COVER STORY Big Data Analytics
Driving Business Value
FEATURE Making Way for 3D Printers
CASE STUDY The Experience Edge
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IT’S A SMAC, SMAC WORLD C
THE MEGA TRENDS OF SOCIAL, MOBILE, ANALYTICS AND CLOUD ARE SET TO CHANGE THE FACE OF BUSINESS
razy as it may sound, the entire world is going to be SMAC’ed. Now, now, I’m not a futurist, not even a technologist. But as one who often writes and talks about tech trends that affect enterprises big time, I can bet a few shirts on this: Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud will shake things up like hell. (Or heaven, if you are on top of the stuff.) It is hard to pinpoint when these four potent forces began to coalesce but, according to an article on Forbes.com, it was Cognizant Technology Solutions researchers who coined the term “SMAC” as recently as 2013. But let’s not confuse terminology with technology (I remember one firm had coined a similar but rather ugly “SoMoClo,” for Social, Mobile and Cloud; and there are others who use “Nexus of Forces” and “the 3rd Platform” for similar concepts). Irrespective of the term, the four mega trends are transforming how technology is developed, purchased, deployed and used. And how employees, partners, clients, customers and other stakeholders behave. It is the combined behaviour that is slated to make the most impact—which is why it is difficult to put a dollar value to it and why impact estimates vary so much. To cite but one figure, a Reuters.com report quoting Nasscom director Rajat Tandon says that the value of outsourcing contracts for SMAC is set to soar from $164 billion last year to $287 billion by 2016. No matter how you cut it, SMAC technologies are slated to leave a lasting impression. A Cognizant report, titled “The Value of Signal (and the Cost of Noise): The New Economics of Meaning-Making,” summarises the situation neatly. “Nearly every aspect of our daily lives generates a digital footprint. From mobile phones and social media to inventory look-ups and online purchases, we collect more data about processes, people and things than ever before. Winning companies are able to create business value by building a richer understanding of customers, products, employees and partners— extracting business meaning from this torrent of data. The business stakes of “meaning-making” simply could not be higher,” it says. I often hear murmurs of dissent: “There is more hype than substance to SMAC.” Or, “Big data (or cloud or mobility or social media) is not for us.” It is possible that one of the big social platforms as we know it ceases to exist one day. Or some term other than SMAC will prevail (like cloud prevailed over service-oriented architecture). But does anyone seriously think people won’t be more mobile going forward? Or the human instinct to extend their socialising to new, emerging media will lose steam? Or, for that matter, we will stop analysing this and that and what not, for business and for pleasure? Crazy as it may sound… sanjay.g@expressindia.com
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BIG DATAANALYTICS
DRIVING Business Value No more a fad, big data analytics is now being deployed by enterprises for real-time and deeper business insights. What will be your use case? BY HEENA JHINGAN
Case Study
feature MAKING WAYFOR 3D PRINTERS
CLOUD SECURITY: WHATTO LOOK FOR
The world of 3D printers is getting more and more exciting. What are the possibilities and where does India stand? Let us take a look
In an era of almost everything as a service, CIOs need to take a few precautions when buying cloud security solutions
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THE EXPERIENCE EDGE
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IndusInd Bank upgrades its customer experience management system for better services and integration
REVITALISING THE DATA CENTRE
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Here is an insight into Genpact’s journey of revamping its IT infrastructure with Schneider Electric's modular solutions, which saved it from becoming antiquated
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AQUESTION OF TIERS The recent hype around data centre tiers has made organisations wonder about the right choice between tier 3 and tier 4. Here are some clues
in the news 49
» Delhi Police launches WhatsApp helpline to curb corruption
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» Karnataka govt to set up IT start-up warehouse » Thiruvananthapuram police launches mobile app for citizens’ convenience
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BUSINESS-ITALIGNMENT: THE NEWCONVERGENCE If you are still in an organisation where alignment of ITwith business is a mere platitude,let me offer this advice to you: get off the bus before it tumbles down the ravine
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» Prospects of networking market bright on SMAC trends: IDC
THE BIG DATAEDGE
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Established companies as well as new entrants are leveraging big data to innovate,compete and capture market value
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» Ericsson deploys Charging System for Vodafone India » IBM Cloud to power Narayana Health Email System » NASSCOM offers security
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solutions to NGOs » Karnataka government partners Snapdeal to promote SMEs
ADVANCE THREAT PROTECTION In this era of cyber-sabotage and cyber-espionage,you must take charge of your future before someone else does
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KUMAR MITRA
SIEGFRIED DREXLER
VIVEK GUDENA
ALISON HIGGINS-MILLER
General Manager, Data Backup & Recovery Dell Software, APJ
Siegfried Drexler, Enterprise Business Development Manager
Group Vice President – IT, NSL Group
Vice President, Asia Pacific, Websense
“For most,backup and recovery is like an insurance policy”
“Prefabrication is a continued extension of modular”
“Managed ITservices is a concept that sounds great on paper”
“There is a disconnect regarding the perceived value of confidential data”
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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 25. No. 9. September, 2014 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Editor Sanjay Gupta* 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
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Express Computer Reg. No. MH/MR/SOUTH-132/2012-14 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 : Sanjay Gupta (*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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t would by no means be an exaggeration to describe the current state of mind of many global CIOs as “Data, data everywhere, not a clue what to do!” The global business environment is going through some major changes like data explosion from the Internet, growing importance of a customercentric business approach, and the rise of disruptive technologies like social, mobile and cloud. For a majority of large enterprises, terabytes of data are generated daily from finance, manufacturing, marketing and other functions. This includes a lot of information about the product or what the customers are saying about it—on or off the social media platforms. The challenge lies in organising and analysing this data deluge in real time, and this is where big data analytics plays a crucial role. Gartner estimates that big data will
drive $232 billion in IT spending through 2016. Not that enterprises were not battling with data disruption earlier, but the volumes were much smaller from limited sources and queries ran mostly on structured databases. The situation lent itself very well to drawing practical inferences by running basic business intelligence tools on data. Now, with data pouring from all sides—including mobile devices, the company’s information system, cloud and multiple social media platforms—CIOs are beginning to realise that the data beast is not only getting bigger but wilder as well. Consequently, they are looking at the burgeoning domain of big data analytics tools as a welcome respite.
Big data analytics in India At present, India is still at a nascent stage of adopting big data technology, but
experts see a big wave ahead. A recent Nasscom report, titled ‘Institutionalisation of Analytics in India: Big Opportunity, Big Outcome,’ indicates that the analytics market in India will double to reach $2.3 billion by 2018 from about $1 billion last fiscal. Among the vertical segments, telecom and financial services are likely to have the most demand. Many of the Fortune 500 companies operating in the country, especially banks, use big data and predictive analytics to understand customer behaviour, risk, likelihood of fraud, etc. The industry pundits hope it will be towards the end of 2015 that they may see a clear distinction in performance between businesses who quickly adopted big data technology and streamlined use of big data to aid decision making and those that put off big data plans. While the full picture will take some
5 BIG DATAANALYTICS STORIES FROM INDIA
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THE HEALING TOUCH
A CYCLE OF GROWTH
ANALYSING CONSUMPTION
BANKING ON IN-HOUSE ANALYTICS
TAKING THE ANALYTICS CALL
Aarogyasri Health Care Trust (a Government initiative to below poverty line families for treating catastrophic illnesses) has partnered with SAS to leverage the claims, financial and clinical data they collect in order to improve lead times, prevent fraud, recognize disease trends and forecast budgets and funds needed.
Avon Cycles has deployed SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA,which will help the company bring analytics and transactions onto a single in-memory platform.It deployed , the solution in 2013, helping business managers save about 5 to 20 man-hours per month per analytical report.
Marico, one of India’s leading consumer goods companies, uses Tableau in all aspects of its business through an enterprise wide deployment.The company analyses a large amount of data on retail behaviour, sales and marketing, inventory movement and procurement of key inputs, allowing it to gain performance insights.
The Ratnakar Bank has taken up several IT upgrade steps recently to ramp up its services—and use of big data analytics is one of them. The bank, which uses Infosys’ core banking solution Finacle, took the open source approach to build its own analytics tools.
With the massive amount of data that a telco generates in the form of call logs, SMS logs, network logs, web logs, etc,Tata Teleservices is using SAS analytical tools to mine these logs and capture customer behaviour to design customised offerings.
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time to emerge, a few early adopters have made quick headway. Tarun Kaura, Director Technology Sales, India, Symantec, refers to an instance where a large credit card company gained competitive edge using advanced analytics based on Hadoop technology. By using the solution, they reduced the process time for 73 billion transactions (amounting to 36 TB of data) from one month (by traditional methods earlier) to a mere 13 minutes. Maneesh Sharma, Head - Business Development, SAP India, points out that big data analytics has definitely jumped past the hype cycle. However, it has taken enterprises some time to move to the current phase. He also notes the difference in how the traditional business intelligence (BI) tools worked compared to today’s analytics solutions. “Customers in India did embark on BI projects, only to realise that most of these tools facilitated standard, end-of-the-day reporting. But with the [new] analytics tools, the analytical abilities are being embedded right into the processes,” he says.
It’s all about value There has been a change in mindset as well. According to Jaspreet Singh, Head – Microsoft Services India, earlier, data storage, management and analytics were considered an expense; they are now regarded as investments that help CXOs catalyse business insights. He quotes an IDC study that estimates that organisations could realise a “data dividend” of roughly $1.6 trillion in additional revenue, lower costs and improved productivity over the next four years by putting in place a holistic approach to data that spans datasets, analytics and more. Almost all organisations, irrespective of their size and industry, are betting on analytics to help them uncover the hidden connections in their business and understand their customers better—with the sole underlying intent of adding differential value to the business. There are some in the industry who lay too much stress on the volume part of the 3V data model (Volume, Velocity and EXPRESS COMPUTER
Variety). However, Sameer Dixit, Head of Solutions – Analytics, Persistent Systems, says that it is a myth that volume is critical for a big data analytics project. Besides the troika of volume, velocity and variety, he says, there is another crucial element called the ‘value.’ “Every enterprise that is deploying big data analytics is looking for business value, direct or indirect,” he says. For instance, one of SAP’s customers, a general insurance company, was registering only 2% conversion rate through its online marketing activities, and most those leads got routed from tier II cities. So it invested in analytical tools to identify ways it could spice up the marketing strategy to double the conversion rate. Another customer, a telco, is using analytics tools to delve deep into users’ data usage behaviour, looking at time spent on each website, etc, so that it can innovate at the “bit level” of data packages for users. And then there are those who think big data solutions are expensive. For them, Sharma of SAP cites the example of an India auto manufacture that imports various parts, manufacturers vehicles and exports them. Accordingly to law, the manufacturer is eligible to claim a duty drawback on those used parts. The auto maker was using PLM for design and ERP for manufacturing, and it was difficult to keep track of what part has been used where. So the company deployed analytical tools. “Due to the amounts they can now claim back, in a way the project has paid for itself,” says Sharma. While early adopters like telcos and banks have been heavily investing big data analaytics tools for personalised offerings and building cross-sell opportunities, there are interesting use cases in manufacturing as well (for instance, in robotics). An upcoming segment in big data is the government sector, observes Asheet Makhija, Country Leader - Information Management, IBM. He says the recent elections have successfully demonstrated the wonders of big data analytics tools and we will see “a greater penetration of these tools in the government’s
Even though Hadoop is considered low cost due to its open source architecture, it is not always the best suitable data storage option. Arun Ramachandran, Country Manager,Data Computing Division,EMC India & SAARC
Do not take a big bang approach to big data analytics; build in a way that the platform is reusable. Sameer Dixit, Head of Solutions – Analytics, Persistent Systems SEPTEMBER, 2014
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10 TIPS
TO GET YOUR BIG DATAPROJECTGOING
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Find the problem that never gets solved: Is there a key business problem that just never gets solved? In many cases, new, big data insight can help overcome previous barriers. Some of the most successful big data success stories start there. To give examples, for investment banking the problem could be about how to get better qualitative knowledge to support funding decisions, for retailers it could be about getting to know consumers more intimately to support micro-segmentation and for manufacturers, about how to more quickly spot and reduce product defects.
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It’s not one giant leap: Within big data analysis there’s often an enrichment process. Big data is not a product you can buy; it is knowledge that needs accumulating, from numerous different data sources and different approaches.Therefore, big data projects tend to comprise thousands of baby steps to get to the end result. For example, when micro-segmenting customers against particular promotions, it takes time to see what works and often more importantly, what doesn’t. If something is going to take longer than three months, put milestones in place to keep senior executives informed.There’s a lot of power in being willing to set up your own evaluation based on their success criteria at the outset.This is particularly important at the start of a company’s big data journey. Often, at this stage a lot of the people involved don’t know much about the technology they’re using, so it’s also a learning experience. There’s only a limited amount that companies are willing to pay for somebody to learn about something without results being seen on the way.
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Agile big data requires building credibility: We often talk about big data in terms of discovering things that nobody knew before, but these discoveries usually need to have a basis in what intuition tells us.Why? For really unusual discoveries to be validated, people have to trust them. The only way they will trust them is if you first follow a path that aligns with things they kind of knew in the first place. So for example, a Retail basket analysis might bring an epiphany on milk sales to the untrained eye if it wasn’t realised that this product is discounted all the time in that store. But by validating this intuitively known insight at the start, it helps develop extreme credibility for when, later on down the track, you have those unique discoveries that aren’t known or expected.
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New discoveries are only interesting if they can be applied: You can monitor social media to understand how people feel about products and services, but the importance of these findings will vary depending on who the actual person is, for example, can you show whether they are a customer or a potential customer? If you can’t figure that out, then how much does the information help you? This type of correlation becomes particularly important if you are looking to monetise data. For example, a company holding information on property sales and foreclosures could monetise that data if they have the means to take data from a large lender compare it against to see if there have are any liens against any of the properties they hold the mortgage against.
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Don’t forget the basics when it comes to predictive models: When trying to check the value of information sources, and then spot and validate trends, it helps to go back to basics and use predictive models and control groups against a small sub-set of the data to validate the concept before you go at it on a large scale. In addition, a lot of data quality issues can be worked around using
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predictive models.You can use them to fill in the blanks for predictions or data quality. However, be sure you keep track of real versus predicted facts.
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Measure success in business results, not IT cost savings: If you look at the balance sheet of most companies, IT expenditure is typically a small percentage of overall revenue. So, while costs savings can be significant, in terms of overall revenue, they can be considered small against the potential revenue increases that could be gained from solving some of the biggest business problems. Look at the Retail industry, for example. Its biggest costs are typically associated with inventory and stock movement, not IT. Savings in those areas can trump potential IT cost savings many times over.
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Big data doesn’t fit on your laptop: Problems that fit on your laptop are usually solvable with the company’s current IT infrastructure.There’s not much advantage in tackling those problems with big data. It’s the problems that are too big that stress your IT infrastructure - that you should be looking to tackle. For example, the Utilities sector is faced by the challenge that it has had to go from handling the data from once a month or quarter meter readings to coping with the much greater information flow from smart meters. On top of that these organisations are keeping this data for much longer.They don’t have the option to just extend their current technology, they need more.
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Don’t try to replace your entire IT infrastructure: That said, people get enamoured with big data as a new shiny object that’s based on low-cost hardware and software. It is not uncommon for them to look at all of these other big systems doing things like online processing, payroll and inventory, and think they can replace all of those as part of a big data effort and be like Google or Yahoo and run huge parts of your infrastructure on open-source commodity hardware? In 100 per cent of the cases I have
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seen companies try to do this, the approach always fails; in fact they don’t fail, they can’t even get started.You can’t justify replacing a working system without a valid, measurable reason for doing it.There is a reason to take certain pieces of your problem set and attack them intelligently with different tools.
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If it looks too hard, you’re using the wrong toolset. Find a different one: Java is a very popular tool but certain problems require an awful lot of Java code. Don’t be afraid to consider alternative languages or GUIs. For example, if a problem is related to data access, there are SQL derivatives that would improve productivity. If it’s statistical, there are lots of languages, such as R, and user interfaces that could take you from hundreds of thousands of lines of Java code down to 10 in a different language.
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Utilise the cloud. Cloud and big data often come close together. Often, in many cases it is activity in the Cloud that starts to generate information that feeds to Big Data analysis.The Cloud can also be a useful place to start when going down the Big Data path, either to get a simple project up and running very quickly, or for proof of concept activity. In the end, you need to take into account where the data will be. In the future, this will likely be a hybrid of both private, local big data and cloud based sources. So if you haven’t started yet, just start collecting data, traditional sources of data, non-traditional sources of data, data outside and inside of your organisation, and just start to see if there is some insight there that is interesting to your business. If you are already on your big data journey, keep taking those baby steps.
Contributed by Sundar Ram,Vice President, Technology Sales Consulting,Asia Pacific, Oracle and Alan Manewitz, Senior Director, Information Architecture and Big Data, Oracle.
We expect to see a spiralling trend in the deployment and adoption of big data analytics for business operations like customer experience management. Srinivas Rallabandi, Head - Business Intelligence, Tata Teleservices
The cloud is bringing the costs down for everyone. The tools are getting better and the possibilities keep growing. Michael Smith Jr, Chief Product Officer,Spuul
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We have seen an increasing number of CIOs moving towards cloud-based big data solutions. Atul Batra, CTO,Manthan Systems
Data storage, management and analytics are now regarded as investments that help CXOs catalyse business insights. Jaspreet Singh, Head – Microsoft Services India 16
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administrative processes.” According to him, while every big data analytics use case is unique, it can either have a direct RoI impact or it might require a consultative approach with a longer gestation period. Among IBM’s customers is the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewage Board, which uses the big data solution to monitor and manage water supply in the city with a view to curbing water wastage and checking malpractices.
Computing Division, EMC India & SAARC. “Typically, in a Hadoop architecture, the servers come with internal storage replication factors, which means for every terabyte of information the storage requirement would be three times. So, to scale, an enterprise would ideally need to add both compute and storage. With scalar NAS a lot of these things can be taken care of,” he says.
Hadoop is not panacea
Most of the companies look at data storage and analytics in the offload modes; they analyse the data in silos, says Ramachandran, which cannot be the case any more. Dixit of Persistent suggests a bottomup approach for CIOs. “The strategy should be building apps and solutions, and gradually moving to the top with wider use cases. You may start with 4-5 nodes for a Hadoop cluster and then go up the top. Do not take a big bang approach; build in a way that the platform is reusable,” he says. Ramachandran is of the view that analytics tools must be plugged back into the application. This will not only help enterprises do the prediction or forecasting part but it will also lead to insights into the ‘next best action’ they can take. On these lines, he says the company is in talks with a leading cellular operator in the country to optimise bandwidth across its cell towers. “An operator is working with us to get a real-time view of the customer’s experience—and how to better it in real time by optimising the network bandwidth on the tower close to the customer’s location at a particular point of time.” Similarly, says Sharma of SAP, a retail store in India is not only able to predict which product in its inventory is likely to stock out when, but the company has also tied the process to the supply chain—so that the supply of that particular product can be initiated in time without affecting sales. Industry experts are thus of the view that handling the data is not as big a problem as developing the right use case.
Many players in the industry warn CIOs against blindly jumping into technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL for quick results. They say that an enterprise first needs to understand how a solution would draw information from various data sources and how it can be used in a context that will bring business value to the enterprise. For one, Deepak Ghodke, Country Mananger, Tableau India, says the CIOs need to get on the right track. “There have been cases where the CIOs have blindly got into building Hadoop clusters, without doing anything in the interim, and thus losing out on crucial time in the market. And then there have been some smarter ones, who started by storing data in simpler, in-memory form and in parallel they built Hadoop clusters.” Makhija of IBM says it is a general perception that embarking on big data is a complicated activity. “I believe it is a journey that can be started at any point of time; with the basic thing of storing the data done right, one could also explore the idea of real-time analytics, depending on the need of the project and, in the meantime, the enterprise could work on improving the data from [business] intelligence reports,” he says. As of now, the industry seems to be moving in a direction where Hadoop is becoming the underlying data store while the data which is needed for real-time analytics, is available in-memory. Even though Hadoop is considered low cost due to its open source architecture, it is not always the best suitable data storage option, says Arun Ramachandran, Country Manager, Data
The right approach
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The challenges Some CIOs, however, are still wary of getting started. As Persistent’s Dixit puts it, they are fighting the ‘fear of the unknown’ and the challenges of data governance. “Or they are still holding on to their past experience of dealing with data,” says Sharma. “The CIOs will have to take a leap of faith.” Susmita Nandi, Practice Manager at Bluestar Infotech, says that changing the mindset or perception of internal management as well as setting a clear roadmap in adopting the technology is the first battle that a CIO needs to win. “Businesses have to keep realistic expectations from big data analytics. One of the challenges with the CIOs is to convince their internal management that adoption of big data is a long-term journey and the benefits from that would be incremental.” Srinivas Rallabandi, Head - Business Intelligence, Tata Teleservices, points to some other challenges as well. “There are organisational barriers such as, Who owns it? Is it IT/CIO, Business/Marketing, or a brand new ‘department’ for big data analytics? How do we ramp up the skills to design, establish and run a moderately functional big data analytics [project]? Do we need to engage expensive consultants?” These, he says, are fair questions—but no different from, say, when one launched an ERP project. Then there are the inevitable RoI worries: sponsorship, business case, TCO. “There is also worry that the current database is too messy, or unstructured, to lend itself to big data analytics. The fact is, this is not a limitation for big data analytics at all,” he says. Rallabandi says his company, which has a data warehouse, has been using predictive analytics based on SAS technology. The solution was originally deployed to primarily meet legal and regulatory operational requirements; however, the concept is now extended to marketing, customer and network management. “We expect to see a spiralling trend in the deployment and adoption of big data analytics for business operations like customer EXPRESS COMPUTER
experience management,” he says. Michael Smith Jr, Chief Product Officer of Spuul, which streams Indian online video content worldwide, says the company processes vast amounts of data using AWS—and big data analytics plays a critical role in helping it understand customer requirements and preferences. He thinks the biggest challenge in big data is figuring out a long-term strategy for how one will crunch and display the data. Collecting data is pretty easy and AWS has all the tools to manage, crunch, and store data, but one still needs to build some custom tools to view data. “So it is helpful that with the AWS Marketplace, one can try out various tools on an hourly basis for reporting. Most companies don’t want to write custom reporting tools, but reporting and how things are displayed is a critical piece of the puzzle,” he says. With cloud coming into the picture, companies can find cloud-based solutions to be more viable as well as quicker to deploy. In Smith Jr’s words, the cloud is “bringing the costs down” for everyone. “The tools are getting better and the possibilities keep growing. The cloud method for dealing with big data is here to stay,” he says. His words are echoed by others in the industry. According to Atul Batra, CTO, Manthan Systems, “For CIOs, big data means a large investment in computing infrastructure. Big data infrastructure is typically CPU, memory, bandwidth and huge storage which varies in degrees of magnitude, depending on use cases, data volumes and processing speeds. As a result, we have seen an increasing number of CIOs moving towards cloudbased solutions as well.” With trends such as enterprise mobility/BYOD, Internet of Things and social media adoption gaining ground, there is an ever-growing need for CIOs to crunch data from multiple sources in real or near-real times. So, while some challenges will remain, big data analytics will continue to find more and more takers among all sorts of Indian enterprises. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com
With the new analytics tools, the analytical abilities are being embedded right into the processes. Maneesh Sharma, Head - Business Development, SAP India
Big data is a journey that can be started at any point of time,with the basic thing of storing the data done right. Asheet Makhija, Country Leader - Information Management,IBM SEPTEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
3D PRINTING
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MAKING WAY FOR
PRINTERS The world of 3D printers is getting more and more exciting. What are the possibilities and where does India stand? Let us take a look BY PUPUL DUTTA
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dditive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, has been used for rapid prototyping since its introduction to the market in the year 1984. However, the technology failed to pick up due to its high cost, nonavailability of raw materials readily, etc. Of late, nonetheless, 3D printing has become a hot topic of discussion. The technology, which has been around for very long and used in the field of aeronautics, defence and automobile, has suddenly become the “in-thing”. It is expected that with a raft of patents in the technology due EXPRESS COMPUTER
to expire in a few months, the next couple of years will see an even greater acceleration in the adoption and development of the technology. In fact, many sections of the industry are already hailing it as the next ‘Industrial Revolution’. According to Gartner, rapid quality and performance innovations across all 3D printer technologies will drive enterprise and consumer demand. In its report, Gartner says that shipments are expected to increase from a total of 56,507 units in 2013 to 98,065 units, growing 75% in 2014, followed by a near doubling of unit
shipments in 2015. “By 2016, enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for under $2,000. Early adopters can experiment with 3D printers with minimal risk of capital or time, possibly gaining an advantage in product design and time to market over their competition, as well as understanding the realistic material costs and time to build parts,” the consultancy firm notes in its report.
What is 3D printing? 3D printing is a form of additive SEPTEMBER, 2014
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3D PRINTING
3D printers are ideal for manufacturing low-volume, high-value products. Rajiv Bajaj, Head- Manufacturing, Autodesk India & SAARC
Alot of technical expertise around 3D printing needs to be gained before a manufacturing house can incorporate 3D printing into its operations. Vivekanandhavarma Datla, Head – Manufacturing Engineering Solutions,Cyient 20
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manufacturing, a process whereby models are built up, layer by layer. In this kind of printing, a three dimensional digital file of the object is created either using CAD (Computer Aided Design) software or by 3D scanning an existing object. The printer software then divides the object in the file into hundreds or sometimes thousands of horizontal layers. The printer then adds material until the layer is complete and subsequently moves up a layer to repeat the process. Some of the common 3D printing processes include fused deposition modelling, selective laser sintering and stereolithography, each using a slightly different method to deposit solid material in each layer of the build. In India, most people are not aware of 3D printing technology. “Customers need education on the importance and benefits of 3D printing. It has become necessary to teach customers how 3D printers can help them to improve the design cycle,” says A.T. Rajan, Chief Marketing Officer & Head of Corporate Strategy Office at Ricoh India Ltd. High cost of technology, including equipment cost, is one of the reasons for low adoption. Secondly, investing in 3D printing might not give quick returns. Also, most of the raw materials have to be imported and the cost for the same is very high. Lack of historical evidence to match the quality and reliability of the traditional manufacturing methods is another inhibitor. And lastly, regulatory barriers in healthcare, aerospace and
automotive industries also act as deterrents.
The market in APAC and India According to Gartner, the APAC 3D printer market saw shipments of 950 units in 2013 while this year it is projected to reach 1,643 units. “3D printers have historically been sold in small quantities with most of the early additive manufacturing devices sold to the North America, Western Europe and mature Asia Pacific regions – not coincidentally the countries where the major technology service providers were based. The number of printers that will be sold in these regions outpaces the numbers in the other regions by several hundred thousand units,” explains Zalak Shah, Research Analyst, Gartner. In India, 3D printing is still at a nascent stage, though the interest is growing, especially in sectors such as healthcare and manufacturing. “The 3D printing market is set to increase rapidly over the next few years, especially in re-creating and manufacturing complex parts which contain complex geometries and surfaces. 3D printers are ideal for manufacturing low-volume high-value products; their application within the healthcare sector is important for manufacturing complex parts in a short time scale. 3D printing is particularly in high demand in the orthopaedics sector,” says Rajiv Bajaj, Head- Manufacturing, Autodesk India & SAARC. SEPTEMBER, 2014
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According to Shah of Gartner, the number of vendors in the 3D printing space in India has gone up from three or four a few years back to around 8-9 currently.
Issues in growth of 3D printing There are plenty of issues plaguing the growth of 3D printing. Product reliability, for starters, is a major challenge for enterprises, as far as commercial use of 3D printed products is concerned. To spread the benefits of 3D printing, there is a need to provide research evidence, comparing traditional manufacturing methods with additive manufacturing. According to Kevin Warren, President, Global Growth, Xerox, the challenges of 3D printing are similar to the challenges of digital printing that were existent some 15 - 20 years ago. “Although the cost of 3D printers has come down considerably, they are still relatively expensive and prices need to come down more. Output speeds are slow and while the quality is improving it still falls short of traditional manufacturing quality,” he says. Most industry experts believe that there should be more internal installations as prices drop and ease of use improves. “We believe the 3D market will evolve in much the same way that the digital printing market has, eventually overcoming the many challenges it faces,” adds Warren. Some of the other challenges are related to the issue of patenting that arises with this technology. According to experts, 3D technology if not pursued carefully can give rise to many patent related legal battles. Another challenge is training, which is difficult and expensive: for companies that want to deploy 3D printing, it requires trainers to be brought in from abroad or sending own staff overseas for training. “A lot of technical expertise around 3D printing needs to be gained before a manufacturing house can incorporate 3D printing into its operations,” says Vivekanandhavarma Datla, Head – Manufacturing Engineering Solutions, Cyient. Lastly, software automation is another pain area in the growth of 3D printing. EXPRESS COMPUTER
The bulk of the design for 3D printed objects is done by hand today and this is certainly not a very efficient approach for a manufacturer with millions of parts in its inventory. Until a streamlined and robust solution to automate the design process for 3D printing becomes readily available, this will continue to be a major bottleneck.
OFHYBRID CARS AND JAIPUR FOOT
Disruptive features of 3D printing While 3D printing has its own bottlenecks for growth, it has some disruptive features too which has made it the “technology in vogue”. To begin with, 3D printing creates very little waste as compared to traditional manufacturing and hence, reduces the carbon footprint. Secondly, with the help of 3D printing, the production and assembly can be localised and only raw materials will have to be transported. According to Bajaj of Autodesk, the 3D printing technology encompasses some major disruptions which can reshape the future of making things. Concepts like biomimicry, 3D bio-printing and prosthetic design have already seen success. Bio-mimicry is a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates those designs and processes. Bio-printing, on the other hand, combines the synergistic potential of engineering and biology to create living human tissues that mimic the form and function of native tissues, including dense cellularity and the presence of multiple cell types. Autodesk customer Organovo, a creator and manufacturer of functional three-dimensional human tissues, has its own proprietary bio-printing platform that captures the unique synergistic potential of engineering and biology to enable the reproducible, automated creation of living human tissues that mimic the form and function of native tissues in the body. The company recently announced the first delivery of 3D liver tissue. “3D printing, with its own pluses scores a few strong brownie points over traditional manufacturing. Like it caters strongly to small number or single unit production where the process owner
At 200 miles-per-gallon, the Urbee hybrid-electric car is touted by some as the “greenest car in the world.”But what truly sets the Urbee apart is that instead of building a prototype the “old-fashioned”way, Canadian design firm KOR EcoLogic printed one from a computer.The Urbee is the first car produced from a 3D printer using advanced design tools provided by Autodesk through their Clean Tech Partner Programme. Using tools including Autodesk Inventor, Showcase, and Alias Design software, KOR Ecologic was able to design and test the Urbee from concept to prototype execution, testing parameters such as road and wind conditions early in the design phase.
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Jaipur Foot Clinic has helped about 5,000 patients by fitting the ReMotion knee which has a 165-degree range of motion through a no-cost license as part of the agreement with D-Rev. D-Rev, which is a grantee of Autodesk Foundation, used Autodesk technology to design the ReMotion knee with extensive input from users. In the design process, D-Rev was able to do digital prototyping, durability testing, and analysis, to ensure that the goals of functionality, quality, and affordability were all met.
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3D PRINTING
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Although the cost of 3D printers has come down considerably, they are still relatively expensive. Kevin Warren, President,Global Growth, Xerox
While 3D printing has its own bottlenecks for growth,it has some disruptive features too which has made it the “technology in vogue” 22
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may have his own specifications. It can be done pretty economically, whereas traditionally manufacturing beats the price by volume. Navigating this disruption calls for strategic oversight and exploring how the new technology can be used in businesses,” says Professor Kaustubh Dhargalkar, who teaches at Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research and also has a 3D printer on the premises of the institute for students to learn about this new technology and innovate.
The future ahead To overcome the challenges in the
growth of 3D printing, it is advised that machine builders partner with service providers and train them on this new technology. According to Gartner, it is more likely that 3D printing as a service will pick up faster than acquisition of 3D printers by companies. Further, government and industry bodies should formulate policies for promoting 3D printing and support incubators embracing this technology. “A national-level programme in 3D printing technology is the need of the hour,” says Datla of Cyient. pupul.dutta@expressindia.com
SEPTEMBER, 2014
INTERVIEW KUMAR MITRA DELL SOFTWARE
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Kumar Mitra, General Manager, Data Backup & Recovery, Dell Software, APJ, talks to Heena Jhingan about the industry’s changing perception about data protection. Excerpts:
“For most, backup and recovery is like an insurance policy” How has the change in the industry’s perception of data protection impacted the sales pitch of vendors? The technology is no more a siloed function, which nobody understands. It is instead a business enabler. If you look at CIOs today, they play a greater role as business leaders than being technocrats. We define security or as in context with the business values. Enterprises define what data they are generating, the applications that they have and what is the value of that application for their business. You need to define the data value and then align the protection strategy that works better. One solution does not fit all and not every data is same, so it should not be protected the same way. For every category defined, there will be a definitive recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). It will link up with application SLAs and the application SLAs are linked to the business, based on those RPO and RTO requirements. That is what defines our pitch as well. We do not try to force fit a product into a requirement. We have a range of products that is aligned to classification strategy, something which our customers are liking. Our pitch to enterprises is, you define the data strategy and we will complement with products. The information age has moved into seconds. Unfortunately, data protection is still like moving bricks, still thought to be a cumbersome process, some enterprises do not understand it. The products are either dated out or the enterprises are using just a script to do the . So, we even help enterprises build strategy, there is no jacketed approach. How is backup as a service shaping up in the market? Backup as a service is definitely gaining moment. One of our customers, Sify, has been using our solutions for almost ten years now. The company had started off with hosting centres and IDCs and then moved to managed data centre services. They evaluated our solutions as a service model nearly six years EXPRESS COMPUTER
What is your strategy for the Indian market? We had been strong in the government and mid-market segments even before we acquired Quest Software. We also have some direct focused partners that are predominantly SIs like Wipro and TCS. From a strategy perspective we are 100% channel driven and have a two tier strategy. We have Redington India as our distribution partner.We are trying to build focused resellers, managed by Redington’s partners that can help us go deeper into the tier 2 layer.
back. They used to offer entire infrastructure as well as a to its customers out of their data centre, so in that sense, on cloud or to a third party data centre is probably not a new concept. The challenge is that a lot of industry segments like BFSI might not be willing to back up on the cloud. So they would look at a private cloud kind of environment, managed and owned by them, but they will still be doing to the cloud. Going forward, a lot of mid market customers will look at third party cloud set up. I believe the pick up has been slow, due to stringent SLAs. Also, with big players like Amazon, Trimax and Netmagic in the fray, things are beginning to brighten. In fact, lot of telcos have got in this space too. With so many reputed players in this area, I feel customers will become even more confident about the concept and this will make the adoption of cloud for pick up significantly fast. What do you think will be the key propellers for the data protection market in the times to come? The biggest trend is cloud: all enterprises are focused on how to make business cloudoptimised. Secondly, business continuity plan (BCP) and DR strategy is attracting CIO attention; they want to know whether they do it themselves or put it in the cloud. Third is the growth of data. IT budgets have not been proportional to the growth of data. Enterprises need to manage more data with limited budgets. People look for slightly self automated solutions, especially on the and recovery piece. Honestly, backup and recovery, for most is like an insurance policy, they think of it only in the time of a disaster. Do the enterprises really want to spend time and man power on it? They would rather focus on applications core to their business. So, customers want solutions that are automated, easy to use and has a competitive TCO. Most customers are not looking at a brilliant product with zillions of features, but they need something simple that does back up efficiently and intelligently and helps recovery when needed. heena.jhingan@expressindai.com
SEPTEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
SECURITY
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Cloud SECURITY: WHATTO LOOK FOR In an era of almost everything—infrastructure, platform and software—as a service, security is one of the biggest concerns. Here is what CIOs must consider before buying cloud-based security solutions BY HEENA JHINGAN
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arun Kaura, Director Technology Sales, India, Symantec, feels it is foolish of any enterprise to ask if they are being attacked. “Of course, you are and it could be any time!” he says, and this aptly describes the information security scenario across the world. Security software company Trend Micro’s research findings reveal that 3.5 new threats occur every second. The report also finds that there are two successful attacks per week. In such a threat scenario, IT security becomes the most significant for companies. As TG Dhandapani, CIO at TVS Motor, says, “Information security is a subject in IT that every CIO aspires to master, but very few have gone closer to it. In fact, most of the large enterprises have outsourced their security management due to lack of sufficient expertise and to focus on the core business. A managed security service provider could be offering security on premise or on the cloud (as a service).” However, security-as-a-service is a delivery model of security solutions where traditional on-premise solutions have been remodelled to be delivered as a service. This could involve basic financial modelling which converts capex to opex or more advanced structuring in terms of the solution provider simply charging on pay per use. Security as a service is said to help customers with the advantage of not having to own any hardware or software, which in turn makes technology refresh very easy. At the rate at which the threat landscape is changing, some segments of the industry perceive security as a service to be an option that saves them from ever evolving attacks. This is why many enterprises have finally opened up to the idea of investing in security as a service versus an on premise security solution, even if applied only to select areas like web gateway and email security. For instance, Kartik Sahani, Regional Director - India & SAARC, RSA, says, “Most major banks started off with relying on managed services EXPRESS COMPUTER
contracts; today over 20 banks, including the likes of HDFC are now using their security as a service solutions such as Adaptive Authentication Platform and FraudAction. Similarly, the pharma industry is also coming up in terms of adopting hosted security due to various compliance frameworks.
The market According to Sid Deshpande, Principal Analyst – Information Security and Datacenter Technology & Service Provider Research, Gartner, the cloud based security market at present is estimated to be around $2.6 bn. This market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.6 % over 2013-2017 to reach $4.1 bn. Rishikesh Kamat, General Manager – Product Development & Marketing, Netmagic, explains, “There are about six to seven broad categories of security solutions that can be classified as cloud security. While data across all these categories is not readily available, we can look at some of the major cloud security solutions to get an idea. For example, secure web gateway and email protection as a category is expected to have a market size of around $25 million and projected to grow at a rate of 20% yo-y. We expect the overall security market to grow, with cloud security accounting for a bigger pie than the traditional model.” Deshpande points out, “As enterprises start adopting more and more cloud-based solutions, it is a natural extension for them to use security as service as well. As in case of online businesses, whose complete operations are dependent online, are more likely to adopt cloud-based security services. Overall cloud adoption is fast catching up in the country. In tune with the trend, Gartner predicts 10% of overall enterprise IT security product capability will be delivered in the cloud by 2015.” “The benefits of cost saving from using ‘as a service’ approach to security in times when most CIOs have budget restrictions, have pushed the vendors
Most importantly, the vendor should be a true SaaS offering company,in the sense it should have an effective metering system. Amit Nath, Country Manager - India & SAARC, F-Secure Corporation
51%
CIOs are concerned that the digital torrent is coming faster than they can cope
42%
CIOs don’t feel that they have the talent needed to face this future
SEPTEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
SECURITY
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Information security is a subject in ITthat every CIO aspires to master, but very few have gone closer to it. TG Dhandapani, CIO,TVS Motor
The cost efficiencies may start from 5-10 % the first year and go up to 30% subsequently as the organisation matures and volume is sizeable enough for better negotiations. Amit Pradhan, CISO,Cipla Ltd 26
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While the need to move to a cloud security solution very much exists,enterprises are constantly battling against issues like legacy infrastructure,licensing,global policies etc. with on premise offering to innovate with pricing. According to industry estimates, of every 100$ spent on IT only 5% are focused on security. Cloud based delivery model is transforming security licensing, even vendors that do not have a cloud based offering are now being forced to offer subscription based prices for on premise solutions,� Deshpande says.
Rapidly growing industry segments like retail, insurance, education, are more inclined towards hosted security model since it allows them greater flexibility and scale. Banking and traditional financial institutions though are still lagging in the adoption of security as a service; however, the overall adoption of security solutions in BFSI is large. SEPTEMBER, 2014
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The SMB and enterprise divide Since hosted security services offer opex and flexible payment models, they make a natural fit for SMBs. Besides, ease of use and affordability, SaaS model for security has helped smaller organisations embrace technologies that were typically viewed as enterprise class such as single sign-on for third-party services. That said, security-as-a-service is equally promising for both SMBs and enterprises as they address different pain points for each of these. While SMBs suffer from low economies of scale, enterprises are plagued by an inefficient control over IT infrastructure, given their distributed nature of operations. “A basic problem area common to both is the availability of the security skill-sets. It is time-consuming and cost intensive for enterprises to hire skilled security staff, and difficult to provide them the right career path to keep them motivated enough for a long time,” says Baburaj Varma, Manager – Support & Services at Trend Micro. This is where managed security service providers provide value through their security operations centre (SoC) services. For enterprises, while the need to move to a cloud security solution very much exists, they are constantly battling against several legacy and other issues like licensing, global policies, concerns on security of their data etc, which leads to a lot of inertia in moving into the cloud.
The challenge Managing security in times of cloud, BYOD, mobility and advanced persistent threats (APTs ) in itself is becoming arduous. To top it up, deploying hosted security solution in the cloud, definitely raises more concerns. “Since the security-as-a-service solution is not hosted on-premise, CXOs can feel a sense of loss of control over the solution. However, this is only a psychological challenge and not a real one. There are multiple means through which customers can keep control over the solution for example, through EXPRESS COMPUTER
It is time-consuming and cost-intensive for enterprises to hire skilled security staff,and difficult to provide them the right career path to keep them motivated enough for a long time. Baburaj Varma, Manager - Support & Services, Trend Micro
Customers can keep control over the solution (security as a service) through multiple means such as regular reporting,third party auditing,etc. Rishikesh Kamat, General Manager - Product Development & Marketing,Netmagic
regular reporting, third party auditing etc,” Kamat says. That said, a real challenge here is collateral damage. Since such solutions are multi-tenant platforms, any issue that has a large impact on one customer has the potential to cause damage to other hosted customers as well. Another key challenge faced is integration with legacy systems. “Wherever on-premise solutions need to read from or write to security as a service solutions, the solution provided may or may not be able to provide an open platform for integration. An example of such integration is correlation of secure web gateway logs with that of an on-premise SIEM (security information and event management) solution,” corroborates Kamat of Netmagic. Moreover, different stakeholders of IT security in an organisations have different focus. Sahani of RSA explains that while a CIO looks at IT security from the perspective of provisioning for infrastructure, a CISO (chief information security officer) has to ensure security of corporate data. The recent RBI guidelines to meet information security standards have brought a lot of onus on the CISOs for compliance. In fact, in the era of digitisation and Internet of Things, the CIOs feel they are ill prepared to handle the challenges these changes will throw up to them. According to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner, 51% of CIOs are concerned that the digital torrent is coming faster than they can cope and 42% don’t feel that they have the talent needed to face this future. Industry experts feel managing security will be one such difficult to tame beast, and letting the controls of security let go will be another story all together.
How to pick a solution Customers need to understand that security-as-a-service is more than just a standalone security solution. It is a platform which needs to be ably managed. Security-as-a-service can either be provided by the OEMs SEPTEMBER, 2014
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SECURITY
Security has to be non-intrusive.One has to ensure that there is no user inconvenience and delays.As part of SLAs,one needs to take care of that. Vijay Sethi, Vice President and CIO, Hero MotoCorp
Hosted security solutions are multi-tenant platforms; any issue that has a large impact on one customer has the potential to cause damage to other hosted customers as well. 28
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themselves or by managed security service providers ( MSSPs), who bundle the OEM solutions and package it as a service. In either cases, CIOs must examine the track record of the vendor in being able to attract and sustain a pool of skilled resources that can manage the solution. In case of MSSPs offering the service, CIOs must ask for the OEM technology that is being used in the back-end by the service provider. In all cases it helps to get a reference of existing customers to evaluate how the service provider is doing on delivery. Kaura of Symantec, observes that discussions with the enterprises are also now more mature and have moved from what they want to know to about threat to how do they respond to them. “As it’s no more a question about whether or not being attacked, it is about how intelligent is my system to react in an event of attack,” he says. “As the enterprises are still not confident of putting all security pieces on cloud, the vendor must be able to offer both pure cloud based services and hybrid kind of solutions,” says Ajay Dubey, Manager, South India, Websense. “There could be times when the CIOs might want to have an on premise security offering for the head offices and hosted solutions for the branches,” he reasons. While industry is beginning to see some optimism around SaaS form of security, two key deliverable SLAs of uptime and risks outages associated with cloud outages still haunt the CIOs, Dubey, says. “The CXOs must ensure the vendors’ back up and service strategy during such snags,” he adds. Agrees Vijay Sethi, Vice President and CIO at Hero MotoCorp. He says the two wheeler manufacturer has been using security as a service for quite some time in areas around vulnerability assessment, email scanning for viruses/worms, anti-malware, antispyware, intrusion detection, website protection, etc. He opines that another challenge is uninterrupted connectivity. “It is important that the security service provider ensures availability of
adequate connectivity and bandwidth to support the transfer of real-time data to the service provider cloud, ensuring that timely management of security is not hampered. While deciding on a vendor, proper requirement of connectivity needs to be tested for the services in question,” says Sethi. “Security has to be non-intrusive. One has to ensure that there is no user inconvenience and delays. As part of SLAs, one needs to take care of that,” he adds. Pharmaceutical manufacturing company Cipla Limited also uses some bits of security as service in a few critical operations areas. CISO Amit Pradhan says, “We have consciously decided to not include the very critical security services in the service model for security and assurance reasons. Areas like web security management, managing perimeter, managing AV and end-points are some areas where the organisation could see some clear benefits of using them as a service model.” He stresses one of the big challenges while using security as a service is managing sign-off of ownership and liability agreements with the vendors. Despite the big risk, Pradhan believes that the option of security as a service is worth giving a shot, especially for small and mid market. “The cost efficiencies may start from 5-10 % the first year and go up to 30% subsequently as the organisation matures and volume is sizeable enough for better negotiations. This is a major cost saving in renewal and replacement cycles in this area,” he adds. There are several other factors that are important for the enterprises before they finally flock to hosted security model. Amit Nath, Country Manager – India & SAARC, F-Secure Corporation, says that they have about 2000 customers using their hosted cloud solution, and nearly 200 of whom are SMEs with less than 500 users. “Always consider, the current reputation and the road map of the vendor, getting stuck with a vendor with a blurred vision of future might have an SEPTEMBER, 2014
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As enterprises are still not confident of putting all security pieces on the cloud, the vendor must be able to offer both pure cloud-based services and hybrid solutions. Ajay Dubey, Manager,South India,Websense
Customers need to understand that security-as-a-service is more than just a standalone security solution.It is a platform which needs to be ably managed. adverse effect on the business. Most importantly, the vendor should be a true SaaS offering company, in the sense it should have an effective metering system. It should offer multiple, flexible payment models at times the pricing models can be misleading,� he says, adding that integration of on premise and cloud security should be done properly and and the hosted solution should complement the existing security solution. EXPRESS COMPUTER
In all, this market is set to grow with hosted security model getting deeper than just web security and email gateway, access and identity to explore newer aspects like remote vulnerability assessment and more critical areas. Desphande of Gartner sums up, saying that a lot of innovation in this space is coming from start-ups. He also foresees consolidation in this space. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com
While a CIO looks at ITsecurity from the perspective of provisioning for infrastructure,a CISO has to ensure security of corporate data. Kartik Sahani, Regional Director - India & SAARC, RSA SEPTEMBER, 2014
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DATA CENTRES
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A Question of
TIERS
The recent hype around data centre tiers has made organisations wonder about the right choice between tier 3 and tier 4. Here are some clues BY JASMINE DESAI 30
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D
ata centres are tiered to suit different business demands. Recently data centre tiers, especially the top rung of 3 and 4, have raised a lot of curiosity among organisations, either when they are trying to upgrade their own facilities or looking for a co-location provider. According to Uptime Institute Inc, Tier 4 comes with redundancy, fault tolerance, and independent dualpowered IT racks and cooling systems; whereas Tier 3 requirements include multiple independent distribution paths serving IT equipment, dual-power sources, etc. How does the selection of these tiers impact a business, especially in the long run? The opinion on whether to go for tier 3 or 4 is widely divided in the technical community. Mentions Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner, "In some places it is impossible to have two separate grids, so there can be no Tier 4. Some places in the world are very safe, thus organisations need not be super protective, hence no need for a Tier 4 data centre in such locations. Even if a company is very particular about Tier 4, a Tier 3+ should also be fine." According to Ankesh Kumar, Director, Channel Products & Marketing, Emerson Network Power, India, " It is imperative to have a robust and secure data centre set up which suits business demands. The four tier system grading of data centres is an industry standard approach and a simple and effective means for identifying different data centre site infrastructure design." It is “fault tolerance� which makes major difference between these two tiers. Tier 4 is fault tolerant, which allows any unplanned activity without affecting main operations. However, Tier 4 requires double the infrastructure of a Tier 3. The difference in up-time per year between Tier 3 and Tier 4, is 99.982% and 99,995%, and the difference in downtime for Tier 3 is 1.6 hrs of downtime per year, and for the latter is 0.4 hrs of annual downtime. EXPRESS COMPUTER
Nitin Mishra, Senior Vice President Product Management, Netmagic, An NTT Communications Company, says, "From cost perspective, the selection between these tiers makes a lot of difference. Setting up a Tier 4 will cost at least 30% more than Tier 3." According to Rajesh Ramachandran, CTO & President- Global Product and Technology Solutions, Rolta India Ltd, Tier 4 is at times questionable in terms of investments you need to make. “At Rolta, Tier 3 is something we needed to have for our business model. Deciding upon these tiers is very much based on how the IT is critical for the business as well as a differentiator," he adds. Since Rolta has its own IT- based products which it provides, both on-premise and on cloud and for its global workforce to be able to use this infrastructure, the organisation has 99.985% up-time, which Tier 3 provides. Rolta made its decision based on the sole criteria of what multi-layer impact would tiering have on its business. Rolta's infrastructure also has a direct influence on its customer's business model as they utilise IT transformation solution from Rolta, which includes managed services. There are strict SLAs for managed services for all customers. Any downtime in Rolta's data centres is going to have multiplied repercussion and that is why selecting a particular tier weighed more heavily for the organisation than in other scenarios. Rolta has six data centres across the globe. The organisation has two tier 3 data centres situated in Mumbai and another data centre in Singapore. For every region, Rolta has a data centre that is between tier 2 and 3. Rolta has also built a private cloud on tier 3.
Tier target Every data centre is looking for ways to become more efficient by reducing power consumption, eliminating unnecessary equipment purchases and optimising manpower. Companies depend on their information systems to run their operations, and if the system collapses the organisation's operations may be hampered. Mahapatra of
Some places in the world are very safe so organisations need not be super protective; hence no need for a Tier 4 data centre in such locations. Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director,Gartner
From a cost perspective,the selection between these tiers makes a lot of difference. Setting up a Tier 4 will cost at least 30% more than Tier 3. Nitin Mishra, Netmagic SEPTEMBER, 2014
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DATA CENTRES
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Businesses are increasingly becoming more network-dependant, and it has become critical for CIOs to be on a higher tier. Ankesh Kumar, Director,Channel Products & Marketing,Emerson Network Power
In an applicationcentric world,even tiering has to be determined by applications existing in an organisation’s environment. 32
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Gartner says, "A key focus for installing a data centre set up is to ensure business continuity. For CIOs the deciding factors are reliability and energy efficiency. If there business demands are less and can afford a few delays, then smaller tier systems can work too." There are many standards which define the tiering parameters, some of the famous ones being Uptime Institute, TIA-942, which CIOs can follow. Whatever maybe the cost difference, ultimately it depends on how much extra organisations want to spend on these parameters. According to Kumar of Emerson Network, smaller and medium business units can easily survive with simpler tier systems which are cost effective too. “However, in the current scenario, businesses are increasingly becoming more network dependant and it has become critical for CIOs to be on a higher Tier," he says. In India, most of the data centres are Tier 3, though few large data centres and co-location providers are shifting towards a Tier 4 set up. The key aspect is to analyse which factors are critical for the business and to what extent. Mishra of Netmagic says, "The decision should fundamentally be based upon criticality and downtime that organisations can afford. Also, how much of planned downtime can applications take. If applications can take more downtime, then even Tier 2 can ensure
100% uptime to the IT infrastructure." Irrespective of the design, the major cause of downtime has been human errors. And it remains itself felt even in Tier 4 set-up. Thus, it is very important to have the right people and processes in place. To get the best of both worlds, zoning the data centre can come in as a welcome solution. However, it is not always a necessary one. Mentions Ramachandran of Rolta, " Zoning gives characteristic of modular, not only when it comes to components like network, storage etc., but also aspects like backup, power & cooling." In an application-centric world, even tiering has to be determined by applications existing in an organisation’s environment. Mishra of Netmagic says,"One needs to look at the flexibility part. If organisations know that more mission critical applications will be coming into the picture then they might as well start with a Tier 3 data centre rather than zoning later." Going by tiering is like going by an already charted map. All one needs to keep in mind is whether one needs to give importance to the difference between Tier 4 and Tier 3 and how much is sufficient enough for an organisation's data centre. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com
SEPTEMBER, 2014
INTERVIEW SIEGFRIED DREXLER SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
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Siegfried Drexler, Enterprise Business Development Manager for Schneider Electric's InfraStruxure portfolio of datacentre solutions (Asia, Pacific & Japan), talks to Jasmine Desai about the company's new prefabricated data centre modules. Excerpts:
“Prefabrication is a continued extension of modular� Modular data centres are known for scaling-out. How would you change the notion? Looking at a scalable approach is a general idea in modular. When the concept of modular was introduced, the first concern was how can customers reduce their capex from day one itself, and pay as they grow. However, presently, there are multiple enterprise level customers who have distributed infrastructure throughout the country and maybe even globally. They look very acutely at asset utilisation of their infrastructure components like UPS etc. Organisations have realised that there is possibility of improving efficiencies by re-balancing the capacities among different buildings depending upon the load. We are working with lot of customers where modular approach has been taken and they are using it to scale down certain facilities and transfer capacities to other facilities without having to spend more on buying infrastructure for every facility. The time to configure is very quick, it is weeks instead of months. We design it differently, depending on customer's requirement. So it can take as less as 24 hours for a small customer, to few weeks for a large customer. What we are trying to achieve is to change the way customers view the infrastructure. Will this offering be catering to SMEs, since they are likely to adopt cloud more easily than having an in-house facility? prefabrication will enable cloud service providers to offer different solutions to customers. Customers who are reluctant to outsource and want the equipment nearby, but the cost of managing and hosting is too much, can also leverage this. In SME most industrial automation has become dependent on IT. There the response time of how the controls work fast is very close to the actual equipment, like a computer controlled laid machine, which we do not see going to the cloud because there is latency issue that comes into play. We can actually start our offer with something as small as half a rack. There are customers who want to reboot a EXPRESS COMPUTER
very small amount of IT, but in remote places or outdoor spaces or in sites where there is a risk of contamination or corrosion. Our solution is able to tackle these issues and cater to these requirements. We are not focusing on the change of architecture of IT, but we are seeing the remote and distributed deployment of IT still co-exists with cloud approach of consumption.
Why is there an interest right now in prefabricated data centres and how does it align with the business interests of CIOs? Prefabrication is a continued extension of modular. Instead of assembling it on-site, we are assembling it in factory. It adds value in terms of pre-engineering and pre-testing it on-site. Prefabrication adds flavour of the factory environment, where the integration happens.We are looking at a broader range of market. Our solutions are both ISO and non-ISO.
Do you see prefabricated data centres being utilised for DR purpose in sectors like BFSI? Yes, this is being seen in many countries. One of the challenges with financial institutions is that they are always located in central business districts. They usually have a multi-purpose building. There is one level wherein they have a data centre. With increase in rents, they are looking at options. For DR, there could be a containerised environment, a modular roof-top environment in a location that is far out of the city where they are guaranteed certain bandwidth. The prefabricated offer is not limited to outdoor containers only. A large part of our offer also has solutions like modular rooms, which help bring in the benefit of prefabrication but in a regular brick and mortar kind of a building deployment. Customers already having facilities, are also looking at prefabrication because the modular room brings in prefabrication from structure perspective. Presently, banks are having shorter tenancy as they are trying to bring down the cost. So we can assemble a data centre in a room, and when they want to move they can disassemble and put it in another room. Earlier, we used to talk about 30% off-site time and 70% on-site time, now this is reversed. We have already created multiple reference designs for data centres as well as prefabricated data centres, wherein the starting point can be much faster. One can select reference design closest to what they want to create. We are trying to simplify the process and make it easier for customers, so that the entire design lifecycle is shortened and simplified. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com
SEPTEMBER, 2014
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CASE STUDY
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INDUSIND BANK
THE EXPERIENCE EDGE IndusInd Bank upgrades its customer experience management system for better services and integration BY HEENA JHINGAN
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ill 2009, IndusInd Bank was using Talisma Customer Experience Management system (CEM) that was good enough for use by 40-50 contact centre agents. However, the bank was not able to exploit the system to its fullest. First among the new private banks to have begun operations in 1994, IndusInd Bank today has a wide network of branches, extension counters and ATMs. Along with this exponential network expansion across the country, the bank needed to re-look at its communication strategy to keep the business growing. 34
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To retain high volume of customers, it also needed to innovate with new revenue streams, increase wallet share of existing customers, and offer personalised customer service. This could be done only through allowing customer interactions across channels, therefore they needed a solution to standardise processes for branch operations, and enable tracking of interactions across silos in the organisation. This would in turn, help sales and services teams to be more consistent and proactive on crossselling and up-selling. Mridul Sharma, EVP –and Head -
Solution Delivery, IndusInd Bank, says, “Efforts towards developing the system to manage customer experience at every touch point, began back in 2009 with transforming the existing client server architecture based system into web based.” He adds that though the bank needed an out-of the box approach to meet the needs of their business, they always thought of ripping off the existing solution and replacing it with the another. “The system was in place, only that it was underutilised, we just needed to upgrade and automate operations to make the SEPTEMBER, 2014
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system more productive. Opting for a new system did not make economic and operational sense. So, we made the critical upgrades back in 2009 and recently we upgraded to the latest version —Talisma CEM version 9.0,” he explains.
For customers, with care Sharma adds, “We developed an easy to use, common front-office application that would integrate financial and nonfinancial data from multiple back-office systems and offer a complete view of the customers, which the previous system was incapable of doing.” EXPRESS COMPUTER
The new system would help manage multi-channel interactions across departments – contact centre, sales, branches and back-offices. The system would not only help the bank serve its customers and employees better, but also empower the various teams working internally. This would require integration of data from different sources for providing customer insight. “The system needed to be highly customised to the requirements of the bank. In fact, the latest system has been customised to an extent that it can handle about 9,000 different queries,” says
Sharma, and all the processes have been automated, for example, if a customer puts in a request for change of address online, the request is archived and automatically escalated to the concerned department. Since all the customer interactions are recorded, and the entire history of past interactions can be accessed through the CEM system, the service process becomes agent-independent. Any agent handling a customer query can access the history through the system easily and respond much faster and more effectively. SEPTEMBER, 2014
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CASE STUDY
INDUSIND BANK
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We developed an easy to use, common front-office application that would integrate financial and non-financial data from multiple back-office systems. Mridul Sharma, EVP and Head - Solution Delivery, IndusInd Bank
The CEM system also keeps track of the time taken to respond to each query.This information is vital to alert agents of their deadlines 36
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Besides, the CEM system also keeps track of the time taken to respond to each query. This information is vital to alert agents of their deadlines. End-of-day reports enlist number of unanswered emails, classified by type. This way, the bank is able to keep track of all communication activities and plan more customised responses. According to Sharma, the best thing about the CEM solution is that the client marketing team can send out targeted emails without much help from the IT Department, enabling the bank to send out timely information to the desired set of targets. Sharma says, “The bank uses Talisma as a customer facing experiential solution as well as an internal collaboration tool within the organisation. Through this relationship, the bank has been able to not only better engage the customers, but also enhance back-office productivity. This in turn has helped increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities and greater customer retention. “Also, everything automated, leads to a paperless environment along with single pane visibility of all operations,” Sharma adds.
Usability is the key The installation of the updated system was completed in a very short period, what Sharma thinks took longer was
making the users comfortable with the new system.. “The system was easily integrated with existing system and also the core banking system. Now we essentially have three integrated systems —the customer experience management system, workflow management system and the core banking system,” explains Sharma. He adds, “It took us about six months to get all the users of the system get acclimatised to the new one and to discipline them to follow the process of entering every detail into the system. This change in the user culture was critical for the success of the solution.” With experiential banking, Sharma, points out that the bank has already carved a niche for itself in this highly competitive segment in India and will consolidate and strengthen its position as a leading bank in the days to come. To make the system more effective, the bank has plans to mobile-enable the solution, but that seems to be a matter some time away as Sharma explains that extending the solution will require them to make some essentially changes. “We have been in talks with Talisma regarding the mobile enablement plans, and still evaluating ways to go about it, we are hopeful that will happen sometime soon,” Sharma concludes. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com
SEPTEMBER, 2014
INTERVIEW VIVEK GUDENA NSL GROUP
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In this conversation, Vivek Gudena, Group Vice President – IT, NSL Group, talks to Pankaj Maru about evaluating technology, preferring private cloud to managed IT, and security aspects linked with BYOD. Excerpts:
“Managed IT services is a concept that sounds great on paper” Being the IT head of a group that is into diverse businesses, which factors do you take into account before selecting a new technology? With investments of over Rs 200 billion, NSL Group aspires to generate revenues of about $2 billion by 2015. And with the group growing at nearly 25-30% annually, the NSL IT team is constantly focussed on doing the right things and doing things right. First and foremost, it's of paramount importance to ensure that the IT vision and mission is completely aligned with the group business strategy. Next, we strive to ensure that IT and business partners are aligned on key priorities. Critical success factors are prepared, measured and communicated for each of those priorities along with detailed risk mitigation plans. More tactically, we use the following criteria to assess new technologies — vendor’s relevant experience in our industry, strategic thinking, TCO, subject matter expertise, and understanding of our key goals, quality and cohesiveness of the account management team and creativity and innovation, among other factors. Which key technologies have been deployed at your organisation and what kind of impact and benefits are you seeing so far? In recent years, NSL group has transformed its business processes through SAP implementation in most of the group companies. This programme laid the foundation for various value-enabling initiatives to improve business process efficiencies through better MIS, business process automation and roll-out of mobile technologies. One key goal is to get information to decision makers in an accurate, faster and more secure way. We automated various business processes through the use of mobile technology in the Seeds and Sugars businesses. We have leveraged mobile applications in various scenarios: ● Real time monitoring/re-allocation of stocks through mobile applications will reduce returns EXPRESS COMPUTER
by up to 2%. ● Accurate measurement of plot through
GPS features on mobile phones will reduce expenses to farmers and NSL by up to 5%. ● Reduced cycle time for farmer and plot registrations by more than 95%, i.e. from 10 days to less than 1 hour. ● Real time visibility to performance of field and sales officers because of GPS enabled features and dashboards on activities such as field visit reports, farmer and plot registrations, etc.
What are your IT plans for the near future? We are very excited and are evaluating data visualisation technologies that integrate MIS with Google Maps.We are also investing in extending the scope of mobile applications by automating more business processes, expanding previous pilot projects and securing NSL IT assets from the growing external threats.
What kind of strategy has been adopted by the NSL Group in the area of managed IT and cloud? Managed IT services is a concept that sounds great on paper and is not for everyone. We conducted a detailed assessment recently to outsource certain areas of IT services. After indepth discussions with three IT service companies, we came to the conclusion that TCO could very well be up to 25% higher in an outsourced environment and dropped the idea. We host our own virtualised environment and a private cloud. We are actively monitoring developments in this space and are very interested to continue the journey into the public cloud. In fact, we are actively looking to freeze the hardware footprint of our data centre, where possible, and move new business applications to the public cloud. Has BYOD made inroads into your organisation and how do you see it in the IT security context? Employees and business partners are expecting and demanding flexibility to conduct business operations from the mobile devices. Emergence of these options have opened the pandora’s box of security threats. We have invested in MDM and MAM solutions to mitigate these threats. Components of these have been deployed for select business process areas as initial steps, leading to the creation of a more comprehensive BYOD policy. The trick is to find the right balance between the process efficiencies gained from the mobile technology relative to the potential security threats they pose. pankaj.maru@expressindia.com
SEPTEMBER, 2014
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CASE STUDY
GENPACT
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REVITALISING THE DATACENTRE Here is an insight into Genpact's journey of revamping its IT infrastructure with Schneider Electric's modular solutions, which saved it from becoming antiquated BY JASMINE DESAI
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enpact, a former business process outsourcing unit within General Electric, became an independent company in 2005 to bring its process expertise in Lean Six Sigma to clients outside the GE family. At the time they could barely imagine growing from 32,000 employees and revenue of US$823 million in 2005 to 60,000+ employees and revenues of nearly US$2 billion in 2012. The fast pace of growth came, of course, with its own myriad challenges surrounding IT. One of the flaws Genpact discovered with its own IT infrastructure was that while it was expanded considerably to maintain uptime, the company's ability to manage it was limited. The situation was further complicated by vendor management issues. It was at this point that Genpact embarked on its journey towards data centre life cycle management. The first step was taking feedback 38
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from all departments within the organisation. The result of the assessment was obvious: there was a clear need for revamping existing monitoring and management processes and tools. The evaluation showed that modular and hot swappable data centre solutions were needed as well. Genpact's older data centres were standalone and took up a considerably large footprint. Genpact had installed UPSs keeping in mind a 10-15 year demand extrapolation. However, this not only entailed much larger space allocation in the data centres, but it was unnecessarily pushing the capex as well. After completing a power quality audit, the company decided to break out of its existing vendor relationships and forge a new one. “The result of the power quality audit was a score chart for the business to improve energy performance and efficiency in the data centre. While the need for a better partner was felt, we
wanted to make sure that we take an informed decision of what we really needed from our partner,” says Shyamashis Brahma, Vice President Infrastructure and Logistics at Genpact. The audit revealed that 40% of the data centre costs were attributed to power consumption alone and the power systems were running on low efficiencies. To tackle this, it engaged Schneider Electric as its data centre consultant to carry out a comprehensive audit for 11 sites across India. “While looking at a partner, we also wanted a total cost of ownership based model and we believed in the plan laid down together with our teams,” says Brahma.
Transform or risk becoming obsolete Schneider Electric suggested a ‘build as you grow’ model that would lower the undue pressure on finances. Instead of a classical UPS, it introduced the idea of a SEPTEMBER, 2014
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SEPTEMBER, 2014
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CASE STUDY
GENPACT
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chassis with a few modules, with the ability to add on more modules as and when required. As a result, they were successful in drastically cutting down capex and wastage. Also, in case of smaller issues, such as battery replacement, only that particular module would need to be pushed out for replacement. If a classical UPS goes down, it takes everything down with it. But with the Schneider Electric model, outages were reduced by 25%. Along with the comprehensive modular solution, the plan also included RIMM (Remote Infrastructure Monitoring & Management Services). Schneider Electric RIMM enabled Genpact to be more proactive with improved, real-time visibility of data centre operations, UPS, and other elements via a simple GUI. According to Brahma, "A detailed change management process had to be set up within the extended organisation and the external supply chain to ensure controlled and trouble-free deployment–and each and every stakeholder had to be carefully covered before the deployment began." Brahma advises other organisations that are planning to tread on a similar path, "While carrying out a technology assessment, it’s very important for the team to understand the impact of the product to the organisation’s business dynamics. They need to understand the need versus functionality fitment when selecting the product." He says that most of the time companies either go overboard or undercut during technology evaluation; as a result, either the full potential does not get realised or some resources go waste. He also says that it is important to focus on the products' TCO and not just on direct cost. The benefits of a modular deployment are not only immediately felt, but also linger on for years to come. Says Brahma, "Presently, Genpact's standardised data centres can be scaled as required, and in a way that is resilient, reliable and free from human errors." The business benefited straight away, through reduction in energy costs by 10-12 percent, lowering of capex by 15-20 percent, and great improvements in operational efficiency and productivity. The modular UPS 40
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Genpact's standardised data centres can be scaled as required, and in a way that is resilient,reliable and free from human errors. SHYAMASHIS BRAHMA, VICE PRESIDENT- INFRASTRUCTURE AND LOGISTICS,GENPACT
counters the variable load conditions during the company's 24/7 working environment, which is already resulting in 70% savings and 90% ROI. Asset Predict, a feature of the Schneider solution, has provided the organisation with complete visibility through remote monitoring and management of more than 300 critical assets installed in seven facilities via alerts, alarms, predictive analytics, and fault resolution. The service enables Genpact to ‘predict and prevent’ as opposed to ‘detect and react’ and eliminate vendor management issues through consolidated management of multiple equipment across many sites. The 3 Phase UPS (Galaxy 7000 and Precision Air Conditioning) has increased energy efficiency. Genpact has also experienced savings of up to 50% on floor space. The entire implementation has resulted in reduced maintenance cost and presently, 75% less time is spent on maintenance. Post-implementation, the organisation has also reduced its carbon footprint. What’s more, their data centre received high ranking from the Global Reporting Initiative. “We recently received an A+ in GRI sustainability ratings and its credit most definitely goes to all the research and deployments we did in the data centre," says Brahma. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com
SEPTEMBER, 2014
COLUMN
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ASHISH PACHORY
BUSINESS-ITALIGNMENT: THE NEW CONVERGENCE B If you are still in an organisation where alignment of IT with business is a mere platitude, let me offer this advice to you: get off the bus before it tumbles down the ravine
The new normal mandates that ITbe no longer driven by RoI alone,but is outcome-based. EXPRESS COMPUTER
usiness-IT alignment is not another well-tossed transformation brew stirred up by hype rather than value. It is a ground-up reality brought upon us by compelling and irreversible changes in our environment—market, economic, social, technological, and even behavioural. It is survival. If we take a step back in time into IT in the pre-Internet era, the picture was starkly different. Actually there was no picture at all, as IT was completely invisible to all but itself. A typical IT (or EDP as it was then called) ‘department’ had a set of data entry operators, who, well, just entered data all day. This data was fed to huge batch-processing minicomputers running COBOL programs which required programmers to be within shouting distance at all times, because you never knew! In the background used to be boisterous ‘line printers’, always printing away on reams of lined paper. In fact there used to be a guy just to haul paper, so voluminous were the ‘MIS reports’. Then Y2K, the biggest damp squib in recorded history, happened, and people woke up to the existence of IT, though no one was quite sure of its role in their lives. In the above scenario, Business and IT existed in different, non-intersecting universes. The advent of PCs and rudimentary LAN made a case for IT to be seen (though still not heard) around the office. From there on to email, internet, chat and a few smart Java apps led to IT being a key enhancer of office productivity, though still not a real business enabler. Many of us in our lifetimes have seen IT evolve from centralised Big Iron (mainframes), to networking terminals (mini computers), to client-server architecture (PC, LAN, servers) to internet (telecom/WAN) to
cloud computing (SOA, Web 2.0). That is five generations of IT in one of ours! The saw-tooth shaped learning ‘curve’ did cause adoption challenges, but had a silver lining: in all of this, the realisation that IT can play a larger role than keeping the traditional light bulb on, finally dawned, albeit around the turn of the fourth generation of IT.
The current situation Let us cut to the present. The amalgamation of IP-centric technologies, abundance of bandwidth, explosion of data, proliferation of smart mobile devices and a growing hunger for actionable information anywhere and anytime, have resulted in the creation of the mobile enterprise which has turned all traditional concepts on their heads. The foundation for the integrated Business-Technology edifice of the future has been laid. Alignment of IT with Business in this backdrop is not about platitudes or catchy slogans, or even mission statements. It is about Business and IT thinking, building and operating together for a shared goal, and that is to make the business successful. If this simple tenet is demonstrated in the day to day behaviour of the entire IT workforce, you have already taken a major first step towards alignment of IT with Business. For the new-age digital enterprise, this must become the new normal. This new normal also mandates that IT be no longer driven by RoI alone, but is outcome-based. Which means IT is an equal stakeholder in the achievement of business results. Let us consider some examples of this. Traditionally IT has been tasked with automation of the process workflow in a manufacturing environment while the actual outcome of those processes is the shop-floor users’ SEPTEMBER, 2014
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responsibility. In the outcome-based model, the role of IT would be achieving JIT manufacturing and lean production to reduce cost (a business outcome). Taking the example of banking, IT is no longer just the agency for ‘computerisation’ of operations, but is a primary stakeholder in the growth of the banking business through enablement of internet and mobile banking and adapting quickly to changing customer preferences. In high-tech sectors like telecom, IT has an even higher influence on the business outcome, not only as an early implementer of new solutions (short TTM) required by the Business, but also as a leading light to the Business in proposing innovative solutions in areas like monetisation of data and business analytics. In such a scenario, IT is a direct stakeholder in creation of business value.
Sustaining the alignment For true and sustained Business-IT alignment, it is clear that Business must have a stake in IT, and vice versa. Hence in companies that are serious about Business-IT alignment it is not only common for the CIO to be measured on 42
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Business KPIs, but for return on IT investments to become a KPI for Business as well. There is a need to move away from a formula-based allocation of IT costs towards a costing model based on actual consumption. This requires sound systems in place to measure IT consumption and also to tie back the business benefits of a solution to the investment made in its roll-out. These are non-trivial factors which require a fair degree of maturity in Business, Finance and IT processes. There is no organised industry today where IT does not have a role in shaping the product that reaches the end customer. Can an airline today claim to offer the level of customer convenience that it does without packaging online reservations, seat selection, web-checkin and a variety of other value-adds enabled by IT? Or a bank, hotel-chain, telecom service provider, even governments? While this may be less evident in case of manufactured goods, the role of IT is equal, if not higher, here as IT is behind many of the real-time processes, material and inventory tracking, control systems, etc, that result in the final product being
created and retailed. Even behind-thescenes IT is at work alongside marketing teams in launching campaigns, benchmarking with competition, analysing customer behaviour and preferences, and enabling efficient customer service delivery. In such a scenario, imagine for a moment that Business and IT are NOT aligned, and go back to the state of 80s and 90s that was depicted earlier in this article. It is not just that chaos will ensue, which it surely will. More to the point, Business will come to a grinding halt. IT is at the very CORE of business today. In fact it is indistinguishable from Business. In an organisation where Business and IT are truly aligned, they are also interdependent. A Business strategy cannot by itself drive business success in the current technology-driven environment. The Business strategy lays the foundation for the IT strategy, which in turn is enabled by the IT architecture. The IT architecture thus has a strong correlation with the Business roadmap, and could have a serious constraining or liberating influence on the Business architecture itself. This cycle of SEPTEMBER, 2014
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interdependence and influence is at the core of the IT-Business alignment. There is no single, proven formula that allows this cycle to run in a well-oiled fashion. However, some pointers may be helpful. ●
A Business-led IT organisation. An empowered business analyst exists in IT for each LOB as a single point interface to the LOB for assuring that business priorities and IT priorities are never out of sync.
DRIVES
BUSINESS STRATEGY
INFLUENCES
IT STRATEGY
● A comprehensive governance framework. Not only to exchange plans and information, but to trigger changes in the delivery mechanism, structure and architecture in tune with the changing business environment. However, nothing substitutes informal and continuous engagement between BU and IT at all levels. ● Measurement of IT along Business axes. That is, factors of interest to Business, not IT. No one cares about server uptime or TAT. It is the end-to-end service availability and integrity that matters. For example, how accurately and quickly can customer information be made available to the call-centre agent? What was the lost revenue due to delayed customer acquisition? etc. ●
Business-sponsorship of IT. There is no common pool called IT-budget for everyone to dive in as required. Instead, an entirely business-funded approach to IT delivery and operations assures that everyone has some skin in the game. All IT costs must have a business justification and buy-in. ●
Thought leadership. An ‘order-taker’ approach by IT is no longer the norm. As domain experts, the IT organisation has to be a trusted advisor to the business providing thought-leading insights that help the business succeed.
● Business-aligned IT roadmap. The IT strategy and architecture must be continually evaluated against the business roadmap. The most common reason for misalignment is divergence in
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strategies which lead to an IT architecture that is not supportive of future business requirements. Increasingly, IT organisations are hiring for business-mindedness rather than technical skills. In most businessaligned IT organisations, the IT team itself is a core group of ‘influencers’ whose focus is on Business and not Technology. All routine operations are outsourced to like-minded partners. This trend helps in directing the organisations’ energies to its core strategic areas and is an insulation against technological upheavals requiring changing skill sets in large numbers. Business-IT alignment is certainly not a platitude in organisations that are serious about the future. It is a requisite for the business to succeed in today’s environment. However, it is not a trivial task to accomplish and should not be under-estimated. Organisations have to
consciously and consistently strive to achieve it. This environment requires business teams to be tech savvy and IT teams to be business savvy. There have to be a lot of common elements in the KRAs of Business and IT teams. Lines are blurring. We may soon see more business managers becoming CIOs and CIOs becoming CEOs. The next generation of IT is fast gaining upon us. This may bring its own set of new, and as yet unknown, services and offerings but one thing is for sure— the defining feature of the new generation is going to be a much sharper convergence between Business and IT. This convergence is going to be not about technology, but a vastly bigger one—of minds. And this, in my view, will open up a whole new world of possibilities—for business as well as communities. Ashish Pachory is CIO of Tata Teleservices.
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COLUMN MURLI MOHAN
THE BIG DATAEDGE D Established companies as well as new entrants are leveraging big data to innovate, compete and capture market value
Retailers are tapping into big data to streamline operations and gain a competitive edge over rivals by leveraging analytics to price their goods and services based on real-time metrics. 44
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joint study by NASSCOM and CRISIL Global Research & Analytics suggests that by 2015, the big data industry is expected to become a $25 billion industry. The report estimates that the Indian big data industry will grow from $200 million in 2012 to $1 billion in 2015 at a CAGR in excess of 83%. The use of big data is a way for organisations in various sectors to outperform their peers in their respective space. Established companies as well as new entrants are leveraging big data to innovate, compete and capture market value. Many companies sit on large information flows of data of various products and services, buyers and suppliers, consumer preferences and intent are collected and analysed to make better management decisions. Here is a look at some of the industries where big data analytics is used for competitive advantage: ● Healthcare: Data analysts in healthcare organisations are increasingly using data to assist clinical decision making, identify patients with a pattern in their sickness, high risk patients, etc. to provide better services for them and reduce wastage. Analytics is also used to analyse unstructured texts from physicians and nursing documentation and compare those notes across a larger population of patients, improving clinical practice and treatments of various illnesses. Pharmaceutical companies analyse the health outcomes of pharmaceuticals that were widely prescribed, which results in better understanding of the patient’s response to the medicine—discovering benefits and risks that were not evident during clinical trials.
● Industrial: Oil is a natural depleting resource and it has to be utilised with care. Oil fields these days use instruments that constantly read data on well head conditions, pipelines and mechanical systems, analysed by a cluster of computers which is later served to real time operations centres in order to optimise production and minimise downtimes. Using big data analytics, an oil company can easily increase its oil production by 5 to 10 percent yet cut operating costs by 10 to 25 percent.
● Education: In higher education, statistical models are being used to help identify university students at risk for not completing courses or dropping out of school. What once was a very reactive event—an advisor contacting a student
● Auto sector: The auto sector, too, has been a great adopter of big data and analytics solutions, especially in the manufacturing unit, to detect faults. For example, when a machine fails, its sensors trigger the rest of the unit from
after it was too late to assist them in turning their grades around—now is a proactive effort. With predictive modelling, advisors are alerted sooner to at-risk student behaviour and can work with students to get back on track, resulting in increased attendance, reduced drop-out rates, and more consistent revenue for the university. ● Retail: Retailers are tapping into big data to streamline operations and gain a competitive edge over rivals by leveraging analytics to price their goods and services based on real-time metrics such as competitor pricing, supply chain and inventory data, market data and consumer behaviour data. This results in narrowing the target customers and providing them with much more tailored products and services, targeting promotions and personalising offers based on purchasing behaviour of the customer. In some nations, retailers have also started to analyse their video data to understand the effectiveness of promotional displays and campaigns, which helps them improve their store layout and product placements.
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breaking down completely. The companies also use big data analytics to analyse massive amounts of unstructured information, or big data, to spot trends and gain business insights. The data captured at the time of a sale is integrated with service operations and all warranty terms and conditions are built into this dealer management software; thus, the eligibility of a vehicle is instantly authenticated through an online check. There are many significant ways in which big data and analytics can unlock the business potential, depending on the sector it has been deployed in. As EXPRESS COMPUTER
As organisations create and store more transactional data in the digital form,they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days organisations create and store more transactional data in the digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days. This, in turn, helps them
substantially improve decision-making and also improves the development of next-generation products and services. Murli Mohan is General Manager of Dell Software Group.
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COLUMN TARUN KAURA
ADVANCE THREATPROTECTION A In this era of cyber-sabotage and cyber-espionage, you must take charge of your future before someone else does
According to the Lloyd’s Risk Index 2013,cyber risk,in the span of two years,has become the #1 technological risk and #3 business risk 46
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n increasing number of sophisticated cyber attacks have been discovered over the past couple of years – from Stuxnet to the Flamer; each of these attacks had a specific goal and target and were very different from the mass cyber threats of the past. The most recent in this long list of targeted attacks has been uncovered in 2014 by Symantec. Dubbed “Dragonfly”, the well-resourced attack group appears to have been in operation since 2011; initially targeting defence and aviation companies in the US and Canada before shifting its focus to US and European energy firms in early 2013. A classic example in the rising trend of Advance Persistent Threat (APTs), the Dragonfly group used a number of different attack vectors. In addition to compromising third party software, the attackers also mounted watering hole attacks, compromising websites that staff members at target companies were likely to visit. The group also utilised spam campaigns. While the main purpose of these infections was to gain foothold on the networks of targeted companies, the attacks did give the Dragonfly group the capability to mount industrial sabotage if they chose to do so. Attacks like these indicate the dawn of the era of cyber-sabotage and cyberespionage, and while many may believe that such sophisticated threats will not affect anyone apart from the intended target, the truth is many of them have had collateral damage.
The rising risks The world’s data—exposed through multiple channels—is vulnerable, even though cyber security has become a priority for many organisations. According to the Lloyd’s Risk Index 2013, cyber risk, in the span of two years, has become the #1 technological risk and #3 business risk surpassing other business
risks such as inflation and rapid technological changes. A decade ago, the biggest risk from a bad virus was a temporarily disabled computer and lost files. Today, targeted attacks are on the rise and advanced persistent threats (APTs), while very focused in whom they target, are a real threat for organisations; capable of stealing financial/customer data and intellectual property, by compromising critical information assets. According to Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), despite stepping up their information security measures, businesses in India continue to be an attractive target for cyber criminals with 69 percent of targeted attacks in India focused on large enterprises.
APTs: The dawn of mega breaches Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are a special case within the much broader category of targeted attacks that organisations of all kinds are prone to. APTs are attacks where cyber criminals plan customised attacks using tools and intrusion techniques developed specifically for certain targets. In contrast to the typical “smash and grab” tactics, hackers using APTs are willing to be more patient while they craft their attack strategy and wait till the reward is bigger and better. The Dragonfly group used attack methods which were centred on extracting and uploading stolen data, installing further malware onto systems, and running executable files on infected computers. It was also capable of running additional plugins, such as tools for collecting passwords, taking screenshots, and cataloguing documents on infected computers.
Need of the hour Targeted attacks are rising, cyber criminals are more ruthless than ever, and the multifaceted equation required to protect against these threats has only SEPTEMBER, 2014
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become more difficult. While the promise of network security-based solutions as the answer to advanced threats gains increasing attention, IT departments are still left grappling with massive amounts of incidents, too many false positives and a laundry list of manual processes to be tackled without the staffing and skill sets needed to win, leaving organisations exposed and vulnerable. In the new era of Mega Breaches, the prerequisite for many businesses today is to be able to identify the incoming attacks and respond to them seamlessly without any downtime. There is a greater need for building a security layer that must be strong enough to fight significant malicious activities and in case of attack, recover from incidents faster. An advanced threat protection solution which correlates alerts and intelligence EXPRESS COMPUTER
APTs are attacks where cyber criminals plan customized attacks using tools and intrusion techniques developed specifically for certain targets. Hackers using APTs are willing to be more patient while they craft their attack strategy till the reward is bigger and better.
across a range of security technologies to deliver more comprehensive attack prevention is the one piece missing from the cybersecurity jigsaw in most enterprises today. To successfully defend against the types of targeted attacks, organisations need to expand the focus from prevention only to prevention, detection and response. ATP significantly reduces the time to detect, prioritise and respond to security incidents. With adversaries hitting all control points from the gateway to email to the endpoint, organisations need security across all points working together, with incident response capabilities and global information intelligence, to beat the bad guys. Tarun Kaura is Director of Technology Sales (India), Symantec.
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INTERVIEW ALISON HIGGINS-MILLER WEBSENSE
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Alison Higgins-Miller, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Websense, shares interesting insights into current data security solutions and security threat trends with Jasmine Desai. Excerpts:
“There is a disconnect regarding the perceived value of confidential data” There are several organisations that do not fully trust their security programmes. How can the situation change? Today’s cyber attacks have raised the cyber security bar through a complex set of infrastructure and tools cyber criminals use to rapidly launch new attacks. Websense prevented more than 4.1 billion live attacks in 2013, nearly all of which exhibited techniques to bypass traditional defences, compromise systems, and persist throughout infected networks in pursuit of confidential data. CISOs require a lot more visibility into what is happening to their sensitive data and how it is being used. One of the ways to overcome this challenge is to have a solution that is unified, dynamic in providing real time defences, and has the ability to protect against data thefts. You mentioned that IP protection and not compliance is the primary buying driver for data security solutions.Why so? Compliance policies have to go beyond organisations’ network to secure mobile users, peripheral devices, and file-sharing software. Ultimately, compliance is a way of enforcing the protection of confidential data. IP is narrowly defined as patents, trademarks and information that a legal team would protect. The confidential information may vary from sector to sector. Exfiltration of data or IP can result in financial loss to organisations, tarnish their brand image and undermine their ability to retain people. So, it is important for organisations to protect this sensitive information to remain competitive and profitable. Why do you think that integration of security solutions is so important? Multiple security solutions can mean overlapping functionality, multiple vendors, and increased management. An unified, completely integrated security solution offers a practical way to escape this dilemma. Above all, a unified content security solution will deliver better protection against advanced threats at a lower total cost of ownership. 48
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Companies often do not have a good understanding of the threat landscape within their organisation. What steps can they take towards this? Organisations need to understand the various stages of the threat lifecycle, current criminal attack apparatus and techniques, and attacker motivations as a foundation for understanding the threat landscape— both individually and holistically. They can gain insight into each stage for clues to understand how criminals conduct their attacks to get closer to the critical data.
Given that social components are increasingly driving business needs, how does security get affected because of this? Social media platforms give ample social engineering opportunities to cyber criminals for launching sophisticated security attacks. Hackers are now increasingly conducting reconnaissance through various social networks to gather intelligence on their potential victims. Referred to as the ‘threat kill chain’, a series of activities, executed by threat actors to penetrate organisations, are used to expand their footprint within these compromised networks, and steal valuable data. The kill chain can be segmented into seven discernible stages: recon, lure, redirect, exploit kit, dropper file, call home and data theft. Attackers are using sophisticated techniques to bypass defences at any or all of the seven stages, and that the further an attack progresses along the threat lifecycle, the greater the risk of data theft. Effective security in 2014 and beyond requires integrated solutions that protect not only at each individual stage, but also across the entire kill chain. With so much focus on 'data', a Ponemon research study showed that 82% of respondents say their company’s leaders do not equate losing confidential data with a potential loss of revenue. Does this show lack of awareness or carelessness? There is a disconnect regarding the perceived value of confidential data. Many professionals find it hard to keep track of the threat landscape and are not sure if they had been a victim of an attack. There is a gap between data breach perception and reality – specifically regarding the potential revenue loss to their business. Executives do not believe that the loss of their organisation’s confidential data could result in a potential loss of revenue which is in contrast to the recent Ponemon Institute research, which indicates that data breaches have serious financial consequences for organisations. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com
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Prospects of networking market bright on SMAC trends: IDC THE ETHERNET SWITCH and router market in India grew 7.24% to over $226.4 million in the first quarter of 2014, indicating stronger demand ahead after seasonal lows and a slowdown, according to research firm IDC. As per IDC’s APeJ Quarterly Switch and Router tracker, the Ethernet switch market stood at $107.8 million in Q1 2014, growing 9.9% Quarter-on-Quarter (QoQ) but showing a decline of 9.8% from Q1 2013 Year-on-Year (YoY). The router market for Q1 2014 in India outpaced the earlier quarters and stood at $82.7 million, with 68.2% QoQ and 40.1% YoY rise as a combination of optimism as well as deferred deals registered by some of the vendors in the market. The wireless LAN market in India witnessed a 17.6% increase QoQ and 10.5% YoY during 1Q 2014, according to IDC’s Quarterly APeJ Wireless LAN tracker. The Q1 2014 WLAN India market was pegged at $35.9 million. Despite the past trend of seasonal low in the last quarter of a year combined with the noticeable slowdown due to the elections, the numbers show a relatively positive sentiment and have put the LAN &
WLAN markets in India in a strong position for the upcoming quarters. Enterprises made the largest contribution to the Ethernet switch and router market in India, continuing the trend from the last few quarter, whereas the service provider segment showed signs of revival with the highest growth
rate in the recent quarters. IDC believes that the wider acceptance of 3rd Platform that represents the increasing popularity of social networking, mobility, big data & analytics, and cloud among enterprises was the prime reason for the growth and future prospects in the market.
Delhi Police launches WhatsApp helpline to curb corruption SMARTPHONES AND THE popular chat messenger WhatsApp have now turned into an effective weapon against errant policemen with Delhi Police launching a new anti-corruption helpline where one can send audio or video clips if any cop seeks bribe or harasses a person. The new helpline number, 9910641064, has been started on August 6 where one can not only just call and register your complaint but also send a recorded audio or video clip if any police man harasses a person or demands bribe. EXPRESS COMPUTER
The new helpline is the brainchild of Delhi Police Commissioner B S Bassi who wants the force to be corruption free. "Once we get an audio or video clip, it will be checked at the Forensic Science Laboratory for its genuineness and once the authenticity is established, action will be taken against the errant policeman. So far we have got one genuine complaint and action is being taken in this regard," said Pillai. Anybody who will be found guilty in this connection will be booked under Section 7
(public servant taking gratification other than legal remuneration in respect of an official act) and Section 13 (criminal misconduct by a public servant) of the Prevention of Corruption Act and other sections under the Indian Penal Code. If found guilty, the officer will be suspended and arrested immediately, police said. "Other than sending the audio-video clip on the popular messaging App, people can also email them to jtcp-vigilance-dl@nic.in," said Pillai. SEPTEMBER, 2014
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Thiruvananthapuram police launches mobile app for citizens’convenience
Karnataka govt to set up IT start-up warehouse IN A BIG push to IT infrastructure in the state and creating a start-up conducive ecosystem, the Karnataka government on Tuesday announced setting up a 50,000-sq ft start-up warehouse in Bangalore, in association with IT industry body Nasscom. The state government will invest Rs 45 crore into the project, which is likely to be operational by November. The warehouse will have a design centre of excellence, working space for daily use on pay-as-you-go basis, a mobile devices lab and an internet of things lab. Once completed, the facility will have the capacity to house over 100 start-ups comprising up to 12 employees each on a 24x7 basis. The government and Nasscom also announced a 500-seater Hack-celerator, a combination of a hackathon and an accelerator, which will be integrated into the warehouse facility. It will be up by November. We will be 50
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sector-agnostic while on-boarding the start-ups. The government and Nasscom will peruse the applications and they will be selected based on merit,” said Karnataka IT Secretary Srivatsa Krishna. Besides, the government is also contemplating providing plug and play built-up space with internet to the startups at anything between Rs 5-15 per sq ft. Work is also underway to transform Karnataka into a WiFi enabled state in the next one year. The Karnataka government also announced a slew of measure to boost the IT ecosystem in the state, which accounts for one-third of the country's IT exports. New age incubation centres will be set up in nine engineering colleges — each receiving Rs 40 lakh over three years — outside Bangalore, while hackathons will be conducted in Bagalkot, Tumkur and Dharwad districts to include rural youth in the state's IT story.
THE THIRUVANANTHAPURAM CITY police has launched a new mobile application to enhance the quality of service provided to the public. As per the release making this announcement, IT firm UST Global built this mobile app with its Apple Tree team. This app is free for the public and helps people to be aware of various traffic rules, penalties and report any violations of laws they encounter. This app also helps people to connect emergency services like control room, ambulance, hospitals and fire service in and around Thiruvananthapuram city. It will also guide the people to the nearest police station from their current location. Also planned are traffic alerts, other alerts to the public from the police and integration with WhatsApp. The application can be downloaded from the official website of Thiruvananthapuram City Police: http://www.tvmcitypolice.gov.in/ index.html SEPTEMBER, 2014
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Ericsson deploys Charging System for Vodafone India
ERICSSON HAS SUCCESSFULLY deployed its Charging System for Vodafone India. The Ericsson Charging System enables a host of new services like flexible refill, community charging and real time balance notifications among several other different voice and data offerings for over 75 million prepaid customers. These customers will now be able to adjust their plans themselves, improving their overall customer experience. It will also enable Vodafone to provide personalised offers to individual consumers by understanding their service consumption patterns. As a part of the five-year agreement, Ericsson will be replacing legacy infrastructure with its new Charging System across five new circles of Uttar Pradesh (W), Uttar Pradesh (E), Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, in addition to Mumbai & Maharashtra circles where it was already deployed. The deployment will enable convergence 52
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across payment methodologies and devices, and enable Vodafone to activate enhanced data charging via mobile broadband charging in the future. Vishant Vora, Director –Technology, Vodafone India said, “The fast-maturing Indian mobile internet consumers expect greater control and flexibility on the kind of services they want to consume, when they want to consume and how they would like to pay for it. The one size fits all and tiered pricing models for services are being fast replaced by a need for personalized services. .” The solution offers a dense computing platform, which can process almost double the traffic compared to the legacy solution. This will also help save on datacenter space and energy requirements. Advanced features will allow for better segmentation to drive higher revenue-generating services for Vodafone India. These include personalised offer management, flexible refill and community charging.
IBM Cloud to power Narayana Health Email System IBM has partnered with Narayana Health, one of the biggest medical institutions in the country, for implementing an efficient email and collaboration tool. The hospital now has access to business class email, a collaborative calendar and contact management that can be virtually accessed anywhere in a security rich cloud environment, lowering operational costs by at least 15% , while improving reliability and manageability. IBM iNotes via Cloud not only benefits the hospital administration, but also its caregivers who can now collaborate more quickly, share files and manage projects seamlessly through cloud. This allows physicians, nurses and other employees to contribute easily across projects, create communities quickly and effortlessly and work as a cohesive team with better communication. Prior to the collaboration with IBM, due to the lack of a centralized email service, the hospital administration was forced to execute their daily work tasks using personal mail IDs. Using IBM iNotes' via Cloud, , Narayana Health is able to improve productivity, deepen customer relationships, generate new ideas faster and enable a more effective workforce. With IBM’s Cloud implementation, the hospital has streamlined the process of keeping record of salary slips for over 13,000 employees instead of providing pay slips manually. “We are pleased to work with IBM in helping upgrade our IT Infrastructure and addressing our business needs,” said Srikanth Raman, Group Head - Information Technology, at Narayana Health. SEPTEMBER, 2014
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Four or Two Hot-Pluggable Nodes in 2U New Generation Twin System · SAS 3.0 (12Gbps) · NVMe · Up to 12 HDDs/Node · FDR(56Gbps) InfiniBand · 10GBase-T · 1TB DDR3 up to 1866 MHz in 16 DIMMs · Redundant Platinum Level power supplies Node 1
New!
Node 2
SYS-2028TP-DNC/(T)(F)R (Front View) Up to 4x NVMe + 8x SAS 3.0 drives (per node) Node 1
Node 2
(Rear View)
SYS-6028TP-DNC/(T)(F)R (Front View) Up to 4x NVMe + 2x SAS 3.0 drives (per node), or Up to 6x SAS 3.0 support (per node)
SYS-2027PR-HT/C0/C1(T)R
SYS-2027PR-DT/C0/C1(T)R
Each node supports the following: Engineering
Oil & Gas Exploration
Search Engine
Simulation
Data Center
GPGPU Application
Medical
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Dual Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 & E5-2600 v2 product families; QPI up to 8GT/s Up to 1TB ECC DDR3 up to 1866MHz memory in 16 DIMM slots 1 PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot; 1 PCI-E 3.0 x8 slot (TwinPro) SFP+, GPU, or “0” slot support (-C0 and -T models) LSI 3008/3108 controller for 8x 12Gbps SAS 3.0 ports (-C1 SuperCap option) Intel® C602 controller for 6x SATA3/2 ports Dual Intel® X540 10GBase-T (-T versions); or, Intel® i350 dual port Gigabit Ethernet Up to 12x (TwinPro) or 6x (TwinPro²) hot-swap 2.5” HDD bays Onboard FDR InfiniBand / 40G Ethernet 1280W / 2000W redundant Platinum Level (94%) power supplies IPMI 2.0 + KVM with dedicated LAN SATA-DOM / mSATA support
Cloud Computing
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I nfo@net webindia.com w w w.net webindia.com New Delhi : +91-11-43240000 Bangalore : +91-80-40540000 Hyderabad : +91-9989990647 Chennai : +91 97890 70289 Mumbai : +91-22-40158811 Kolkata : +91 - 33 – 23232055
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NASSCOM offers security solutions to NGOs IN A BID to drive inclusive growth in India, NASSCOM Foundation, will now offer Symantec’s enterprise and desktop products to NGOs through its software donation programme. NGOs in India will now be able to get the latest information security and backup solutions as donation, enabling them to keep their data secure while diverting a large part of their IT security budgets to solving social issues. In a world driven by Information and Communication Technology (ICT), a large number of NGOs in India are using outdated or free security solutions with limited protection, making them highly vulnerable to hacking, data thefts, trojan horses, viruses, worms, spyware, adware, rootkits and other security threats. NGOs from across the country, will now be able to protect themselves from these risks and fulfill their organisational security and backup needs like online transactions/ donations, employee and donor privacy and even protection against data loss due to system/server crashes.
With Symantec Security Solutions, organisations of any size can have a simple and affordable desktop security that protects against today’s ever evolving threats. Welcoming the initiative, Shantanu Ghosh, Managing Director - India Product Operations, Symantec, said, “Symantec is committed to making the world a safer and better place. Running an NGO is hard work, but Symantec wants to make securing it the easy part.
Through the NASSCOM BigTech Program, we want to do our bit by helping NGOs protect and manage their information, so they can continue to leverage technology for greater good.” The BigTech program endeavours to provide technology led solutions to the NGOs to help increase their effectiveness. Since its inception, the programme has successfully donated software worth Rs.34 crore to NGOs across India.
Karnataka government partners Snapdeal to promote SMEs KARNATAKA GOVERNMENT HAS partnered with online marketplace Snapdeal and is in the process of doing it with Amazon also to set up a platform for Small and Medium Enterprises in the state to sell their goods to the entire world, a top government official said. Speaking at the tenth India Innovation Summit 2014, Srivatsa Krishna, Secretary in the Department of IT, BT and Science and Technology, Government of Karnataka, said: "In one step they can reach the whole world from wherever they are in Karnataka; and we have to take connectivity to every district, going down to every taluk." 54
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"They can actually be part of the large global market, which I think will be a huge step forward," he told the Summit, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry. Later speaking to reporters, Krishna said "it will be a market place for small and medium enterprises of Karnataka to connect to the global market, so we have reached out to Snapdeal and Amazon for it....; Amazon has still not done it, it is still in the process. Snapdeal has already done it." He said "....it is a simple platform, a replica of a Snapdeal platform but with Government of Karnataka and Snapdeal together designing it...." SEPTEMBER, 2014
REGD.NO.MH/MR/SOUTH/132/2012-14, PUBLISHED ON 28TH OF EVERY PERVIOUS MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 29 & 30 OF EVERY PREVIOUS MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. 49926/90