A Peek Into Orbis' IT Orbit

Orbis Financial is a recent entrant in the financial services space. It got the nod from SEBI to commence Custodial services in India in July 2008. Given the nature of operations, and the amount of Information technology support that it needs the company has been very swift in completing major IT projects in recent times. Atul Gupta, MD, Orbis Financial has been at the helm of it and he gives a Biztech 2.0 a quick run through of these IT initiatives.

How critical is the Role of IT at Orbis Financial?

We strongly believe that organisational growth, and responsiveness to competition, depends on the management’s ability to identify, plan and execute an effective strategy, to compete in the global markets. Being a financial services provider, we understand the vital role of IT for its business, and ensure that it is powered by technology, which is robust, reliable, scalable, secured, energy efficient, and most importantly aligned with business.

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Orbis, as a custodian of securities, firmly believes that the key differentiator is being agile and innovative in the face of change. As the company operates with Securities, there are a number of issues. Important issues include- data security, availability of systems & applications and their performance, faster provisioning of IT resources, communication with Exchanges & Clients, and Business Continuity. By being business enablers, the technology function has enabled us to project ourselves as a competitive service provider in the custodial market in India, by allowing us to meet the desired expectations of our clients under dynamic market conditions.

Please tell us about the green data centre and virtualisation IT Projects, undertaken at Orbis Financial

Our data centre is completely virtualised with a centrally manageable IBM blade server technology and next-generation environmental control system with redundancy at every level. What this means to Orbis is an energy efficient system that reduces power and cooling consumption. It also helps us in reducing the actual use of real estate space.

At Orbis, we have opted for VMware’s virtualisation software. It helps us in scalability, better capacity management; lower Total Cost of Ownership, server and space consolidation, optimisation and better utilisation of hardware resources and green computing. It is also the backbone of our disaster recovery setup, and allows enhanced and automated DR Process.

What benefits has Orbis Financial achieved with a virtual desktop infrastructure with thin clients?

Our employees are provided with thin clients instead of traditional desktop PCs. Users access virtual desktop images hosted in the virtual infrastructure using VMware. We have seen complete value for money in opting for this technology. It offers centralised management and control, lower acquisition costs, lower total cost of ownership, security, flexibility, the space benefits of a small footprint desktop device, ease of use, greener technology and many more. Managing the IT infrastructure is now easier and faster, ensuring high uptime of the client node resulting in customer satisfaction as a whole. We have also managed to reduce total cost of ownership substantially. Our IT administrator is able to centrally and remotely monitor and maintain thin client terminals, and also provides remote support. We believe this technology is completely secure, as all sensitive data is saved on a server and requires a secure log-in to get access. USB devices can be disabled and enabled by administrators. Because thin client terminals are completely secure, there are very little user errors. Risk of data theft and loss of data is minimised to a great extent as centralised manageability of virtual servers reduces the risk involved with it.

What have been some major recent IT Projects at Orbis Financial?

We have implemented the DLP software, which has just started to draw the attention of organisations. DLP software helps us greatly to protect information, which is most valuable and also key business assets. It helps us to mitigate the risks associated with data leakage or loss by proactively locating and controlling sensitive data across endpoint, network and storage systems.

Our complete data backup processing is automated using IBM Tape Library with CommVault Backup software, which is centrally administered, meets all compliance requirements, reduces backup failure and enables faster backups with lesser manual intervention.

Subsequent to achieving ISO 9001:2008 Certification, we have already initiated the process of getting ISO 27001 Certification for our systems.