Info Leakage Prevention: Foremost Security Imperative

How are you managing your data intelligently? What are the innovative ways that you have adopted?

Today, as part of one large repository, the need of the hour is data integration, consolidating and managing pre-existing as well as current information from multiple sources - across domains, functions / silos, and industries. It is important to have a robust up-to-date data integration platform, that houses all relevant studies and data - from market sales, equity studies, to consumer data on preferences and needs, such data that will enable decision makers to quickly access information on a key variable, as well as query against existing data from past studies to gain meaningful insights. At WNS, we manage data in fairly innovative ways as mentioned below:

• We have a unified storage fabric available; all types of storage are hosted on the same kind of hardware and managed through a single console.
• We have invested in space efficient cloning; Thus, reducing time to clone and improve storage efficiency (resulting in low power consumption, lesser space or lower cooling required)
  What pain-points do CIOs/IT heads have with regard to data consolidation? How can they overcome them?

Most CIOs/IT Organisations have similar challenges with regards to consolidating data. Some of them are as follows:

• Manage data growth — Make smart decisions about where and how you store data.
• Keep data accessible — Ensure data is readily available to meet compliance and business unit requirements.
• Reduce risk — Eliminate costly data loss, reduplication errors, access problems and backup challenges.
• Protect against disaster — Create data copies that can be cost-effectively stored and quickly recovered.
• Control incremental expenses

These challenges can be overcome by managing data intelligently. All content must be prioritised and classified so that data is stored appropriately (i.e. the right category of data should match the right classification). Always ensure a balance between capacity and demand that enables scaling up storage as per business needs.

What are the current data security issues? what solutions are you offering to counter them?

We are living in an era of interconnected enterprises where in an outsourcing environment business processes are delivered across continents, Information security assurance attains vital priority for an enduring business relationship. WNS’s security framework has evolved over the years focusing on this objective and has achieved a right balance of intelligent security platforms, integrated with robust processes towards safeguarding its extended enterprise. In an information centric organisation like WNS, Information leakage prevention figures as one of the foremost security imperatives and has been addressed with an amalgamation of the right security systems and human intelligence. Some of the measures around this space are summarised below:

• WNS has appointed a 24*7 incident response & security monitoring team under the CISO umbrella to continuously monitor all WNS managed information transmission channels to pre-empt data extrusion attempts
• Automated rule based monitoring coupled with human intelligence for proactive detection and deterrence of data extrusion attempts rather than applying reactive approach. All e-mails sent from the WNS mailing system to public domains are deferred for delivery for pre-determined time period so as to enable security monitoring team to manually validate the contents sent out with e-mails by using a highly customisable e-mail Content Filtering Solution
• Effective implementation of host DLP (Data leakage prevention) platform to ensure protection against data extrusion attempts over mass storage devices and the web
• Implementation of Hard Disk encryption to ensure unauthorised exposure due to theft of mobile computing assets especially laptops
• Implementation of Enterprise wide SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) with the WNS Security Operations Centre (SOC) providing convergence of multiple security monitoring systems in a centralised application / log repository. This new avatar of the WNS SOC has improved the ability to recognise and react to threats in real-time under one Holy Grail and aided resource consolidation; optimised manpower; improved automation and enhanced visibility into the enterprise security stature
• Convergence of logical security and physical security incident management into a single application with the aim of providing a common platform for managing security incidents

Please throw some light on storage virtualisation trends?

As a company’s digital data increases and becomes more globally distributed, storage becomes a key issue. Traditional solutions designed a few years ago, are no longer relevant as they are not designed to face challenges of the future.Thus, the question to consider is that, what is storage virtualisation and why is it so important? Storage virtualisation can be best described as the pooling of multiple physical storage resources into a centrally managed single storage resource. There are three reasons why this approach is being adopted now a days:

• In the recent past, there has been an increase in Solid State disks with better performance & lower energy costs.
• Higher adoption of de-duplication technologies for more efficient utilisation of unused space
• Thin & dynamic provisioning of storage will ensure that the growth of storage is controlled and more prudent

Storage trends. What technologies are being aggressively adopted?

WNS is taking outstanding initiatives in storage deployment where the results show a significant reduction in operating expenses and reduction in the carbon footprint of its datacentres. Some of the technologies, WNS is aggresively adopting in storage deployment are as follows:

• True Multi-tenancy for virtualised environments
• Application Integrated Snapshot, Restore & Replication for VI (VMware, HyperV, Oracle, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint & SAP)