The Divergent Twins In IT

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