Star Union Dai-ichi Life Places Its Bets On Cloud Platform

Summary:

With the I.R.D.A breathing down heavily on Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance to set up a Disaster recovery site, former Head-I.T., Harnath Babu chose a path only a handful of his peers would be willing to take: Go public cloud.

Highlights:

The Rs 9-lakh project was executed in just 10 days, allowing Babu to meet IRDA’s deadline and save his organization Rs 20 lakh

Reader ROI:

How futuristic vision helps an individual sniff out opportunities and envision change

For much of March of 2010, Harnath Babu, former head-IT at Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance, wore a particular look: A jaw set in determination and frown that furrowed his otherwise unlined forehead.

His worries didn’t stem from the health of the business. That was fine. It was the weight of deadline that weighed heavily on him. Some months ago, the industry’s watchdog IRDA (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority) had given the company a deadline to create a disaster recovery (DR) set up for its investment management system. That deadline was March 2010. Although Babu had bought more time from IRDA—till December 2010—he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to meet that deadline.

It wasn’t that Babu was being laid back; he already had a larger DR project in the works. But the compulsions of being a start up—the company had launched operations barely a year ago, in February 2009—including budget restrictions for a capital intensive DR, and a small IT team, were making it an uphill task to get the DR project off the ground. And although they had a temporary DR set up in Bangalore, it wouldn’t meet their long-term needs. Planning to dovetail the DR for the investment management system into the larger DR project would only delay it. In the meanwhile IRDA was breathing down his neck. “Building our own DR would take more than a year. But we could not wait for that large project to be completed. I thought it wise to take another approach to address the issue of the investment management system,” says Babu.

Babu’s gut told him that the solution lay in a collocation model. “But this would have its own set of issues. We would have to go to a vendor, procure servers, place them, and deploy manpower to manage the servers. That called for a huge investment in time and capital. I just wasn’t convinced this approach would work,” he says.

Babu was running out of choices.

My own credibility was at stake in this project. Had it not succeeded we would have gone ahead with the collocation model but we would have definitely not meet the timelines set by the regulator

Plan B During his search for a solution, Babu had a chance meeting with the managing director of Sify. From their conversation Babu learnt that using a cloud platform to solve his DR problems would help him meet his timeline—and ensure he didn’t spend a truckload of cash on the project.

Babu liked the idea but he knew that the overwhelming majority of his peers—Indian CIOs cutting across sectors—were uncomfortable with the idea of a public cloud. According to CIO research, only about 4 percent of Indian CIOs say that they would use a public cloud. While not one to seek the safety of numbers, Babu found it hard to ignore the overwhelming verdict of his peers.

At the same time, Babu was drawn to the solution, mainly because of a trait called futuristic vision. People equipped with futuristic vision tend to continuously scan their environments in search of future trends and are often ahead of their time. They sniff out opportunities, exhibit a willingness to take risks to pursue their vision, and have the ability to organize people to chase that vision. In their book, The Leadership Challenge, award-winning leadership authors James Kouze and Barry Posner found that futuristic vision is one of the five most important behavioral traits of a leader. For Babu, the only way ahead was to dive deeper into the potential cloud solution and throw a bright light on the problems surrounding it, in the hope that this would make them disappear. Weighing most heavily on Babu’s mind were apprehensions around the security arrangements of the service provider. He decided to conduct a full-scale investigation into the service provider’s set up. He visited their datacenter in Bangalore to check on the kind of infrastructure they had placed for the cloud. He also studied how they could ensure secured access to data and how to monitor the

NOC. The bright light vaporized his doubts.

“I was convinced with the kind of hardware and servers they had placed. They did not use sub-standard hardware. And they had an adequate support infrastructure. The other thing was that the cloud was in a Tier-III datacenter, and India has only one Tier IV datacenter,” he says.

Now he had to find a way to convince his management.

My own credibility was at stake in this project. Had it not succeeded we would have gone ahead with the collocation model but we would have definitely not meet the timelines set by the regulator

Back to the Future About eighteen months ago, about the time that the hype around the cloud started peaking, one of the arguments in its favor was that CFOs everywhere loved the concept. The word that technology vendors put out on the street was that CFOs—the people a majority of CIOs report to—couldn’t get enough of the idea that technology no longer had to be a huge capital expense. And that if CIOs didn’t push the technology delivery mechanism, their bosses would.

That, it seems, couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality, managements aren’t as trigger-happy to go cloud as they have been made out to be. And for good reason. As more CIOs start going down the cloud route, it’s becoming apparent that management aren’t willing to endanger the security of their data to save cost. That was one of the blockades in Babu’s way. When he built a strong business case for the cloud as a solution for the company’s DR problem, and presented it to his senior management, he wasn’t received with the level of enthusiasm he expected.  His management was unfamiliar with the concept and was skeptical of the platform’s maturity. “Cloud computing is still in a nascent stage. Most organizations are still testing the waters. And security was another big concern for them,” Babu says.

But convinced that the cloud solution was air-tight, Babu decided to take another approach. He presented them with a cost-benefit analysis of the solution and convinced them that the company’s data was secure. “I told them that if we created our own DR for the investment management system, we would end up investing a lot of time and money,” says Babu. “The cloud could help us save between 60-70 percent of the cost.” The bait worked and his management gave him the go ahead.

Once he secured management buy-in, he worked quickly. He built the access from the service provider’s Bangalore datacenter to the company’s datacenter. Close monitoring and control helped him ensure a speedy execution. The Rs 9-lakh project was executed in just 10 days, allowing Babu to meet IRDA’s deadline and save his organization Rs 20 lakh.

“My own credibility was at stake in this project. Had it not succeeded we would have gone ahead with the collocation model but we would have definitely not meet the timelines set by the regulator,” he says.