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Access And Control
The Dataquest-Citrix CIO meet got together CIOs from various cities who discussed the issue of 'controlled access of information to the employees, partners, and associates' 

With connectivity options increasing by the day, the access to information is just a click of mouse away. While on one hand it improves productivity, on the other it puts great stress on information security managers who struggle to create various layers of security to facilitate right levels of access to information. In order to understand the ground realities, the Dataquest-Citrix CIO Meet on 'Access Vs Control', got together CIOs in Bangalore, Chennai, and Delhi, and debated the multi-pronged issues surrounding the CIOs in the realm of controlled access to information.

(L-R) Sunil Kapoor, Fortis Healthcare; AK Bhargava, MTNL; S Ramasamy, Indian Oil; PK Roy, Dataquest; Vipul Anand, Minda Group; SC Mittal, IFFCO; and SS Mathur, Ministry of Railways

The debate at Delhi centered around the important issue of security, which has put companies in a dilemma on whether to provide full or partial information access to their employees, partners, and associates. Here we provide some views aired on issues of managing access, managing control, and consolidation.

SUNIL KAPOOR, Fortis Healthcare

VIPUL ANAND, Minda Group

S RAMASAMY, Indian Oil

SC MITTAL, IFFCO

Managing Access

Sunil Kapoor of Fortis Healthcare
We have the hub and spoke model where we share patient data from remote sites. We looked at access from three modules, the physical facility per se. Then we have to give access to doctors who can use aircard of Reliance, Tata or Bharti, and access it, while on the move so that if there is an emergency they can actually review a patient. Then again there is an access point. This is facility equipment. Then we come to information domain.

Prasanto Kumar Roy, Dataquest
Remote access requires some level of service, for example, a doctor is remotely accessing through an aircard, he expects a certain response. For instance you have things such as live monitor feeds from the patient's bedside. Have you looked at your architecture in terms of delivering applications real time?

Vipul Anand, Minda Group
We have a heterogeneous network and a mixture of applications in use. We use SAP, BAAN, and Oracle. We also use in-house developed systems, and a huge network, which spans across 12 companies of the group.All our customers are also connected. For example, Maruti wants all the information to be transferred ;through EDI.

The biggest threat to our network is the problem of managing the network and applications at any given time.

Managing Control

S Ramasamy, Indian Oil
We operate 10 out of 18 refineries in India, which are located in different parts of the country. Some of them are located in Northeast. We have about 9,000 km of pipeline network. We have a large marketing network of about 25,000 end points. We have decided to go in for IT to enable process in our company. In this process, we have taken up massive ERP implementation.

We are one of the largest implementers in the Southeast Asia. Presently, SAP is running at around 600 locations. In this process, we need to have a very high level of technological help in terms of servers and network. We operate our own hubs. We have about 320 VSATS. Given our size, access and control is very important.  When you talk of access, it is desirable to have faster and easier access.

Consolidation

SC Mittal, IFFCO 
In IFFCO, we deployed e-procurement about two years back and it is based on PKI technologies and digital certifications.

Initially when we started e-procurement, we were having applications servers in different plant locations and database servers. Getting the vendors to the database servers whenever tenders or bids were placed was a Herculean task because bandwidth at all these locations was difficult. We decided to move the application server to our corporate office in Delhi and the database services in plants.

Shrikanth G 
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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