Focus on AOPS to manage infrastructure: DQ Summit

BANGALORE: With enterprise market for IT growing every year, the challenge faced by all the enterprises is how technology and resources are managed meticulously to achieve the business objectives.

The Dataquest CIO summit on Managing Enterprise Infrastructure held here on Friday, called upon the CIOs to concentrate and tackle the AOPS: Availability, Operations, Performance and Scalability, and stressed the importance of defining a policy and manpower orientation of the same while managing the infrastructure of an organization.

Delivering the keynote address on How the CXO is Looking at IT Infrastructure Management Today, to a gathering of over 75 CXOs, Atul Kanwar, CEO and MD, Transworks, said, “ Managing Infrastructure is an ongoing challenge. The internal growth of an organization, and mergers and acquisitions, increases the complexity of managing the infrastructure.”

Every organization has to identify the AOPS, while managing the infrastructure of an organisation, he added.

During a discussion on Technology and Resource Optimization to Meet Business Objectives, the panel opined that scalability, practices, process, frameworks, training people, building and recognizing appropriate tool and implementation of the right tool is very important to achieve a long term results.

They emphasized that the CIOs have to identify what ‘IT’ is expected to deliver to the market and based on that the appropriate tools has to be developed to achieve the objectives.

Ravishankar Subramanium, vice president and head of IT, ING Vyaya Insurance, Srinivas V, CIO and CTO, Nagarjun Agrichem Limited, S Sridhar, head of IT at Hutch, Jayaram Durga, head, R&D, L&T Infotech, Anand Kumar, IT lead, South Asia, Monsanto were the panelists.

Ibrahim Ahmad, group editor, Dataquest and Voice&Data, moderated the session.

On a query on ‘Are enterprises able to align themselves with outsourcing partners to meet the business needs and requirements,’ Durga said, “Service providers should understand the needs of the client as well as customers. The clients have to be guaranteed that the tools used by the service providers are proven and not experimented on them.”

Kumar of Monsanto, while expressing his bad experience in outsourcing, feared that the vendors may be made ‘guinea pig’ by service providers.

However, ING’s Subramanium favored outsourcing and gave a geographic dimension. He said, “the Bangalore environment has been very favorable for outsourcing unlike other cities.”

“Changing technology itself is one the big challenge to keep up with the security. Laying down a good security policy in the company and adherence of the same is very important. Users have to be trained and awareness has to be created about security,” the panel reiterated during the panel discussion on “Information Security Infrastructure in the midst of growing security threats.’

The panelists included Albert Herbert, CIO, Wockhardt Hostpital, Unni Nambiar, CIO, Cbay Systems, Vishak Raman, country manager-India and SAARC, Fortinet and Atul Kumar, chief manager-IT, Syndicate Bank.

Raman said, “With newer applications coming in the market, vulnerability comes along with it. It has to be coupled with process, people and training. Further, threats have now moved from network vector to application vector.”

Commenting on the advantages of the Integrated Security Appliances/Solution (ISA), Nambiar, said that ISA has helped in lowering the cost, centralized management, resources training but negative aspect is centralized failure and less trained manpower available in the market.

The Dataquest CIO summit held every quarter looks at discussing various IT issues faced by enterprises. The next summit will be held in Kolkata on Sep 12, 2006.

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