Nothing volatile in this IT index

JAIPUR, INDIA: Everything has returns and then everything has risks. There is always a need of that savvy calculator who can juggle the two extremes with ease and poise. Vijay Kumar Talreja, Director, IT at Ambit Holdings Private Ltd helps us with some arithmetic on current IT trends and how his desk is same or different from what banking industry does with IT. More here...

Would you call your industry an early adopter or a wait-and-watch investor in IT?

In our industry, technology is rather the lifeline. Even in banking, things can go on to some level without IT but in broking and that too an institutional broking major, no manual business continuity is possible. A system down spells into straight financial loss. You really need something like an auto failure or Disaster Recovery (DR) here. Every nano-second latency means a lot for our business.

What is your top-of-mind priority or concern then?

We are trying to figure out trading support applications. While DR is so far not mandatory here unlike banking industry, except for a recommendation, we are trying to ensure uptime with server virtualization. We have opted for VMware there. The next step would be a good DR. We are the first hybrid cloud financial services industry in India. After server virtualization, our next step would be private cloud, then hybrid cloud, and then DR-as-a-service.

Tell us more about this facet?

We started this cloud journey three years back as we saw a lot of IT team time going in managing messaging manually and add to that downtime as well as archival issues. So we went ahead with Google solution. In a month's time it took care of all issues. Cloud is a good trend. As to hybrid clouds, things work well if an industry is comfortable with its data lying in the ether and regulators do not want everything right in front of the eye.

Has compliance caught up with IT so far?

The biggest challenge in India is that one has to align with regulatory frameworks and that did come up as a concern when we thought of Cloud.

Does IT trickle down uniformly from the top to all across the group in your organization?

We have a shared-services infrastructure model. IT is more or less uniform but what may differ is some business applications, specially third-party ones.