. The greeting cards that are available on the website are sourced from MyGov portal.

The projects that you have spoken about are quite transformational in nature. Does this prove the point that now we have moved beyond the stage where we were just automating procedures in the name of eGovernance?

Absolutely. In eGovernance, if you are only automating the existing government systems, then you are not achieving much.

The main focus should be on doing transformational things. For instance, Jeevan Pramaan is totally transformational. If we had a system where the pensioner has to get a certificate attested by a government servant and scan it and upload it, then that would have been mere automation. But we are using the pensioner’s biometrics to prove his identity and confirm to the bank or the pension disbursement authority that the man is alive today.

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TECH TURNS IN 2014 The advances in technology involve years and years of incremental effort. The work that has happened in a single year is hard to detect. But in this feature we have attempted to accomplish the difficult task of fixing the spotlight on a single year—2014. We interacted with members of the vendor community to have their views on the key developments in technology front in 2014.

BY JASMINE DESAI

FEATURE

TECHNOLOGY TURNS IN 2014

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VIC MANKOTIA VICE PRESIDENT-SOLUTION STRATEGY, APJ, CA TECHNOLOGIES

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T Service Management (ITSM) began with the aim of providing an operational edge to enterprises over their competitors. Mere implementation did not provide the solution, constant monitoring was required and hence the help of CIOs was solicited. To ensure its smooth functioning, over the past few years, enterprises felt the pressure to increase their services and hence an effective SaaS based ITSM was needed.

This year we have witnessed a shift in terms of ITSM now moving from an individual management of different components of hardware to focusing on delivering end-to-end services which are pre-defined and are based on the best practices. This is the age of the customer and technologies need to cater to this category. As a result of this, ITSM solutions needed to be made more

customer friendly to ensure smooth business functionality. CA Technologies identified this problem and came up with a SaaS – based ITSM model which results in employee satisfaction, speed of deployment, and reduced cost of ownership.

In the near future, CIOs can expect certain changes in the ITSM field. The major change in ITSM will be the usage of cloud services to interact with customers.

A SaaS-based ITSM approach in the future will enable CIOs to cater better to their customers in this fast paced world.

However, these changes can be seen only once we overcome some basic challenges.

When implementing SaaS-based IT service desk solutions, customisation and integration are the most common problems, often leading to higher implementation cost and obstacles to

upgrading to future version Infrastructure and operations organisations have reported that SaaS solutions that still require coding to adapt to the specific needs of the business, are not quicker to implement than onpremises solutions, ultimately delivering a poor experience at a high cost.

B S NAGARAJAN DIRECTOR- SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INDIA & SAARC, VMWARE SOFTWARE INDIA

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ealising that IT required a fresh, new software-defined approach for the data centre, VMware established the SDDC architecture two years ago. SDDC in 2014 was about separating applications from their underlying infrastructure, by virtualising compute, network and storage, and then automating their management.

This year has seen considerable extension of the compute virtualisation market. The trend toward abstracting storage has gathered pace across the industry, and is expected to continue to see significant progress. The broad trend seems to be towards managing heterogeneous SDDCs (and thus clouds) so that consumers of XaaS are able to manage a broad portfolio of SaaS, PaaS, EXPRESS COMPUTER

IaaS providers, together with their private Clouds and partner service provider assets.

Helping to fulfil our SDDC vision was the delivery of VMware NSX and VMware Virtual SAN in the last year to redefine the hypervisor and its role in the data centre by extending virtualisation to networking and storage, respectively.

NSX brings virtualisation to the existing network and transforms network operations and economics.

End user computing is an important business division for VMware. VMware has been doubling its penetration of EUC offerings within its base of 500,000 customers in a EUC market of $8 billion, globally. In India, it has acquired more than 300 customers.

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FEATURE

TECHNOLOGY TURNS IN 2014

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PARAG ARORA AREA VICE PRESIDENT & COUNTRY HEAD - INDIA SUBCONTINENT, CITRIX

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014 witnessed a significant change in the way we define mobility. Now mobility signifies an entire gamut of devices being use for accessing work without barriers to location and network.

The consumerisation of IT has led to the rise of a new era for a workforce that prefers a flexible working environment.

Today mobility has become one of the key drivers for business transformation.

From an Indian perspective, we have witnessed a widespread adoption of Citrix solutions in different segments across vertical. Gartner positioned Citrix in the leaders’ quadrant of the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) Suites1 report. The report evaluates the Citrix XenMobile solution, a comprehensive EMM solution that delivers mobile device management

(MDM), mobile application management (MAM), mobile content management and enterprise-grade productivity apps on premises or in the cloud.

In 2015, enterprise mobility will continue to strengthen its base within India and globally. We will see the new trend of the users/employees becoming the focus for companies as the solution is customised according to their needs in the workspace. Beyond user experience, we will also focus on expanding security measures in our solutions just as mobility expands.

In a country like India, one of the prominent barriers to mobility is the inconsistent network and data traffic.

Citrix has been heavily investing into developing solutions that are adaptable to these concerns.

EDGAR DIAS REGIONAL DIRECTOR FOR INDIA, BROCADE

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he most notable aspect that we saw in the networking industry in 2014 is the realisation among enterprise IT users that the traditional network architecture cannot cope with the demands of the new age data centre. The CIOs and IT heads are preparing for a software-driven world, where enterprise workloads will be designed, orchestrated and delivered instantaneously.

Initiatives like OpenStack and OpenDaylight Project are giving enterprises and service providers the choice of more open, flexible, highly programmable and efficient network infrastructure. This 'disruption' in the data centre’s network infrastructure is being driven by software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

The year 2014 was remarkable for us.

Enterprises such as Micromax and Videocon D2H chose Brocade Ethernet

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Fabrics to address their data centre demands of exponential traffic and highly virtualised environments. We have also seen many customer transactions in 2014 towards planning an SDN-ready network

infrastructure and deploying NFV. Clearly, SDN and NFV are moving from being just 'discussions' to actual 'production deployments'.

We believe the year 2015 will be even more exciting. The Third Platform of computing – coined by IDC and defined by the emergence of social, mobile, big data and cloud computing – is being driven by a changing business landscape, where users are driving the pace of IT . This is causing the demand for greater flexibility and control over the pace of network transformation, and we will see that data centres will in future be built around stateof-the-art, virtualised IP networks.

A key trend to watch out for in 2015 is the rise of the ‘New IP’. The world has changed a lot in the last decade, and the data centre is now at the forefront of this change, and the New IP will usher in a new era of networking that is built on agility, openness and software innovation.

JANUARY, 2015

www.expresscomputeronline.com

SAJAN PAUL

AMOD RANADE

DIRECTOR-SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INDIA & SAARC-JUNIPER NETWORKS

GENERAL MANAGER-DATA CENTRE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC IT BUSINESS INDIA

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oday businesses are increasingly operating online, which is fuelling the need to adopt new age technologies. Enterprises and service providers are quickly moving to adapt to this new business model. SDN represents the biggest change in the network world.

With our SDN portfolio we can help software and hardware to help service providers build high-IQ networks and cloud environments. These networks are secure, automated and scalable, enabling rapid service provisioning based on actionable intelligence.

Imagine what the next evolution of the network could deliver if it could inherently eliminate complexity for end users and operators, adapt on the fly to deliver experiences based on user

preferences, and if intelligent software could be added to make existing hardware more efficient and versatile.

That is what Juniper delivers with an optimised, automated, high-IQ network that allows for real-time customisation.

VIKRAM K DIRECTOR, SERVERS, HP INDIA

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014 was a year of technology disruption with the continuing evolution of cloud, mobility, social computing, Big Data and security.

Growing popularity of cloud computing, virtualization and Big Data is boosting the server market in India, wherein blade servers and micro servers are the major EXPRESS COMPUTER

drivers of growth. High Performance Computing (HPC) is also on the rise.

Organisations want to shift their missioncritical workloads on the x86-platform. x86 servers are also significantly contributing to the growth of the Indian server market.

Some of the key achievements in 2014 for us include product innovations like HP ProLiant DL580 Generation 9 (Gen9), HP Moonshot, HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA and High Performance Computing (HPC) Platform HP Apollo 6000.

According to Gartner, within the Indian IT infrastructure market, server revenue is forecast to reach $677 million in 2015, a 3 % increase over 2014. We believe, HP server strategy offers the right compute for the right workload at the right economics, every time, thus enabling governments, enterprises & SMBs to take advantage of the tectonic changes in the IT industry today.

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chneider Electric IT Business is well positioned as the thought leader in the Data Centre space with its extensive portfolio of Data Centre Physical Infrastructure solutions . We launched innovative technologies in the Enterprise Data Centre cooling, with the introduction of high temperature InRow coolers.

Schneider Electric Services Bureau brought the benefits of Internet of Things to monitoring the efficiency of critical infrastructure. Our Elite Data Centre Partner program was well received by channel partners across 25+ cities, especially in Tier I & II cities.

The launch of ISX for SMB IT, brought enterprise class Infrastructure solutions to SMB clients. It set a new standard in prefabricated Data Centres with the introduction of 15 prefabricated Data Centre modules and 14 new prefabricated Data Centre Reference Designs. The reference designs detail complete Data Centres scalable in 250 kW to 2MW increments and meet Uptime Tier II and Tier III standards.

We will continue to focus on innovation in the field of Data Centre infrastructure.

JANUARY, 2015

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FEATURE

TECHNOLOGY TURNS IN 2014

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SUNIL JOSE MANAGING DIRECTOR, TERADATA INDIA

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eradata India has been on a high growth trajectory this year.

With our comprehensive suite of Integrated Marketing Cloud Solutions we are helping businesses leverage Big Data insights to improve customer experiences. This has helped us strengthen our position as a leading player in the BFSI, Telecom and Manufacturing space.

For the fourth year running Teradata has been featured as a Leader in Gartner ‘s“Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) Magic Quadrant” report. Earlier this year, Forrester Research, positioned Teradata as a leader in its ' The Forrester Wave: Big

Data Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2014 ' report.

In 2015, we will look at heightening our exposure in the entire ecosystem, including system integrators and advisory consulting partners. As an organisation we have made some significant acquisitions for strengthening our leadership and expertise in the analytics domain.

Teradata acquired assets of Revelytix and Hadapt. We also made the acquisition of Think Big Analytics, a leading consulting and solutions company focused exclusively on Hadoop and Big Data solutions to help organisations with successful implementation of their big data initiatives.

AMBARISH DESHPANDE MANAGING DIRECTOR-INDIA, BLUE COAT

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014 saw a significant rise in attacks.

By themselves, the attacks were simple, but the had clear differentiators in terms of the disclosures and the impact that the incidents had. The massive data breach at Target Stores in the US hurt both profit and revenue. Another such attack on the Home Depot, placed 56 million debit and credit card customers at risk. The hackers had managed to break into the company's payment systems.

Such attacks have awaken the organisations about the danger that their systems face and now they are more focussed on investing in appropriate cyber security systems.

In fact, now cyber security is being regarded as a core part of the business infrastructure.

We believe that the advance threats will create a new area of concern for CIOs and CISOs, who have been predominantly investing in 'Threat 20

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Blocking' technologies. While the traditional technologies will be required, we foresee reduced investments for the same. The priority for CIOs/CISOs will be to start investing in technologies that will help them combat advance persistent threats (APTs).

A recent IDC report states that by 2016 security will be among top three business priorities for 70% of CEOs of global enterprises. Clearly in-depth protection, analysis and transparency are the new focus areas.

For Blue Coat, this has been a year of consolidation in India, especially after four key corporate acquisitions. The customers and clients can expect amplified competences from us on all our technologies. Blue Coat Systems globally and in India will focus on driving business assurance technology awareness across various markets.

JANUARY, 2015

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RAMSUNDER PAPINENI REGIONAL DIRECTOR INDIA & SAARC, FIREEYE

I

n 2014, a leading anti-virus company declared that the anti-virus was dead.

What we are seeing is that the traditional network security system is not capable of stopping the advanced attacks.

When FireEye assessed more than 1200 organisations worldwide, we learned that in 97% of the cases the networks had been breached.

This year we brought together the best from FireEye with Mandiant Security Services . In 2015, CIOs should keep an eye on the emergence of mobile as a threat vector. With Apple Pay joining Android and others in the mobile payment space, and NFC is becoming increasingly mainstream.

We will see a renewed vigour and focus on cybercrime in the mobile market.

The top categories of apps that are

classified as adware include personalisation, entertainment, and lifestyle apps. These types of apps have rich information about the user’s profile and interests. At FireEye, we have mobile products to help in these types of attacks.

We anticipate an 'Internet of Things' security issue. We expect to see malware going after the software that comprises the IoT. In 2014, the QNAP NAS, a storage device, was a perfect example of attackers targeting specific devices with Linux malware. We are likely to see other popular platforms attacked that expose a wide base of users and devices. As more vulnerable platforms are discovered, we can expect to see more specialised Linux malware that runs on this class of consumer/SoHo devices.

TARUN KAURA DIRECTOR-TECHNOLOGY SALES, INDIA & SAARC, SYMANTEC

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he year 2014 saw tremendous growth not just in terms of data – both structured and unstructured, but how enterprises looked at managing and storing this data.

Organisations are gradually transitioning towards solutions that enable them to store data effectively and churn out insights to provide the business competitive advantage. With technology trends like cloud, mobility, social and analytics becoming mainstream, organisations are now looking for a robust solution that helps them leverage the existing infrastructure and transition seamlessly to the infrastructure of the future. We have observed that there is less need for traditional approach to clustering i.e. only big back end applications having a DR solution associated and more towards event driven application management.

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Last year we announced Disaster Recovery Orchestrator, a solution that enables recovery on cloud.

Early this year we announced a new version of Storage Foundation and Netbackup, which enables the customer to harness the existing infrastructure to the modern ones. Products like Storage Foundation 6.1 and Netbackup 7.6 have features which help organisations leverage the existing infrastructure by aligning with the modern Data Centre.

According to a report by Gartner, the storage market will reach $409 million in 2015 and backup and archival and disaster recovery are some of the key growth drivers in this market. With hybrid cloud becoming the infrastructure of choice, customers will be more inclined towards adopting converged infrastructure and concepts like SDDC, SDN will primarily dominate the storage market.

JANUARY, 2015

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FEATURE

TECH TURNS IN 2014

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SUMAN REDDY MANAGING DIRECTOR, PEGASYSTEMS INDIA

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he biggest industry shift that has occurred this year is that now the organisations worldwide are moving towards digitisation. Across the globe, SMAC has witnessed an uptake in a major way this year, creating a digital disruption.Analytics is yet another powerful medium where companies are required to understand a lot of metrics about their customers, their buying patterns, etc. Large companies are expecting that software will help them get closer to their customers.

Businesses and business processes have become extremely real-time and dynamic.

Customer engagement is playing a key role in the digital world. Most solutions available in the market today are reactive, in the sense that a bunch of things are bought and stacked together to make it work. They might work

initially, but this is clearly not the robust way of scaling up the operations.

SMAC is built into the Pega platform.

Pega platform (PRPC – Pega Rules Process Commander) enables organisations to integrate each and every element such as predictive analytics, social media sentiment analysis, process management, relationship management and case management.

In the next few years the customer interactions will become more and faster paced, and organisations need to equip themselves to handle this change now. A customer today has an interaction through email and then responds to the conversation on a social media channel and expects the organisation to be aware of the entire context of that interaction.

This trend will be more evident in times to come.

MEHUL DOSHI COUNTRY MANAGER-ENTERPRISE SERVERS, STORAGE & DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS, FUJITSU

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ontinued data growth in 2014 and the years before put further pressure on organisations hosting data in the high terabyte and petabyte range. Scalability bottlenecks of high-end systems, the increasing share storage consumes in the IT budget, and the long RAID rebuild times of in case of disk failures increased the motivation of storage professionals to explore new architectures. The hype topic of software defined storage (SDS) turned from a pure discussion topic to a first wave of real implementations in this year.

For us, the biggest momentum was the open source storage software Ceph, which is probably the most mature softwaredefined storage platform for solving highscalability problems. The takeover of the leading Ceph distributor InkTank by Red Hat has contributed by creating increased 22

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confidence in this technology.

Our new disruptive architecture enables customers dealing with exponential and unpredictable data growth. It delivers modular scalability, zero downtime and online technology refresh making sure that even double digit petabytes of data can be kept online for many years without any interruption or system migration.

Currently, customers are using the ETERNUS CD10000 for operating cloud storage and online archives in a very cost efficient way while delivering a high quality of service. Further enhancements to this disruptive architecture will be a key focus area in Fujitsu’s storage strategy. It will go a long way in solving storage problems in environments of unpredictable data growth.

JANUARY, 2015

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HARSH MARWAH COUNTRY MANAGER, VERIZON ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS INDIA

E

nterprise cloud has evolved, graduating from an experimental platform to one that carries missioncritical workloads. It is simultaneously redefining and strengthening the role of centralised IT and driving a corresponding change in what enterprises expect from their cloud service providers.

In 2014, we released a new service model and a set of features for the company’s cloud infrastructure and storage platform, designed to help enterprises move business critical workloads into the cloud.

We added Amazon Web Services (AWS) to our growing list of cloud services accessible via our Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI) service, enabling clients to manage a multi-cloud environment that allows for dynamic bandwidth allocation, application performance throughput, quality of

service and usage-based billing.

This year, CloudBees, an enterpriseclass platform-as-a-service provider, joined our expanding cloud ecosystem of technology companies that will offer services and applications on our nextgeneration cloud computing and cloud storage platform, Verizon Cloud.

We are addressing the growing need for organisations to connect more than one cloud seamlessly and securely with its Secure Cloud Interconnect service.

Organisations can use Verizon’s Private IP service to connect to multiple cloud services including the Verizon cloud and Microsoft Azure, with an additional half-dozen other major cloud services expected to come online later this year.

Areas of rapid disruption are coming from mobile, cloud, M2M and big data.

These technologies are radically changing the markets across every industry.

JAGJIT ARORA REGIONAL DIRECTOR- SALES, RED HAT INDIA

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hat stands out for us this year is the collaboration that we are having with Cisco in the area of cloud, and the work that we are doing for CRIS (Centre for Railway Information Systems) on their deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as their underlying infrastructure for mission-critical systems. This year, we acquired FeedHenry, the leading enterprise mobile application platform provider. We acquired the cloud computing services company, eNovance, and also Inktank, which offers scale-out, open source storage systems based on Ceph, a storage distribution for OpenStack.

This year, we released a joint report with Harvard Business Review. This report discusses the ways by which it is

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becoming mandatory for CIOs to focus on innovation. The report reveals that CIOs will play an integral role within the CEOs' growth teams, in designing the open, agile and customer-engaged organisation.

We are constantly striving to show to our customers the benefits of migrating to an open platform, and the ROI that it provides from a long term business perspective. To do this, we believe in enabling our customers to choose the appropriate technology solution. In each case they will need to build their infrastructure from the ground up. We will continue to work closely with our local customers, partners and the open source community in India to provide the best open source infrastructure stack.

JANUARY, 2015

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FEATURE

MANAGED SECURITY

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Managing the IT PROTECTION Should organisations shift their IT security to the managed security model or should they take care of security related issues by themselves? Pupul Dutta interacted with industry experts to find an answer to this question…

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JANUARY, 2015

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ecurity is essentially a cat and mouse game between the lock maker and the lock picker. When you install a new lock on your front door, you gain the feeling of security. But the new lock presents a new game or a challenge for the lock picker. Eventually he will achieve the capability of breaking the new lock and then you must upgrade to a better lock.

Usually Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. is known for its movies, but recently they made headlines everywhere for a major security breach on their premises.

On 24th November, hackers were able to break into the IT systems at Sony and expose critical corporate information that included budgets, layoffs and SSNs (Social Security Numbers), and passwords.

Allegations have been flying that the hackers were working on behalf of North Korea, which has denounced Sony’s upcoming movie “The Interview.” In the movie Seth Rogen and James Franco play the role of TV journalists who become embroiled in a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. This hacking of Sony’s IT systems illustrates once again that even the most prominent companies in the world are not safe from cyber attacks. Large retail chains, banks, government organisations, and even movie production houses are being targeted on a regular basis. Due to the increasing frequency of attacks the cost of business is rising.

The attack on Sony’s systems underscores the need for organisations to have an extra protection layer in networks where important information is being stored. Jay Heiser, analyst at research firm Gartner, says, “A key problem is making too much data available on one network. Companies today often push for integrated environments, making data available for use by many people on many systems.”

Building base for MSS Firms too are gearing up to tackle the rising threat. Organisations continue to spend a significant amount on security defences. According to PwC organisations are, on an average, spending about 8% of their IT budgets on security.

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Usually, the budget varies from company to company, and is often linked to the size of the organisation and the kind of work that it is doing. Gartner is of the view that the information security budgets should be around 8-10% of the total IT budget. It is also generally acknowledged that the companies located in Asian countries face more risks as their IT budgets are often inadequate.

Thomson Thomas, Senior Vice President -Business Systems & Technology, HDFC Life, explains, “Organisations are investing more on information security. BFSI and small businesses with a turnover of less than $10 million or businesses located in rapidgrowth markets report the highest increases as a percentage of their budgets.

Although budgets are on the rise, information security functions continues to feel that budget constraints are their biggest obstacle to delivering value to the business. CIOs/CISOs need to do a better job of articulating and demonstrating the value of investments in security.”

On the question of IT budget spent on security Ajay Srivastava, Head IT, Spice Retail (Handset Business), has a different view. He says that only about 2-4% of the total IT budget is spent on security.

We expect MSS market to grow aggressivelyin the coming 4-5 years and swell up to $30-35 billion in the future.

The market in India is currentlyestimated at $300 million.

Sivarama Krishnan, Executive Director,PwC India

Managed security market After the latest attack on Sony Pictures, CISOs are forced to rethink on their security policy. According to a report by Symantec on Internet Security, large enterprises in India face up to 69% of the overall targeted attacks. There is a rising need for sophisticated managed services that will significantly reduce the time it takes to detect, prioritise and respond to security incidents by producing integration between its endpoint security and third-party network security vendors’ products.

Hence, managed security is the answer to today’s sophisticated threats.

Managed Security Services represent the around-the-clock remote management or monitoring of IT security functions delivered via remote security operations centers (SOCs).

According to Managed Security Services Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2019,

Organisations identify security as a core requirement; however,they do not have the core competency to manage it and hence they are keen to adopt MSS. Tarun Kaura, Director - TechnologySales,India, Symantec JANUARY, 2015

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MANAGED SECURITY

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Managed Security Services (MSS) market in India is estimated to be around $251 million in 2014.

Analyst firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), on the other hand, estimates the global Managed Security market to be around $10 billion. Says Sivarama Krishnan, Executive Director, PwC India, “We expect MSS market to grow aggressively in the coming 4-5 years and swell up to $30-35 billion in the future. The market in India is currently estimated at $300 million. This is expected to grow to $1 billion in the coming five years.”

Vaidyanathan R Iyer, Leader, IBM Security Solutions, IBM India, estimates that the market in this segment will grow at 30- 40% annually, since lot of organisations are taking to cloud and security is their top priority.

Managed security versus on-premise security Despite most organisations outsourcing their core IT functions like email and payment processing, IT security remains majorly an in-house activity. Concern over allowing third parties access to sensitive data or systems is often the primary issue.

Says Iyer of IBM, “IT security entirely depends on the business requirements of the organisation. Certain critical areas in an organisation will have in-house security for data which they will not want to expose according to their business model and legal framework. Businesses which scaleup will know which kind of service to outsource to a single vendor. So, organisations these days have both inhouse security and managed security services. The better option would be according to the business requirement of an organisation.”

Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides numerous advantages against on premise security in a number of ways. Firstly, SaaS allows an enterprise to customise and choose the right hardware and software solutions, which, coupled with expert oversight, can help in achievement of reliability in security, without compromising performance and functionality. SaaS also helps in reducing not only capital cost but also the per user operating expenditure. It also offers flexible pricing models, which can result in 26

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substantial cost savings for enterprises.

Thirdly, the quick deployment of security services and the ability to scale operations at short notice gives SaaS unmatched advantages over on-premise security. Lastly, defending against APTs requires a lot of technical expertise, which is difficult to find, more so in an onpremise security model. Managed security services have an upper hand in this aspect and can better manage APTs throughout their lifecycle.

It is therefore important to note that initial fears of outsourcing are quickly outweighed by the benefits of cost reduction and service enhancements once they are fully understood. It is clear that there is a major shift towards acceptance of managed security services by organisations of all sizes, across a multitude of industry sectors.

Factors driving MSS market The financial services sector along with the technology and telecommunications sector continue to be the key driver behind the growth of the Managed Security market. However, with rising number of security incidents and increasing automation in the industrial sector, we can expect other sectors to contribute significantly to the growth “Increasing complexity, diversification of information security risks (adoption of BYOD and cloud based models, etc.) and difficulty in recruiting and retaining

skilled resources is leading to the growth of the managed security services market in the country. Several enterprises are also challenged on account of the costs of running an in-house security shop,” explains Krishnan of PwC. Talking about factors that are driving the growth and adoption of Managed Security Service, Tarun Kaura, Director Technology Sales, India, Symantec, says, “Organisations identify security as a core requirement; however, they do not have the core competency to manage it and hence they are keen to adopt MSS. Secondly, managed security services replace lack of security experts, expensive niche talent acquisition and already overburdened security staff.”

Also, the organisation’s need to develop a repeatable process for identifying the security incidents and analysing the vast amounts of information created by security products. This they need to do to gain understanding of how the customised, volatile and sophisticated threats drive the need for managed security service.

Challenges in migrating to MSS Challenges depend on the Service Level Agreement (SLAs) of the company.

Companies might retain few of the services and outsource other services to managed service provider. For example, a pharmaceutical company or a manufacturing company may not JANUARY, 2015

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outsource their design security system as it is a part of their core Information Technology system.

“Defining an SLA is the most important thing. There are lot of things that companies should consider while deciding to migrate to managed security service, like compartmentalising your SLA, what is the kind of security being managed by the service providers, where is the service provider located,” says Iyer.

One has to understand that the quality of the SLA is often a deciding factor in winning and retaining customers. It is important not to confuse an SLA with a service contract however.

Nevertheless, a major deterrent to the adoption of SaaS is limited risk tolerance.

Although enterprises today have acknowledged the presence of an ‘alternative’ to traditional security operations, their risk averse nature prevents them from adopting managed security service. The prospect of confidential data moving to/ from SaaS providers seems to overwhelm enterprises.

Also, moving to a shared security model with some aspects of security managed on premise, and some aspects being outsourced, will be the way to tackle the changing threat landscape.

Selecting MSS vendor An interesting trend that is fast emerging in this sector, is that even though the majority of the emerging managed security services are offered by large single source providers, many small and medium businesses prefer to outsource their IT processes to trusted third parties, which are relatively small players.

Explaining this trend, Krishnan of PwC says, “Large single source service providers provide a reliable alternative to on premise security, but charge a slightly higher premium on services. As a result of this, small and medium businesses, look at smaller (but trusted) third parties to manage security.”

“As stated earlier, the movement of confidential data to/ from the service provider is a major deterrent, which is why smaller third parties have been able to attract more business comparatively,” he adds.

Kaura of Symantec is of the view that EXPRESS COMPUTER

Defining an SLAis the most important thing.There are manythings that companies should consider while deciding to migrate to managed security service,like compartmentalising your SLA,what is the kind of security being managed by the service providers,where is the service provider located.

Vaidyanathan R Iyer, Leader,IBM SecuritySolutions, IBM India

Defending against APTs requires a lot of technical expertise, which is difficult to find,more so in an on-premise security model,Managed security services have an upper hand in this aspect.

Managed Security Services consist of around-the-clock remote management or monitoring of IT security functions delivered via remote security operations centers (SOCs). For services like these, an enterprise would have to look out for a single source provider as opposed to multiple third parties, which can provide a broader support covering multiple technologies, have documented standards and policies for handling both typical and atypical operations and threats.

“While choosing a single service provider, enterprises should consider a provider with multiple security operations centres from which they can globally monitor and manage security issues across their client base. In today’s business environment, these centers must be running 24x7x365. Also the technology used to analyse and correlate data collected from multiple devices should support rapid response while ensuring the scalability to support an ever-increasing number of managed devices,” Kaura adds.

What are the companies looking for?

Some organisations may like to save costs by hiring a small MSS vendor, there are others who would prefer to go with the brand. Though there are no concrete analysis of the threat that an organisation may put itself to if it goes with a particular type of vendor, it is advisable that the companies should opt for vendors who have a good track-record in the industry.

Companies are looking at managed security for scalability, flexibility etc., and they will start outsourcing their non-core functions to MSS, though it will take sometime for the core functions to get outsourced. There are large companies like IBM that have themselves taken the responsibility of entire managed service because of the service credibility in the market. There are smaller players too but customers will not outsource their core IT immediately.

“Managed service will co-exist with hosted security for some time more. I don’t think hosted security will disappear so soon. But more and more services will go towards managed services,” asserts Iyer. pupul.dutta@expressindia.com

JANUARY, 2015

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COLUMN MANOJ KHILNANI BLACKBERRY INDIA

MANAGED SECURITY S “Despite the growing importance of mobility across organisations, security around it is often overlooked as a bolt-on and treated as an after-thought.”

Markets and Markets forecasts that the managed security services market is expected to grow from $14.32 billion in 2014 to $31.86 billion in 2019, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.3% from 2014 to 2019.

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ecurity is one of the hottest topics in today’s complex business environment and not without any reason. This year the world witnessed a serious vulnerability called the Heartbleed bug supposedly affecting some 500,000 websites, as per sources.

Every day there are new hacker attacks, malware epidemic, data breach and spying incidents reported around the world. Today’s security threats have reached catastrophic proportions with our growing dependence on technology.

In reality, nobody using a smartphone or Internet is off the hook.

In the wake of these developments, enterprises globally are under tremendous pressure to provide an endto-end secure framework. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend is adding to the woes of the modern day CIOs. With mobility assuming centre stage in driving productivity across organisations, a small instance of device loss or misplacement can result into a massive security breach.

According to Gartner, the year 2014 is expected to witness double the rate of employee-owned devices compromised by malware as against corporate-owned devices, which further compounds the BYOD dilemma. Moving data across different devices and network is rapidly increasing security risks to the corporate network and opens sensitive corporate or personal data to leaks and attacks.

Despite the growing importance of mobility across organisations, security around it is often overlooked as a bolt-on and treated as an after-thought. Hence, this has emerged as one of the weakest potential points in many organisations' information security infrastructure.

Enterprises need to re-evaluate their enterprise security strategy and mobile needs to be an integral part of it. The fact that the number and utility of mobile devices will only increase means that the boundaries of the modern organisation are being stretched to include hundreds

or even thousands of mobile end points possessing access to the most precious assets, such as intellectual property and other sensitive corporate information.

Moving to managed security Enterprises across the world are struggling to cope up with the changing dynamics of security and this has emerged as one of the topmost concerns of today’s CIOs. This provides a huge opportunity for managed security service providers to come into play. Most organisations are lagging behind in their security readiness and a reliable managed security service provider can help them bridge this crucial gap.

As per MarketsandMarkets forecasts, the managed security services market is expected to grow from $14.32 billion in 2014 to $31.86 billion in 2019, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.3% from 2014 to 2019. Besides the looming threat of cyber-crimes and data loss, the increasing adoption of cloud services are enabling growth in this segment.

Further, the cloud based services delivery model is estimated to grow manifold times in the coming years. There is a rising demand for network security and services that enable partition of corporate and personal data. BFSI, utilities, IT, Telecom and government sectors are expected to lead the market.

Bumpy road The managed security segment is also privy to a range of challenges both from technical and business perspectives. The technical challenges encompass the infrastructure, the tools and the processes required to drive services. The business challenges from the enterprise side make it difficult to provide the right services at the right time and for the right cost.

An integrated approach to security, in which data is encrypted while at rest (stored on a digital device) or in transit is the best protection against the loss of data JANUARY, 2015

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or a security breach that could impact the profitability, competitiveness, or reputation of an organisation. Security in today’s environment must be built in at every layer of the organisation - hardware, apps, network and infrastructure to ensure end-to-end protection. It is imperative for enterprises to adopt a streamlined, collaborative and end-to-end approach to data security. The threat landscape will keep evolving with time, but with an all-pervasive managed security deployment, enterprises can at least mitigate the risks and be better prepared to handle crisis situations.

At BlackBerry, security is at the heart of everything we do. It is not just an offering for us, rather it is a philosophy we embody. BlackBerry has the knowhow, patents, and heritage to deal with security threats of any size and nature.

Security is built into every layer of our products, from software, hardware and EXPRESS COMPUTER

An integrated approach to security,in which data is encrypted while at rest (stored on a digital device) or in transit is the best protection against the loss of data or a security breach that could impact the profitability, competitiveness,or reputation of an organisation.

infrastructure to the network. These layers all work together on our proprietary network to create scalable security solutions that are the only ones trusted enough for global financial services companies, top law firms, health care providers, law enforcement, defense departments and the Oval Office.

BlackBerry has over 50 security certifications and approvals, more than any other mobile vendor, including the only “Full Operational Capability” approval to run on U.S. Department of Defense networks. The recent Secusmart acquisition extends BlackBerry’s leadership in delivering end-to-end security with enhanced voice encryption capabilities. At BlackBerry, our entire focus is on making workers more productive and organisations more secure.

Manoj Khilnani is Country Marketing Head – Enterprise for BlackBerry India.

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FEATURE

VIRTUALIZATION SECURITY

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VIRTUALIZE, BUT WITH CAUTION A look at security vulnerabilities that accompany virtualization and how enterprises are gearing to build safeguard against the risks.

BY HEENA JHINGAN

B

y freeing the IT infrastructure from cocoon of the “one application, one server” rule, which often led to the overcapacity of the system becoming underused and expensive, virtualization symbolises a major shift in IT practices.

With the advent of virtualization and the associated move of hosting multiple virtual machines on a single server, many of the problems related to IT infrastructure have now disappeared.

Virtualization is now a mature concept even in developing markets, including India. Depending on their respective

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strategies, organisations are adopting open source or propriety virtualization architectures.

Virtualization is widely adopted in data centres today to enable cost effective multi-tenancy with more optimal use of compute resources.

Architected for cloud computing, these new data centres are a combination of physical servers and virtual workloads.

However, virtualization also introduces a completely new set of security challenges — and this means that the data centre requires an even more pervasive range of security options.

IDC estimates that the economic impact of server virtualization in India will be $3.89 billion by 2020. This takes into account on the finances that can be saved in servers, power, cooling and realestate. According to Gartner, by 2015, almost 20% of overall VPN / Firewall market will be deployed using virtual infrastructure and 100% of overall IT security product capabilities will be delivered from the cloud.

Physical security devices were not designed to protect the new virtual components architecture of virtualization. The security professionals JANUARY, 2015

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If the host physical machine is insecure,all guest virtual machines in the system will be exposed and vulnerable to the threat.

Jagjit Singh Arora, Director – Regional Sales, Red Hat India

SECURITYCHECKLIST IN AVIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENT

1 2

Protect the host server and virtual machines with regular software updates The hypervisor layer must be configured correctly and subjected to security upgrades regularly

need to recognise what new threats come with virtualization and adopt their security practices to accommodate them.

3 4

Enforce proper user access controls to the server hosting the virtual machine

Perils of Virtualization

5 6

Keep disaster recovery and business continuity plans ready

Network security tools should also have access to the virtual network traffic between the virtual machines

Ensure continuous monitoring of virtualized servers

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Not many organisations are prepared to handle security threat of the virtual world. Physical security devices residing outside the virtual infrastructure may be able to provide basic levels of security to the physical network, but they do not provide the visibility and control within the virtual infrastructure that is needed to address new virtualization challenges.

Many companies are trying to use the

Since the hypervisor is the critical piece of software that controls all of the VMs running on a single piece of hardware,it’s a verynatural attacktarget.

Sajan Paul, Director - Systems Engineering, India & SAARC,Juniper Networks JANUARY, 2015

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VIRTUALIZATION SECURITY

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DEALING WITH VIRTUALIZATION: THE ESSAR WAY

V

irtualization has been around at Essar for about eight years now. Currently almost 50% of Essar Server landscape is virtualized.The rest constitutes of planned virtualization, some out of compulsions being continuing in the standalone environment due to legacy systems and other within remote environments.

Dharmesh Rathod, Head – ITAssurance and Information Security, Essar Services India Limited believes security vulnerabilities do not differ much in virtualized and physical environment since the exposure of virtualized component is far more limited to the hypervisor that itself get well shielded with the parent OS component.“Having said that there indeed are some matter of concerns that exploits the vulnerabilities associated with the hypervisors however fortunately the virtualized environment within Essar has been quite well safeguarded,”he says.

Testing (VAPT) before releasing the virtualized environment to end user/production environment.

Living with virtualization Rathod says, security hardening of physical and logical instances has been the vital safeguard every time our technology team releases to end user. These hardening well takes in account the loose areas of OS/Hypervisor features such as access control, controlled environment of critical services etc. This takes care of wellguarded virtualized instances. The release of virtualized instances are also subjected to VAPT checks across during predetermined intervals.

Virtualization, cloud & mobility

As any other project, virtualization required Essar to prepare. The worked on a well constructed security hardening checklist and build up the basic security baseline.

“Adequate security due diligence is taken up with respect to the request analysis such as whether it is part of DMZ, external facings, internal usage etc. Each requirements is dealt with its respective security safeguarding and is subjected hardening accordingly.We also conducted Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration

Virtualized environment inherits varied security concerns when they find themselves in native data center environment as against cloud environment, Rathod says.

“None can be inferior to each other, hence the client has to ensure adequate balance while grabbing virtualized set ups within both scenarios. Furthermore, virtualized environments on one hand offer better flexibility and scalability features, living up to security demands in context of cloud and mobility is a big challenge to overcome. Exploits of vulnerabilities on cloud and mobile environment one witnesses are so complex that at times applying fixes can get very difficult.

same methodology and tools in the virtual environment that are typically used in physical environments and this is difficult to work with.

In an era, where the enterprises are toying with the idea of virtualization across the layers of their IT fabric, be it server or the endpoint (desktops), Nilesh Goradia, Head of Client Virtualization & Mobility BusinessCitrix India, says server virtualization

is no longer new to Indian enterprises.

Desktop virtualization might not be large as of now, but it is growing fast. A ZDNet’s IT Priorities 2013 research report report found that about 43% organisations in India had virtualized their server environments.

Jagjit Singh Arora, Director – Regional Sales, Red Hat India, says, “It is important to make sure that the host physical machine and its operating

Preparing to virtualize

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system are not compromised in any way while deploying virtualization technologies. This is because, if the host physical machine is insecure, all guest virtual machines in the system will be exposed and vulnerable to the threat.”

Sajan Paul, Director - Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, is of the view that the traditional network security appliances are blind to any communications between virtual machines (VMs) within a single host. This opens up a potential for security attacks such as inter-VM attacks; an attacker may compromise one virtual machine and then leverage that VM as a springboard to attack other VMs on the same host. The more VMs resident on a host, the more effective the potential attack. The attacker can also use a compromised VM to launch an attack on the hypervisor itself – a technique known as hyper jacking. “Since the hypervisor is the critical piece of software that controls all of the VMs running on a single piece of hardware, it’s a very natural attack target,” he says.

Goradia agrees with the need to secure not just the host, but hypervisor as well. He reasons that since hypervisor is the virtual machine manager, a program that allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware processor, it is very important to secure it.

“Enterprises may have to deal with a combination of OS and their vulnerabilities. For instance, there could be some really large enterprises with about 500 servers, dealing with multiple OS environments. Thus, the enterprises need to develop security systems to enable them manage OS security from the hypervisor itself so that they needn’t worry about security of the OS. This brings down the cost of setting up security system and managing their updates,” he asserts.

BS Nagarajan, Director – Systems Engineering, VMware India & SAARC, believes that security is no longer a major concern for organisations evaluating virtualization and that some of their customers like HDFC Bank had virtualized servers about seven years JANUARY, 2015

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back. He says, “For many organisations virtualization is not a choice, but a need.”

“As more customers are now moving from Unix to x86 servers, it is becoming imperative for them to virtualize,” he says.

Talking about the desktop virtualization, Goradia of Citrix says that as desktop virtualization is based on hypervisor technology, securing it also requires extreme care, just as in the case of the hypervisor.

“Since there could be multiple users of a virtual desktop, the organisations need to have effective security locks so that user may not need to download information to access it,” he says.

In such cases enterprises have tried to secure with the DMZ or the perimeter network concept. “If a user has to connect with the data centre he has to go through the perimeter network that validates the user, the tools of the network will decide what information will go to which resource.”

But the job doesn’t end here, as the perimeter network can also fail, or other times, the virus/malware could be riding on the endpoint device, so there is need to analyse the device as well.

Nagrajan points out that such things were more successful when company provided devices needed to connect through VPN, but things got more complicated in the BYOD (bring your own device) scenario.

Thanks to the software defined networks, the organisations have also scaled up from their traditional antivirus and malware solutions. “The trend now is to reverse identify the source of threat and wipe it there,” says Goradia.

Easing it with identity Stressing that data theft risks increase in virtualized environments, Vic Mankotia, Vice President of Solution Strategy for Asia Pacific and Japan at CA Technologies, says the Firewall passwords are not intelligent enough. In such cases, identity management becomes crucial.

“A user identity can become the perimeter, it is a stepped up way of authentication. Since we work at the Kernel level, we can we even identify EXPRESS COMPUTER

Auser identitycan become the perimeter,it is a stepped up wayof authentication.

Since we workat the Kernel level,we can we even identify virtual images.

Vic Mankotia, Vice President, Solution Strategy, Asia Pacific and Japan,CATechnologies

Right planning (for virtualization) is critical as the market lacks the maturityto decide what information resides on premise and what moves to cloud.The enterprises must realise that corporate IPshould not be out.

Tarun Kaura, Director-TechnologySales-India, Symantec

virtual images,” Mankotia says.

Another important aspect of virtualization is that assets can be downloaded from the Internet. Yuvraj Pradan, SE Lead-India, McAfee, observes that a number of virtualization vendors offer pre-configured virtual appliances. These appliances are built and optimised, often through community contributions, and are typically meant to serve very specific purposes such as a firewall or an Internet browser appliance.

“The security risk associated with these appliances is lack of control on the contents of the appliance itself. Malware or other dangerous elements could be downloaded with the appliance. Once installed within a corporate environment, malicious software can then go about its nefarious activities for example, passive information gathering over the network.

Just as organisations have very strict rules with regard to placing unapproved hardware (and software) onto the network or even powering it on, it is equally important to enforce a similar set of rules on virtual machines and especially downloaded third-party appliances.” Pradan says.

A further complication to keep in mind is that most of the virtualization technologies available today support complex networking schemes that can make such “rogue” virtual machines essentially undetectable by the network while still providing them with unrestricted access to the host as well as the network itself, he adds.

In times, when virtualization is making inroads in various aspects of a data centre—server, storage and network, Pradan opines that it is difficult to say only one piece of the gamut is vulnerable.

“Administrators need the ability to monitor the virtual environment, understand it, replay what happened, and see what the environment looks like at any given time to determine the best way to troubleshoot and control the environment. IT departments need a tool that shows a visual representation of the virtual environment as well as real time and historical reporting to show what changed, who changed it, when it was changed, what happened from a JANUARY, 2015

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VIRTUALIZATION SECURITY

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THINKING VIRTUALIZATION

The enterprises need to develop securitysystems to enable them manage OS security from the hypervisor itself so that they needn’t worryabout securityof the OS. This brings down the cost of setting up securitysystem.

Nilesh Goradia, Head of Client Virtualization & MobilityBusiness-CitrixIndia

For many organisations virtualization now is not a choice, but a need.

BS Nagarajan, Director – Systems Engineering, VMware India & SAARC 34

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K

apil Mehrotra, CIO, Artemis Hospital is planning to to virtualize the company’s servers and desktops He says, server virtualization is our priority, later we also plan to deploy desktop virtualization as in a hospital kind of environment, patient data is sacred and the same doctor goes to different hospitals, it is important to ensure the data is protected.

The Hospital is evaluating solution from Citrix, but Mehrotra says these decisions are not easy to make.“So, we conducted internal PoCs, which helped us a lot. For, us the first level of security is tackled , at the

application level. The HIS (Hospital Information System) is built in a way that a doctor can see data for his own patients only. At the active directory level also we can make authentications settings and all of this will be logged.”

Mehrotra says they plan to go live with desktop virtualization by March, but we will do it in a phased manner, at present we have about 500 terminals, including 150 laptops.

On the server side we plan to first move the core applications such as PACS, patient portal , HIS etc to virtual server and later we will work on the non-core applications.

network perspective to cause the event, and how this event relates to the security of the entire network infrastructure,” Pradan says. Basically, securing the virtualized environments is a matter of efficient planning.

Security in post virtualization era

Plans for Virtualization There are numerous ways of enhancing security on systems using virtualization, but the organisation must have a plan, says Arora of RedHat. “The organisations must have clear understanding operating specifications, specifications regarding services are needed on guest virtual machines, specifications regarding the host physical server and specifications regarding the kind of what support that is required for these services,” Arora says.

Tarun Kaura, Director-Technology Sales-India, Symantec opines that right planning is critical as the market lacks the maturity to decide what information resides on premise and what moves to cloud. The enterprises must realise that corporate IP should not be out.

For effective planning, Kaura recommends that security team should be a part of the data center design team.

“An end to end security policy and checkpoint should be in place,” he says.

There has been subsequent security technologies developed to protect the virtualized environments each with its own sets of advantages. virtualized environments have resulted in easier adoption of cloud based data centers and environments. Some of the key security trends have been to help undertake consolidation of security across the hybrid models and how effectively do enterprises leverage existing security solutions and platforms to provide a unified security framework to manage both set of technologies.

Also there has been a gradual push to develop security solutions for virtualized platforms such as agent less technologies for protecting virtualized server infrastructure. With various cloud based infrastructures being set up such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, etc.

There is a need to protect these infrastructures too and hence the need for a holistic security framework for protecting them with emphasis on customer data privacy and advance persistent threat protection. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com

JANUARY, 2015

INTERVIEW ALOK OHRIE DELL INDIA

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“Mobility is all about content delivery, content storage and applications. This is an interesting space for Dell, we can bring lot of value to this area,” says Alok Ohrie, President and Managing Director – Dell India. In conversation with Pankaj Maru. Excerpts...

“Digital India will become a catalyst for new investments” What is your view of the Indian market? What steps is Dell taking to garner a bigger slice of the Indian market?

The business sentiments in India are very bullish now. The government is taking actions that can create several new opportunities for the IT sector. In fact, the government has already defined its vision of Digital India, which will become a catalyst for new investments. We believe that the market here is poised for a massive growth over a period of next 3 years.

Hence, we are aggressively following the new business opportunities. With a new Go To Market strategy (GTM), Dell has changed its route-to-market (RTM) with a strong focus on customer engagement and wider reach. Unlike, direct approach in the past, Dell India has come up with three RTM that includes Dell Led for direct sales engagement, Partner Led for business accounts with special pricing and products; and Distribution Led for consumer IT products. The advantage and benefits of this new GTM are improvements in coverage and reach, better engagement with partners, getting closer to customers and being accountable where it counts.

Some large players have exited the IT hardware business. Does this lead to the creation of new opportunities for Dell?

The process of consolidation in the IT industry started with the lower end of products, which is the peripherals, and now it has gone to the PC range of products. About 8-10 years ago, some of the companies got bought over, some businesses got hived-off and that process of churning is continuing till now. There are players in the PC business who are either openly declaring that they don't want to continue in the business or are looking for buyers for business to be bought. This phenomenon has now got extended to the infrastructure space, and we are seeing early signs of consolidation in the server market.

Today there are far fewer number of players left, even though the market remains the same.

Hence the opportunity becomes available to the EXPRESS COMPUTER

company that is best positioned to go and capture it, and Dell is very well positioned. Having gone private we are capable of quickly deploying our resources to the areas where we see growth. We are also in a position to change the business model in order to have cost efficiency.

Many tech companies are now focussed on mobility, but we are not seeing any major move by Dell in this area.Why? In mobility, from devices point of view, we have a range of tablets. We continue to make our tablets richer by adding new features to them. In couple of months, we will make further enhancement of the product line. We are planning to come up with voice enabled tablets and many other innovative products. However, currently we are not looking at smartphones. In any case the form factor is changing and when I talk about voice enabled tablet, I am essentially talking about a device that can also provide the functionality of a smartphone.

We are not in the space of a smartphone of 5 inches or less, but we are very much there in the tablet space of 7 inches and above.

The process of consolidation in the IT industry started with the lower end of products, which is the peripherals, and now it has gone to the PC range of products.

What is Dell planning to do in the area of mobility solutions?

Mobility is all about content delivery, content storage and applications. This is an interesting space for Dell, we can bring lot of value to this area. For instance, the companies that store the content and deliver it to the mobiles of their consumers need efficient storage solutions.

They also need servers, networking solutions, etc. Dell is a leader in this area of storage, servers, networking. We are also in a position to play a role in the area of developing an architecture for the hardware and software to work in a cost effective and efficient way. Then there is the issue of security, which is a big challenge for most companies. We have solutions for protecting data that is sitting in the infrastructure or is being transmitted or is in the device of the consumers. pankaj.maru@expressindia.com

JANUARY, 2015

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CASE STUDY

RURALSHORES

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RURALSHORES SCALES

MULTI-LINGUALVOICE BUSINESS WITH

OZONETEL

RuralShores has successfully expanded its business by using a cost-effective cloud based communication solution from Ozonetel

BY PANKAJ MARU

S

calability is a core issue that enterprises in the Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) space have to deal with on a regular basis. In most cases, the scalability of operations can entail huge investments in human capital as well as technology.

However, the companies have to invest in new technologies to take care of the new requirements whenever there is expansion of business operations due to geographical factors for the sake of meeting the specific needs of the customer.

The Bangalore based rural BPO firm, RuralShores, faced the challenge of scalability, as it needed to upgrade its technology platform to meet the demands of its clients. The company is offering more than 65 types of business processing services to local and international, small and medium enterprises, in verticals like BFSI, Telecom, Retail, Government, Ecommerce and others.

It also provides voice based support for business processes in different languages like Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi and English. Most of the voice based business support services are catered from centres located in rural and remote locations in India. As these services are being provided by the local youths,

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RuralShores is contributing its mite in generating sustainable employment.

Challenge of Scale

RuralShores has now developed the capability for increasing its multi-lingual voice processes support from 30 to 210 agents over a period of eight months.

Maharaja Gokulavasan, Head – Service Delivery Business, RuralShores

Few of the clients of RuralShores were in the need of inbound and outbound multilingual voice services. Even though RuralShores wanted to expand its voice processing business to take care of the needs of its clients, it was unable to make substantial progress due to funding related issues.

On one side there were the financial constrains, and on the other side there was the challenge of meeting the business needs of the clients. RuralShores was looking for a technology solution that was not very expensive and also offered the facility of scalability and reliability. The capability of integration with a distributed network of call agents based in far remote locations was also a key issue for RuralShores.

“We wanted a solution to support our voice processes across customers, processes and languages that are spread over a distributed network. This is a complex requirement and we needed an dependable and scalable infrastructure,” says Maharaja Gokulavasan, Head – Service Delivery Business, RuralShores.

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The challenge that RuralShores faced was compounded by the fact that its voice support services are being offered from seven villages located in far flung places. Some of the villages are —Thirthahalli (Karnataka), Dhawalgaon (Maharashtra), Bhiloda (Gujarat), Pulla (Andhra Pradesh), Sonari (Uttar Pradesh), Rathinagiri (Tamil Nadu), Kanker (Chattisgarh), Babrala (Uttar Pradesh) and Chand (Madhya Pradesh).

“Across these centres, voice calls are diverted and distributed to agents who speak different languages and that's how customers' business needs are served,” adds Gokulavasan.

The Solution To find the right solution to the complex problems that it was facing, RuralShores did lot of research in the market. A thorough investigation of all the solutions that are available was carried out. “Based on the research, we found different kind of solutions - some were being offered on hosted model, some on the client-server model and others were on premise solutions,” says Gokulavasan.

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Benefits

The company wanted a technology solution with multiple service capabilities like integration with different locations based call centres, multi-lingual support, distributed calls per client, along with easy manageability and affordability.

Finally RuralShores decided to go in for the hosted communication solution from Ozonetel, which is a cloud based communication application provider for small and medium sized businesses.

Ozonetel's teleco grade cloud platform provides Communication as a Service (CaaS) to organisations.

In August 2013, RuralShores ran a pilot deployment of Ozonetel's solution to test its capabilities. Post the solution's successful pilot deployment, RuralShores adopted the cloud based solution for its multi-lingual non-telecom voice processes. The team from Ozonetel team had carried out the deployment and integration of the solution at RuralShores.

Following the success of the pilot deployment, RuralShores has now developed the capability for increasing its multi-lingual voice processes support from 30 to 210 agents over a period of eight months.

As RuralShores has got the solution on a per licence per month model, it is in a position to meet the of its customers needs without having make any new capital investment for technology platform, operations and manageability.

“With the incorporation of Ozonetel's solution, there has been rise in our voice processing business. It now contributes around 8-10% to company's overall revenue,” says Gokulavasan.

With this improved scalability through technology solution, RuralShores is now geared to expand its operations with 30 new centres, which are being planned across 14 states and are slated to come up by March 2015. To man these centres, it will add 4500 agents. Also, it is now well- equipped to add more languages to support client's business requirements. pankaj.maru@expressindia.com

JANUARY, 2015

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FEATURE

TVS MOTOR

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Y2K & THE MAKING OF A

CIO “Explaining business value and gaining the confidence of top management and assuring users of the technology that their life would improve are the success factors,” says T G Dhandapani

BY ANOOP VERMA 38

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JANUARY, 2015

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DECEMBER, 2014

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FEATURE

TVS MOTOR

“M

y entry into the field of IT was rather accidental!” says T G Dhandapani.

Coming from someone who has done quite well in his IT career, this statement is surprising. But Dhandapani insists that he didn’t make any conscious effort to carve an IT related career for himself. He began his career in finance and in 1991 he rose to the post of COF. For the next three years, he handled business planning operations, and then moved to manufacturing operations.

“I was head of the Die Casting Division of Sundaram Clayton for three years. I handled production, quality, maintenance and commercials,” says Dhandapani.

“Later I joined the task force to build half a million capacity two-wheeler manufacturing plant at Mysore. After completing the project, my first thought was “what next ?”

Y2K & the making of a CIO It did not take long for Dhandapani to discover the answer to the question What next? This was the period when the issues related to Y2K were cropping up.

The company entrusted him with the responsibility of implementing the solutions to tackle the Y2K issue. While working on this project Dhandapani had his first exposure to IT. This was also the time when the company was planning to implement ERP. The consultant who had been hired for the project implementation needed a person from the organisation to head the task-force for ERP implementation.

Three people, including Dhandapani, received the offer to be head of the taskforce. Dhandapani accepted the offer. He may not have realised it then, but with this 40

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step, he was initiating a major transformation in his career. He was venturing into the world of IT. Soon he realised that on a psychological level he was rather comfortable working in IT projects. “While working in the ERP project, I realised that by nature I am an IT person,” says Dhandapani. “I feel as comfortable in an IT environment, as a fish in water.”

About the work that he is doing in TVS, he says, “I am really happy about my work in TVS. The extent of freedom that I enjoy and the faith that the management has on the IT team, is something that I can take pride in. I have very committed team members.”

Even in the post Y2K era, many of the enterprises were not fully convinced about having large-scale deployment of IT in their organisations. Dhandapani says, “So long as IT was used for data processing, the real potential of IT was not visible to most people. At the most IT was a mere productivity improvement tool for accounts and HR departments.

People were worried that any large scale automation or computerisation could lead to labour problems.”

On the challenges that must be there when IT is implemented in an organisation for the first time, he says, “The challenges will be there, they are to be expected. Even I didn’t know about all the benefits that can come from IT. It is only by working on IT projects that I learned about all that can be done through computerisation.”

“In every organisation there were people who had achieved excellence in their work without making much use of IT and they were not ready to share the knowledge that they possessed with the

IT guys. If computerisation was enforced on them, it led to serious resistance and in some cases, even sabotage. However, now that it has been amply proved that IT can lead to lot of benefits for the organization, most people have warmed up to it.”

Initiating new innovations in IT Today he is responsible for the development and execution of IT strategy in 10 companies, including TVS Motor and Sundaram Clayton. The verticals in which he is working are as divergent as automotive, manufacturing, construction and power. The major IT projects that he and his team have implemented include Lean Manufacturing, Electronic Kanban, Digitisation of TPM and NPD Process, Electronic Collaboration with Suppliers & Customers, Digitisation of New Product Development, Mobile Applications, Digital Manufacturing, Analytics, Big Data in Manufacturing, etc. Most of these solutions have been developed and implemented by the in house IT team.

One particular IT project that has proved very beneficial for the organisation is the Dealer Management System (DMS). Dhandapani says, “We have facilitated the development of the DMS - an ERP for TVS Motor Dealers.

This system has been adopted by all the 1000+ dealers around the globe. We have also provided a private cloud based DMS solution to our 2000 authorised service centres.”

“We have also developed a new business model, which is called the Enabled Oil Business. This has led to the automation of all the commercial processes end-to-end. Only one person is required to handle the Rs. 100 crore business with a million transactions.” This JANUARY, 2015

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leads to 12% savings in operating costs year after year.

Dhandapani proudly states that the 80% virtualised Data Centre that his organisation is using is under layer three certification. “TVS Motor is perhaps the first Indian company to obtain ISO 27001 certification enterprise wide,” he says.

IT as a vehicle for innovations “It is a cliche to say that the field of Information Technology is constantly evolving, because it indeed is,” Dhandapani chuckles. He is of the view that success in IT can only come when one is step-in-step with technological evolution. You don’t need to be ahead of technology, and you certainly need to avoid getting left behind. He suggests that IT can yield best results only when the ecosystem is prepared before adoption of new technology. “Explaining business value and gaining the confidence of top management and assuring users of the technology that their life would improve are the success factors,” he adds.

In his opinion, only when the IT department is a vehicle for consistent innovation that the business can have a tangible value. The IT initiatives must also make some kind of strategic contribution to the growth of the business. For that they have to be well balanced. If the IT vertical is only focused on ensuring that the lights are switched on they will only be remembered when there is a maintenance related requirement. “IT department must endeavour to take their performance to such a level that they are remembered also when all the services are working in fine order,” he says. “It is necessary for us to bring in tangible business values.”

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Our ITteam is responsible for Shelf Engineering Initiatives in which the ITsolutions are kept ready for implementation before business users ask for it.

Shelf Engineering Initiatives “Our IT team is responsible for Shelf Engineering Initiatives in which the IT solutions are kept ready for implementation before business users ask for it,” informs Dhandapani. “Ideas are digitised in advance based on business issues, technology trends and adoption possibilities in the market.”

So what is Shelf Engineering Concept?

It is essentially a strategy to anticipate possibilities and develop a process or technology that can be put to use in future. It may not be useful today, but in three to five year period many of these technologies might become critical for the success of the enterprise. Essentially the concept reduces the new product development lead time by proactively developing solutions ahead of time. “In our own company, we found that we took longer time to develop a product if a technology or feature or process was new to us. Hence, the guideline came from our mentors that we should not mix technology and new product

development. We worked accordingly to achieve shorter development cycle time,” explains Dhandapani.

“We have successfully adopted shelf engineering concept in product development. A new design for a product or part is either documented or developed to prototype stage and adopted at a later date. In the last two years alone our team has shelf engineered 16 products. IT executives have started working on “beyond current demand” and they are encouraged to come up with at least two new ideas per person every year. One important aspect of this initiative is that IT executive is stepping into the shoes of the user while testing. This enriches his perspective and the outcomes are amazing.” he adds.

When asked to name an instance where the Shelf Engineering Concept has led to some positive outcomes for the organisations, Dhandapani gives the example of the centralised MoM (Minutes of Meeting) project. He says, “In any large organisation, several structured and ad hoc meetings are held. As per standard operating procedure, minutes of the meeting is prepared in MS Word document and circulated to stakeholders of the meeting and the minutes compliance is reviewed in the next meeting. In most cases, executives look at the minutes only on the day of review and the meeting becomes a purposeless repetitive exercise and more often degenerates into a session of excuses. There is no alert to the person responsible in advance for compliance nor is there a mechanism to keep the chair person updated on the progress of work. Observing these issues, we developed a centralised MoM system using an open source platform.”

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“This system automates all the processes- from request for meeting to resolution - integrated with mailing system and calendar. This project was engineered and tested within IT. After adoption in one area, there was a request from the Chairman’s office to track the action points of business meetings for ‘ontime compliance’. There was also a mandate to develop the system in three months. Since this was already shelf engineered, the MOM project was deployed in less than a day across the organisation. Now HoDs have a dashboard displaying status of actions carried out as against their promise. This enhances managerial effectiveness.”

The Nano Value Concept How do you measure the business value of an IT project? Dhandapani is of the opinion that it is absolutely critical to measure the business value of IT delivery. Unless there is a system for measuring the business value of IT projects, it will be difficult to motivate IT managers. He believes that minimum business value from an IT project should be Rs 1 lakh. The benefits accrued are measured in Nanos , reminiscent of the price value of the Nano car for ready association.

“In Six Sigma, while measuring the defects, the move from percentage to parts per million (ppm) brought the breakthrough in the thinking about manufacturing quality. What we are aiming for is similar to that. Continuous innovation is targeted and benefits are measured on number of Nanos created per month – keeping the lights on is not value created. This target is given to every IT staff and in the first year benefit is measured irrespective of the day of implementation. From the second year onwards benefits accrued are not measured as IT contribution but considered as daily work management of the respective process. However sustenance of benefits is measured independently,” explains Dhandapani.

Dhandapani has put in place a system in the IT department for the setting up of a target of Nanos at the beginning of every year for every member of the IT staff. “A 42

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TG DHANDAPANI Current designation Expertise Work Experience

Favourite quote Favourite book Favourite food Favourite destination Favourite gadget for work Favourite gadget for personal use

: Group CIO,TVS Motor and Sundaram Clayton Group of Companies : IT strategy and project execution : 34 years of professional experience in the areas of Finance, Business Planning, Operations, Projects and IT. : “Never never never give up”~ Swamy Vivekananda : Ponniyin Selvan by Kalki Sri Krishnamurthy : Masala Dosa : All historically important places in India : Blackberry : Sony audio system in the car

supervisor should contribute, apart from his target, at least 20 percent more than the target of his subordinates and so on. A team’s target is 20 percent more than the total individual target. This strategy is adopted to ensure that both individual and team initiatives are nurtured.”

New perspectives on IT buzzwords He may have entered the field of IT at a later stage in life, but Dhandapani is well informed about the raging issues in this space. On the subject of Data Centre security, he says, “Data Centre security is of supreme importance. However, this is more of business de-risking rather than a security subject. As a part of business continuity plan DR system is very important. All business continuity plans are subject to the desire to de-risk.

DR plans and programs are to be adopted step by step from simple backup to real time replications.

Affordability, RPO and RTO will decide the size of investment in DR.”

There has been a lot of talk about Big Data Analytics in India, but we hardly see any implementation of the technology in our enterprises. Why? Dhandapani is of the opinion that any IT concept will take longer time for implementation as it involves understanding, relevance, right fit, ROI, appetite and much else. He says, “There is nothing big in Big Data Analytics. The system is all about deriving information from multiple resources, which can be structured or unstructured. The potential business outcomes from the information can be huge.” He is of the opinion that Big Data will be helpful in converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and thereby pose a challenge to the dominant belief.

On the subject of cloud, he feels that there is a long way to go before there is any major cloud adoption by the enterprises in India. He also makes the point that cloud is more of an arrangement rather than a technology.

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The Great Indian

PSUs It is important to note that the growth of IT sector will fuel the growth of the nation. By marrying the government’s ‘Digital India’ campaign with its PSU sector, India will emerge as an economic superpower by 2020.

BY LALIT KUMAR, Business Technology Architect, and PRASHANT CHAUDHARY, Sr. Director, Sales – Government, CA Technologies

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he turn of the millennium saw India emerging as one of the fastest growing economies globally. Public sector undertaking has played a very critical role in this growth and development of this nation. The PSUs have stood the test of time, heavy industrialisation that the nation has seen, as well as the global economic downturn, a few years back. This transition was possible due to the economic reforms undertaken by the government in the early 1990s. This however, was just the tip of the iceberg. With the world latching on to a state of complete digital transformation, India’s

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transition was inevitable. From earlier days of minimal technology, to the current scenario of high tech adoption, India is definitely answering the call of disruptive technologies. Globally, we feel that the businesses are rewritten by software. On an average, the Indian public sector companies have spent about USD 9 billion on information technology in the last few years. A global research and analysis firm Forrester estimates that India’s public sector’s IT purchases will grow at a CAGR of 14 percent between 2012 and 2017, reaching US $108.5 billion in 2017.

However, based on the experience of decades of operation, for PSUs to become more profitable entities, there is a need for them to be more agile, bring in greater efficiency, transparency and accountability in the sector. Employer to about 1.5 million people, the public sector’s pro-active adoption of IT is also seen as a move to address the global competition faced by Indian PSUs. Today PSUs are looking at IT to analyse customer information efficiently and develop targeted and customised offerings for customers. Besides, massive infrastructure investments and increasing citizen expectations are set to further fuel public sector IT spending.

Deployment of proper IT tools In that context, deploying proper IT tools or designing relevant IT infrastructure will help pave the future path for these PSUs. According to a Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) study published sometime back, executives from PSUs indicated that the ability to adapt quickly to change and improve service quality using information technology will offer a greater advantage to public sector organisations. With changing times, PSUs are under pressure to be more citizen-focused, more business oriented and smarter in their choice and use of newer technologies. Shrinking budgets and increasing expectations for better service delivery and transparency is the call of the time. With adoption of trends such as cloud computing that allows storage of structured and unstructured information at large, the ‘bring your own device’ phenomenon, the convenience of working while on the move has given rise to the issue of data privacy invasion, and security is one of the topmost priorities for Indian CIOs.. While the changing IT trends push the PSUs to adopt newer technologies, the biggest challenge lies in making it “secure”. Solutions like CA Identity and Governance Minder, help enterprises protect their systems from external as well as internal threats in terms of unintentional data damage.

While IT Infrastructure Management is of core importance for most of the PSU, there are few of the PSUs those have walked a long way into the IT path and these Public Sector Undertakings are either already a user of ERP applications or gearing up to adopt one.

While ERP is of important requirement of the PSU eco-system, it

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becomes more critical for them to adopt the right methodology to make sure that the investment in ERP is paying off well, and to ensure that they would need solutions to monitor the performance of the multiple tools they have invested into.

CA Technologies provides critical tools to monitor the performance of the deployed ERP and other applications. CA Application Performance Manager helps to understand the end-user response and also provides visibility into faults and performance issues causing application degradation and other bottlenecks identifying the root cause of the problems and help solving it faster, reducing MTTR with low cost of operations.

Power sector in PSU have another major concern of managing and securing the information and access on SCADA as well as IT systems, which involves both IP and non IP devices. Power sector is facing challenge to undertake the task and perform efficiently while managing both the environment centrally and this is where CA Mediation Manager layer can provide option to convert the information from non-IP devices into understandable format for IP consoles and allow the administrator to manage both the environment centrally.

Management of sensitive data The PSUs also conduct transactions involving sensitive data—whether that be personally identifiable information (PII), electronic health records, strategic planning data, or employee, citizen and non-citizen data. As the number of users and applications interacting with this data increases, the threats to this information and the IT infrastructure supporting it multiply. Identity, credential and access management (ICAM) plays a critical role in protecting the nation’s mission critical data, IT infrastructure, and citizens’ and noncitizens’ privacy from cyber threats both internal and external. Over the past few years, CA Technologies’ has worked with various Government projects. About 70 % of the state data centers (SDCs) and state wide area network run on CA solutions. 70% of states which have APDRP projects that been implemented 46

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or are in the process of being implemented, run on CA Solutions. With growing exchange of public data over government portals, there is a growing need to protect citizen identity. CA Identity Manager is a flexible and scalable solution for creating and maintaining identities and related user attributes. CA Identity Manager can be integrated with end points to synchronise user identity information across IT systems as they change. It also has the ability to identify when identity information is updated on an end point and can then make policy-based decisions about whether or not to update the central user profile and then synchronise these changes back out to other systems. As identities are created and maintained on the massive scale required by many agencies, they must be stored in a high performance repository capable of handling this volume. CA Directory is a distributed directory which delivers superior levels of availability, reliability, scalability and performance. Independent testing has proven CA Directory’s ability to scale to hundreds of millions of users and

hundreds of servers in a distributed environment5. As an identity foundation, CA Directory imparts these enterpriseclass capabilities to each of the ICAM solutions which it supports.

When the Prime Minister spoke about the need for a Digitally Conscious country, subconsciously security concerns were raised. Data invasion is no longer fictitious. With application economy gaining traction, and almost every business turning towards it, government is not to be left behind. It is important to note that the growth of IT sector will fuel the growth of the nation. By marrying the government’s ‘Digital India’ campaign with its PSU sector, India will emerge as an economic superpower by 2020. CA Technologies has presented an opportunity to this sector with its competent solutions. With CIOs taking a strategic move in the adoption of appropriate technology solutions, Indian PSUs that seem to have faded in the background due to the advent of newer enterprises and MNCs, will be revived.

We are hopeful that the IT innovation, adoption of new technologies and growth thereby, will lead India to the next level.

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SMARTINNOVATION, NEWIDEAS & BRIGHTFUTURE New and emerging IT solutions are changing the way the Public Sector Undertakings manage their operations. Turn the page to learn about the deceptively simple IT solutions to the complex operational problems that Public Sector in India is facing‌.

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HIGH POWER PANEL DISCUSSION ON STATE OF PUBLIC SECTOR IN INDIA

EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA 2014 High Power Panel Discussion on State of Public Sector in India Inaugural address Next Generation PSUs Power to do more Thinking scalable securityalways on/always evolving: thinking 24x7, Simplification of industrial approvals using e-biz and beyond Survive and thrive in the application economy Using ITto drive growth and efficiency in PSUs 48

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Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director and Head - New Media, The Indian Express Limited Jaiveer Srivastava, CMD, The Fertilizers & Chemicals Travancore Ltd Anant Geete, Union Minister of Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises Dr. SPS Bakshi, Chairman & Managing Director, Engineering Projects India Limited Alok Sinha, Ex-Chairman, Food Corporation of India

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nant Goenka, the moderator of the panel discussion, began by asking Anant Geete, “How does it feel to be regarded as the bridge between two political parties—BJP and Shiv Sena?”

“Presently, there is a heated political atmosphere in the country and so it may seem that I am acting like a bridge between the two parties,” Geete responded. “Before this election we had a coalition system of governance in the country. Now a single party has emerged with full majority in the centre. However, despite BJP having an absolute majority, there continues to be a coalition between BJP and Shiv Sena.

This coalition has withstood the test of time as it is not a coalition of political opportunism, it is a coalition made on the basis of ideals.”

Goenka brought up the topic of what steps can the Public Sector take to bring better technology. In response, Geete said, “The Prime Minister has given the country the mantra of ‘Make in India.’ My ministry is a willing participant in the Make in India programme. In manufacturing there is global competition, but we are not lagging behind. We will achieve the vision of the Make in India programme.”

Geete said that the government is trying not to interfere in the day-today workings of CPSEs. He agreed that there was a need to give more autonomy to the Public Sector. "I am ready to give 100% autonomy in my ministry,” he said.

Goenka asked, “Why is it that the government is often late in adoption of new technology?”

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Dr. SPS Bakshi, CMD, Engineering Projects India Ltd, replied, “My view is that the Public Sector is not late in adoption. We are equally in the race for adopting new technologies. We are working hard on Smart City projects.

We are working with Japanese and UK partners for getting new technologies.”

Jaiveer Srivastava, CMD, FACT Ltd, said, “Shri Anant Geete is a straightforward personality. He is trying to give a new direction to all the 277 CPSEs that come under his ministry. He is trying to engineer many reforms.”

On the subject of the Make in India campaign, Srivastava said, “The Make in India campaign is very important. We have to think in these terms. We can achieve the objectives of the Make in EXPRESS COMPUTER

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India campaign only if we are efficient, time-oriented and quality-oriented."

Goenka said that in USA a much smaller section of the population was involved in agriculture, yet that country was the world’s largest exporter of food related projects. “Why can’t agriculture in India be as productive as in USA?” Goenka asked.

Srivastava said, "In India, we need to ensure that the right technology can reach the farmers at the right time. We also need to develop cold storage, and other infrastructure. Fertilisers have to be widely available at cheap rates.”

Alok Sinha, Ex-Chairman, Food Corporation of India, said, “5 to 10 crore people are added to the labour force every year in India. We have to find jobs for them. For that we have to make the

economy more productive."

During the panel discussion Anant Geete made some interesting comments on the emotive issue of development versus environment."I don’t think India is responsible for the current state of environment. It is developed countries that are responsible for it. We can’t afford to practice the kind of environmentalist views that are emanating from the Western world at present. How can we ignore the fact that currently more than 70% of the country is living in the rural areas, where people lack most of the basic amenities that the West takes for granted! We need to ask ourselves the question—who is funding those who are bringing this extreme brand of environmentalism to this country?” said Geete.

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INAUGURAL ADDRESS S. Narsing Rao, IAS, Principal Secretary to CM, Telangana

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S. Narsing Rao

Narsing Rao began the inaugural address by stating that PSUs hold huge potential for business growth. According to him, application of IT in PSUs in last 15 years, has been more of cosmetic. Some have made optimal use like ONGC, NTPC etc.

However, PSUs still need to utilise it in a more optimum way.

He went onto explain that there are certain things very unique to the PSUs. In procurement, it’s a nightmare for the public sector executives to do the procurement due to compliance. This method is a deterrent. Organisations have to identify what makes sense to them. Sometimes, people do not know what is the supplier price, but with this system, who applied for the tender at

what price becomes clear.

He gave another example pertaining to coal mine. In a coal mine in each shift around 300 people work. The person has to assign the jobs and the allegation is that these people misuse their positions and give lighter jobs to certain people.

With the ERP in picture, the system automatically allots work to people.

In pre-nationalisation days, every 15 days payment used to be made. It used to result in lot of problems like alcoholism, domestic abuse etc. Now the amount is directly paid into their account. He later suggested service providers to study failures in central PSUs and see business opportunities. That is where companies should utilise ICT where it can be objectively applied.

NEXT GENERATION PSUs Jaijit Bhattacharya, Partner, Infrastructure & Government Services, KPMG in India

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Jaijit Bhattacharya

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he speaker began the session by stating that IT is compliancebased, rather than outcome–based which hinders PSUs. Gross turnover of PSUs in 2002-03 was Rs. 5,44,390 crores, with less than 1% profitability. Some of them have been backbone of this economy, while others have been a failure.

Next-gen PSU is an evolutionary step towards a more efficient and profitable public sector enterprise through adoption of a set of trends in business models, operational models, financial models and technological models for achieving a more economically relevant outcome.

He went onto explain the difference between a PSU and a non-PSU. He mentioned that structure of ownership is different. Therefore, different defacto

desired outcomes, different outputs and different governance structure. structure and hence the deadening hand. In PSUs outcomes are not driven by profitability.

The oxymoronic issue is that PSU was designed so that it would take activities that no one would take. There are companies which are doing it, but not everyone. Rationale for PSUs is new.

There are issues of connectivity, issue of smart-cities There is a need for new business models, new financial models. He questioned that how many PSUs are really leveraging community radios? Can we have outcome driven models?

There is significant undermonetisation of assets. Value building should be done through a systematic process.

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POWER TO DO MORE Raman Bountra, Business Leader, Government, Dell India

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Raman Bountra

he speaker commenced the session by saying that in essence across the spectrum, we are asking for transformation. The Bountra mentioned that Dell itself has gone through a huge transformation journey in last five years.

Dell innovated in six key areas to create more value in services, converged infrastructure, cloud, devices, data and security. The company invested $18 billion in last five years. They have procured 30 different companies. Due to this it is able to give flexible transition services, intelligent converged infrastructure and seamless cloud enablement. It is a place for end-to-end solution. He said that Dell's technology is very disruptive. Comprehensive portfolio

built with industry’s most innovative IP. Dell is empowering government services with the power to do more.

Huge potential exists in PSUs in adopting IT. For example, India Cancer Facility delivers rapid patient treatment (Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre). It implemented highly available storage platform (Dell compellent storage and Poweredge servers) for medical imaging and patient records to meet demands for seven years.

Dell also works with NICSI, DGS. He concluded by mentioning that Dell has 2700 employees in India, vertical specific R&D centre. Dell went private in 2013. It has 40 distributors and 8,000 channel partners.

THINKING SCALABLE SECURITY- ALWAYS ON/ALWAYS EVOLVING: THINKING 24X7, Aravindan Anandan, Consulting Systems Engineer, Asia Pacific, Barracuda Networks

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Aravindan Anandan

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he speaker began the session by mentioning that presently, securing an organisation and to have it 24x7 is the next step, and to have scalable security is the third step.

Scalable security covers multiple aspects like horizontal scaling across geographies. There is vertical scaling in terms of local networks and elastic scaling which is public or private cloud.

He said that not all PSUs want solutions which are easy to use. Thus, where can they start? They can start by asking how they want to manage these solutions.

There are 2 ways to develop or maintain

management infrastructure: 1. Umbrella management 2. Management as foundation.

The problem with umbrella management is in perimeter security. In contrast to using management as a foundation one starts with installing management as infrastructure. He said that Barracuda NG firewall is the nextgen firewall which handles many aspects of perimeter security. Barracuda also introduced VPN load balancing.

Today’s network perimeter security needs to be strong. Barracuda prevents ATPs at the perimeter.

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SIMPLIFICATION OF INDUSTRIAL APPROVALS USING E-BIZ AND BEYOND Jayesh Ranjan, IAS, Vice Chairman & MD, Telangana State Industrial Infrastructure Corporation

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Jayesh Ranjan

he speaker mentioned that to start a business in Telangana earlier was difficult. As per State government's new industrial policy on November 27, the focus is to improve ease of doing business, right to single window clearances, online platform, eBiz plus more and single window without grills. Process of permissions and approvals will be quick through online platform eBiz. Infosys is the technology partner.

Right now, the situation is very complicated to set-up an industrial unit.

It is department centric and requires 16 kinds of clearances in the state of

Telangna. eBiz plus is investor centric for government regulatory information. If one wants to establish business in Telangana, it can be obtained using this platform over a period of time. There is a common application form, and relevant portion of those forms is sent to the respective authority. It enables investors to make online payments for the services.It takes only 15 days for clearance.

The session ended with the speaker stating that Infosys is also looking at the possibility of digital securing it. 20% of services have already been implemented on eBiz.

SURVIVE AND THRIVE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY Lalit Kumar, Business Tech Architect, CA Technologies

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Lalit Kumar

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he speaker started the session by asking what is application economy? He stated that today every company is a software company.

250 plus PSUs. have spent $8.5 billion in 2012 in IT, which is more than 2% of their total revenues. The key drivers of an application economy are: application development, IT management, secure environment and mobility.

He mentioned that three major areas to succeed in an application economy are management (services monitoring, project monitoring, capacity monitoring, server monitoring). CA Technologies

provides solutions in all these areas. He mentioned that it is security of information which is more critical to organisations. Peripheral security is not 100% secured. He mentioned that solutions from CA Technologies like multi-factor authentication and IAM can be leveraged as a solution. According to him the mediation layer gives more visibility into the internal systems.

Speaking on DevoPs he said that 88% of enterprises plan to implement DevoPs. He concluded by saying that more than 1200 businesses worldwide leverage CA solutions.

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USING IT TO DRIVE GROWTH AND EFFICIENCY IN PSUs

Rajesh Kapoor, Director (Technical), Telecommunications Consultants India Limited Rajiv Garg, GM-Incharge (CS & IT), Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited K Ramchand, Sr. GM (CIT), Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited CV Rao, GM (IT), National Thermal Power Corporation Limited Prashant Chaudhary, Sr. Director (State Business, PSUs & MCIT), CA Technologies

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he panel discussion began with contemplation that PSUs are adopting best practices in their area of operations. The question raised was how to take care of security? Will solutions like M2M change PSUs? According to CV Rao, GM -IT, NTPC, spoke about restructuring of whole organisation in which implementation of ERP was key in 2007 at NTPC. It included areas right from project management to operations. NTPC went for real-time applications also. They have a centralised control room which monitors efficiency of units online. Power generation is a regulated market now, and the company's bottomline is affected by the efficiency of operations.

According to Rajiv Garg, GM (IT & CS), BHEL, IT has become an enabler in most businesses now. Alongwith IT implementation organisations have to re-

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engineeer business processes as well. At BHEL, ICT covers all facets. BHEL has 17 manufacturing units, project engineering management and certain other portfolio. Manufacturing plants have end-to-end implementation of IT. There is network connection to the remotest of plants. Large plants have turnover of Rs.12-13,000 crores.

According to him, it is very important to achieve timelines in ICT projects. Most projects do not get delivered in time, because the implementation success is dependent on people and processes.

Project is not delayed due to management as commonly perceived.

Major delay happens from the supplier side. He later mentioned that there is lot of potential of M2M in PSU. BHEL is finding some issue in cloud, because it has its own captive data centres.

K Ramchand, Sr. GM (CIT), BSNL,

talked about his earleir experience in IT. He was involved in customer care and development packages and migrating it to another platform. The first time it was done, the commercial officer who takes requests from customers for telephone connection, used to physically sign copies. Telecom tariff depends on pulse rates. With the introduction of CDRP system BSNL is able to record call data records without depending on the pulse rates. It gives flexibility in introducing new tariffs. BSNL has 47 units of SAP. One of the process re-engineering it did was centralisation of accounts.

Giving vendor perspective mentioned, Prashant Chaudhary, Sr. Director (State Business, PSUs & MCIT), CA Technologies, that from equipment perspective, when it initiates a project in PSU, there are projects which continue for few years. There is technology refresh happening every six months. When it comes to software, there are applications which requires dedicated team. It is not possible to be in silos. He said that organisations should set-up private cloud for security.

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POWER BREAKFAST HOSTED BY DELL EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA 2014 Power Breakfast Hosted by Dell Creating Future ITInfrastructure How ITcan help PSUs in bringing efficiency and transparency Information security perspective for PSUs Cost-effective DR Solutions Lessons learned from the biggest security breaches Assessing cloud computing opportunities and challenges in PSUs Best practices in cyber security for PSUs Enabling a future ready data centre PSU performance and way forward Challenges before Fertilizer PSUs in India High performing organisations & the people side of change High Power Panel Discussion on State of Public Sector in India CATechnologies power discussion Cost effective DR Solutions with Cross Platform Migrations 54

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he discussion in this session centred around ERP. One of the delegates spoke about upgrading from Oracle ERP 11i to 12i. He was of the view that success of ERP is also linked to the way the company addresses the issues of change management.

Most delegates agreed that in PSUs, ERP is a very expensive project and that is where SIs come in. It also always requires customisation, in which OEMs are of little help So, either organisations have to change business processes and legacy architecture, which is not always right.

Another delegate mentioned that earlier they used to have a long process for leave approval for senior authority, now it is a matter of single step. Earlier there was also a problem of over-time and people faced lot of difficulties, but later on the process got streamlined. Now everyone can derive benefit out of it.

Delegates then went on to discuss about the various phases of

implementing or upgrading ERP. They observed that the early stages of computerisation are very painful as the processes also need to be taken care of.

According to the delegates, it is sometimes very difficult to make the system integrator understand what an organisation wants. They are required to do more change management for SIs. Most of SIs do not even understand what is IPv6.

Moving onto data security, everyone agreed that it is one of the prime concerns of the organisations today.

Security in any form of data is one of the biggest challenges. Data is changing hands in seconds, one of the delegates said.

The example of the Estonia eGovernance Academy was cited.

There is a laptop and a screen there.

All presentations are made on screen and no paper comes in the cabinet or goes out. All proceedings are done online. Another example was of ONGC, where documents are available for suppliers online.

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CREATING FUTURE IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Power Breakfast hosted by HCL

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he conversation at the breakfast table revolved mainly around the steps that the Public Sector Undertakings can take to ensure that their IT infrastructure, the data centre in particular, is future ready. As digital technologies are becoming more and more crucial for the business landscape, it is important for all organisations to have an IT infrastructure that is reliable and future ready.

Some delegates from the Public Sector were of the opinion that it has often been the experience that the System Integrators are unable to deliver results that according to the terms of EXPRESS COMPUTER

the contract. Among them few were of the view that the delays in the execution of IT projects were primarily responsible for the failure to create IT that is efficient and long lasting.

The delegates from HCL agreed that when it comes to IT transformation, there simply is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. They informed the people at the table that HCL was working with a wide array of global partners, independent of their specific technologies and products.

The attendees at the breakfast meeting were informed that today HCL is offering the advantage of Next-

Generation Data Center (NGDC) services. The Public Sector Undertakings can go in for optimally designed solutions that can fit their enterprise needs and also reduce their IT costs. Many delegates were of the view that increased scalability is important for business growth. The people from HCL agreed with them.

Overall, this was a freewheeling discussion in which lot of interesting ideas were exchanged on how private IT players and the government organisations can cooperate and collaborate for creating optimal IT infrastructure.

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HOW IT CAN HELP PSUs IN BRINGING EFFICIENCY AND TRANSPARENCY Dr. SPS Bakshi, CMD, Engineering Projects India Ltd.

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Dr. SPS Bakshi

he session commenced by Dr. SPS Bakshi stating that IT has revolutionised the world. He said, “Significant milestones have been achieved in the quality of governance due to the advent of IT.” He observed that eGovernance does not mean acquiring more computers, it means improving the quality of citizen services. It is important to remember that eGovernance is easy governance, efficient governance.

According to him, the key factors for focus of effectiveness of PSUs are security and cloud computing. He mentioned projects like Make in India, Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana, Digital India and

Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana as the key takeaways from the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech.

He said that Digital India is a dream for the poor. With broadband connectivity, we can ensure long-distance education.

Speaking about the IT initiatives within his organisation, he said that it has eTendering, ePayment, eAuction, eRecruitment, eAttandance, eProject Management, ePayments and video conferencing. For enhancement of governance, a works manual, has been brought in. The organisation has environment annual hand book for keeping important checks on, building and allied works recruitment and promotion policy.

INFORMATION SECURITY PERSPECTIVE FOR PSUs Harmeet Singh Kalra, Head- Strategic Accounts, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

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resenting his perspective on different verticals of security, Harmeet Singh Kalra said, “Environment’s complexity is evolving with new emerging technologies. Every year threats are becoming more sophisticated and frequent. Our national critical infrastructure is under serious security threat.”

He said that most organisations react only when an attack happens. Instead of having a well-planned security strategy, they haphazardly deploy all that is available. Organisations are also not clear about who is the owner of security.

He spoke about software-defined protection. Checkpoint’s softwaredefined protection is built on enforcement layer, control layer, and management layer. The starting point of enforcement layer comes from focussing on the system that is to be protected. At control layer protection is formed..He added that the management layer is the most critical component as it brings SDP architecture to life by integrating security with business processes.

“Organisations cannot define their requirements from the perspective of 5-7 years because it is so dynamic,” he added.

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COST-EFFECTIVE DR SOLUTIONS Dr. Rajeev Papneja, Executive VP, ESDS Software Solutions Private Ltd.

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Dr. Rajeev Papneja

he speaker started the session by talking about ESDS’s offerings in Cloud Disaster Recovery space.

ESDS has auto-scaling cloud. It is a SAP hosting partner. ESDS also has an automated server management. The company provides cross-platform disaster recovery on cloud.

He mentioned that there is a certain kind of surplus when it comes to infrastructure. According to him, ESDS has brought utility into the computing model. They always allocate extra to handle the spikes, but do not charge extra for it.

Speaking on DR, he mentioned that during 26/11, there were some organisations still functioning the next day. Organisations like Metlife were

functioning because they had DR in place.

He talked about DR health. Organisations should ask if all the components are available right from server, power, people and network. When it comes to DR readiness, organisations should ask if they are able to achieve RTO and RPO? Rajeev Papneja said, “There are many challenges around traditional DR. It is a costly proposition and is difficult to maintain. With RaaS (recovery as a service), there is guaranteed uptime..”

He spoke about ESDS service Enlight.

They have data centre in Nashik, and another one is coming up in Navi Mumbai. They give DR on HP-UX on x86 platform. He concluded by saying that disaster does not always have to be a natural calamity.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE BIGGEST SECURITY BREACHES Gurinder Singh, Senior Pre-Sales Engineer, Websense

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Gurinder Singh

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he speaker commenced the session by mentioning that there are seven stages of advanced threats and data theft - recon, lure, redirect, exploit kit, dropperfile, call home and data thefts.

Talking about the trends of 2014 he mentioned that it was predicted this year that the advanced malware volume will decrease, a major data-destruction attack will happen, and the attackers will be more interested in cloud data than an organisation’s network.

Further, highlighting predictions, he said RedKit, Neutrino, and other exploit kits were expected to struggle for power in the wake of the Black hole author arrest. .

He said that cyber criminals were expected to target the weakest links in the ‘data-exchange chain’. “The security market watchers have expected the attackers to lure executives and compromise organisations via professional social networks. Traditional security systems like Firewall, AV and IPS are not enough to deal with these organised threats,” said Gurinder Singh.

He was of the view that in 2015 the attacks on IoT will rise. Email threats are evolving. “Command and control instructions will be hosted on legitimate sites. Credit card thieves will morph into information dealers,” he said.

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ASSESSING CLOUD COMPUTING OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN PSUs

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he panel discussion opened with exchange of ideas on the benefits that cloud can have for G2G and G2C services. Rishiskesh Jadhav of ESDS mentioned that cross platform DR is very helpful as it does not lock the customers..

The world of Cloud is geared to provide incredible computing power that was previously limited to a select group of technologically advanced organisations.

By using Cloud Computing the Public Sector can make it more easy to utilise IT for business development without having to invest in complex hardwarea. The deployment time of Cloud Computing solutions is quite fast. This can give the Public Sector more time for developing products.

We are living in an age of rising expectations. Moving IT operations into

Projjal Chakrabarty, Executive Director (IS), Indian Oil Corporation Limited KVV Satyanarayana, GM (MS), Power Finance Corporation Limited BK Soni, IT Consultant, NTPC - SAIL Power Company Private Limited Rajiv Chandra, GM (IS), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited Sunil Kumar, Group GM (IT), Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation Limited

the Cloud can be an efficient way for Public Sector to reduce the cost of its operations..

Panelists had concerns about legality.

The topmost priority is to keep Indian data in India. So service providers need to have data centres in India.

BEST PRACTICES IN CYBER SECURITY FOR PSUs

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he discussion started with UK Lal making the point that we have to keep on upgrading best practices in security. Indian government has issued a circular that ISO27001 should be implemented. The instructions in government are there, but there is no implementation.

Anand Patil said, "Earlier the network was limited to the premise. That is no longer the case. No device on the network is safe. In-house training and awareness is required. Now security audit is mandate for telecom industry, which is a recent modification."

MA Khan said, “We have to have products on Internet, at the same time it is not safe online, so we have to keep on looking at new security products. RBI has issued regulations as banks are exposed to large risks. These kind of set-ups should be there even in Central government.”

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Panellists:·UK Lal (IPS), Chief Vigilance Officer, Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India·Anand Patil, GM (IT), Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited·MA Khan, GM / CISO, IDBI Bank·Ramachandra R Parashar, GM (IT) / CIO, Bharat Earth Movers Limited·Sanghamitra Pyne, Chief Engineer & Head-IT,West Bengal State Electricity Transmission Company Limited

Sanghamitra Pyne said, ” The nature of security threats has changed. Today we have sensors and control systems on transmission level. Automation part is a concern as we need to keep it safe from cyber attacks. SKADA has been in place for 20 years, but there were no breaches

then. As of now, we are revamping our SKADA systems.”

Ramachandra R Parashar said, “The awareness around security, currently, is really low. There is a tendency to share passwords with in the departments from the ease of operations point of view.”

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ENABLING A FUTURE READY DATA CENTRE Ravi Venkatraman, CSO, Enterprise Business, HCL Services Ltd

Ravi Venkatraman, CSO, Enterprise Business, HCL Services Ltd

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avi Venkatraman started the session by mentioning that disruptive forces like data explosion, social, cloud, mobility were influencing the decision of organisations.

Today there are more than 13 million apps running on social media. Are we ready to be disruptively innovative? He said that the challenge is that the demand for IT infrastructure needs to be synchronised with business priorities.

There are questions on how to improve utilisation of servers, how to scale infrastructure as per growing demands etc. He asked the audience, "Can your data centre support business growth?" He went on to declare, “A lot of money is spent on maintaining data centre. The average age

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HCL has over a decade’s experience, providing data center services that include: ● Optimizing data center operations with hosting and facility management services ● Migrating and consolidating to optimize high-performance data center architecture ● Design, architecture, and implementing data center infrastructure to facilitate a client’s business expansion strategies

of data centres is 14 years. That is not being future-ready. The future depends on what you do today.”

He gave a rundown of HCL projects.

HCL is maintaining a flagship government initiative that can provide identification for each resident across the country and thereby provide efficient delivery of citizen services. It is managing data centre for one of the largest research organisation. HCL has more than 15,000 data centre assets under management.

They have 1300 data centre experts, and touch points with 21 regional logistics centre. They leverage next-gen IT management tool Tefilla.

They have operations centre located in Pondicherry.

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PSU PERFORMANCE AND WAY FORWARD BN Sathpathy, Senior Advisor, Planning Commission, Government of India

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BN Sathpathy

he speaker began the session by stating that at present, there are 277 PSU enterprises. About 50% of PSUs are engaged in services sector.

But are they efficient enough and if not then what can ICT do?

He informed that the gross turnover of CPSEs in 2012-13 was Rs 19,45,777 crores.

He said the top ten loss making CPSEs include BSNL, MTNL, Air India, Chennai Petroleum Corp Ltd, Hindustan Photo Films Manufacturing Ltd,, Fertilizers and Chemicals (Travancore) Ltd and Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd. It is clearly evident that the services sector PSUs are by and large loss making.

He suggested that giving them ICT compliance and a chance to compete with private sector, will be a better way of moving ahead.

According to a report of panel of experts on reforms in CPSE (Central Public Sector Enterprises) the suggestions made were around Corporate governance, HR strategy, review of MoU, Technology mapping and JV, PPP and Procurement.

BN Sathpathy said, “ICT can make transformation in small enterprises, but in Air India where reasons for loss are totally different, special IT plans have to be there.”

Sathpathy asserted that every CPSE should have an IT plan. This must involve benchmarking of its extant technology levels and the preparation of a time bound plan for future, based on its strategic needs and benchmarking with the other public/private competitors in the sector.

CHALLENGES BEFORE FERTILIZER PSUs IN INDIA Jaiveer Srivastava, CMD, The Fertilizers & Chemicals Travancore Ltd.

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Jaiveer Srivastava

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aiveer Srivastava began his presentation by informing the audience that theirs is one of the loss making PSUs in the country. But in the same breath he said the team at FACT was working hard to make the company profitable.

He went on to inform increasing food production through increasing fertiliser production is no more a straight forward solution with guaranteed results. India is the third largest manufacturer and also the second largest consumer of nitrogenous and phosphatic fertilizers.

Recently, changes were made to the

fertilizer policy, suggesting direct subsidy transfer to farmers, but there have been some challenges on the implementation front.

Speaking on urea scenario, he mentioned that from last 15 years a number of urea plants have come up in the country. IT can contribute in bringing down the cost. “IT can be utilised for process and quality control.

NIC has started a mobile based fertilizer monitoring system. He later on said that this is the age of LNG. Way forward would be through the right pricing of domestic gas,” he said.

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HIGH PERFORMING ORGANISATIONS & THE PEOPLE SIDE OF CHANGE Jay Kumar Hariharan, CEO & Chief Coach, Blue Fire Coaching Consultants & Co-Founder of coatom.com

Jay Kumar Hariharan

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his invigorating session was a welcome change from the usual discussion on ICT in Public Sector that we were having. Jay Kumar Hariharan gave an engrossing presentation on how the performance levels of individuals and

organisations could be improved.

Hariharan caught the attention of the audience from the very begining and held it till the end. He said, “The inability to read or calibrate change has affected countries and dynasties. Change is not mandatory and neither is survival.

Organisations are born and they die.

What differentiates champions is the ability to handle change.”

He asked why is the people side of change important? What is change management and what does good change management look like?

He mentioned that over 90% of large project failures are due to people related

issues. He said, “How to make people ready for change? According to a survey conducted by IBM in 2008, some key barriers to success were lack of senior management support, corporate culture, changing mindsets and attitudes. On KPMG change readiness list India ranked 65. Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?”

He concluded the session by saying that knowledge does not change behaviour. It is the starting step. To succeed, he suggested, we must seek to discover the bright spots in the change process, script critical moves, motivate employees and celebrate small wins.

CA TECHNOLOGIES POWER DISCUSSION

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he discussion started with CA Technologies team talking about application economy. About 82 billion applications are downloaded every year. Four key areas for organisations to consider in an application economy are application development, IT management, security and mobility.

The question was asked what is the best way to know if the ERP in the organisation is performing in the way it is supposed to perform. The delegates spoke about the services that they are having in their organisations. They monitor IT systems, which are enabling delivery of services, and try to see if the problem is coming from application or infrastructure which is in between?

CA Technologies mentioned that as long as a device is IP-enabled they can help monitor it, even the new SCADA technology is IP enabled. Delegates wanted to know how to make SCADA systems hacker proof. CA Technologies EXPRESS COMPUTER

Delegates in discussion over security monitoring and other challenges at CATechnologies power discussion

mentioned that it is security of information which is more critical.

Peripheral security is not 100% secured.

Also, most of the time the threats are internal. There should be a mechanism to make sure that users, who are making use of the system are trustworthy.

There is a thin line between safety and security.

Delegates had a dilemma on how to interpret alerts coming from so many systems. Organisations spend lot of time diagnosing the problem. CA Technologies mentioned that with its

monitoring systems, one can have the exact analysis of the alerts. Delegates had queries on securing the data being hosted on cloud. There should be access control for critical applications.

CA Technologies access control agent sits on application. It makes sure that there is no intrusion and that the access is controlled by an efficient firewall. For instance, it is possible to give a granular command that a certain line on webpage should not be isolated. IaaS has not taken off in government, because it dose not guarantee security.

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COST EFFECTIVE DR SOLUTIONS WITH CROSS PLATFORM MIGRATIONS

Power Session Hosted by ESDS

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t is really important to have this discussion with IT representatives from PSUs since more than 90% of PSUs are not having any business continuity plan (BCP),” he said. It is a risk that PSUs are taking. The problem is that many of the PSUs are making only 1% profits and with such small margins, they can’t invest in traditional disaster recovery solutions.

Yet DR is a necessary investment, especially for a PSU like IRCTC, Indian Railways, Power Generation Companies, etc. They have tho invest in DR to safeguard their important data and ensure the continuity of their operations in case of the main data centre fails. ESDS mentioned that they have done PoCs for many big customers like Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, Airtel, KFC, PizzaHut. All these customers are successfully leveraging their DR solutions.

The delegates from the PSU sector agreed that their organisation can’t take the downtime beyond a certain point.

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ESDS mentioned that they have done PoCs for many big customers like Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, Airtel,KFC,PizzaHut. All these customers are successfully leveraging their DR solutions.

Few delegates raised concerns regarding the location of DR sites. Other critical issues like licenses of different software and databases, software patches and their update. They also spoke about issues related to hardware, manpower and the role played by DR sites in business continuity aspect of the organisations, etc.

Most officials said that they were aware of the benefits of DR, but they did not know how to go about it. One of the delegates mentioned that they have a DR in place. He also informed that a test environment has been created to test the patches.

Whenever a new critical patch is to be applied, first the testing team tests these patches in a downsized environment and it is then tested thoroughly. Thereafter it is applied on a production environment to overcome any issues related to vulnerability. One of the delegates mentioned that management needs to speed up the decision making process; it is very imperative to have a discussion on DR solutions. As of now 80% PSUs do not have a DR.

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