"Ensuring Compliance With Innovation Is The Biggest Challenge"

Fulfilling customer demands in order to remain competitive in the sensitive software industry and bringing in innovations in technology are some of the challenges faced by Polaris Software Labs. In an interview with Biztech2.0, CEO V Balakrishnan speaks about his key challenges and the various technological innovations done by Polaris to maintain a competitive edge.

How has the IT scenario changed over the last five years?

IT is important in doing business in the present day, whether it is a software company or any other company. The IT environment scenario has totally changed over the past few years. Now the affordability of software has made things easier for enterprises, and packaged software like ERP is available at an affordable price even to small organisations. There’s a lot of consolidation in the packaged software segment. Price points have come down drastically. Now vendors have come up with integrated solution offerings that have various applications integrated into it.

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What applications are used internally by Polaris Software Labs to maintain a competitive edge?

We are outsourcing some of the services, such as desktop management and IT services delivery infrastructure. We have deployed software inventory management applications, which take care of software delivery, licenses deployment, and compliance and asset details. We also recently deployed logging and audit assistance software such as activity tracking and review tools.

As far as compliance is concerned, we maintain our own security and compliance standards internally in alignment with industry standards like BS7799 security certification. In case of dedicated development centres linked to specific customers, we maintain various compliance standards as per requirements and demands of customers, as per mutual agreement.

We also use NetApp backup and recovery solution, which offers instant auditability and takes care of data management needs. Apart from providing regular applications like backup and recovery, it helps us to manage enterprise-critical applications.

What are the challenges faced by you as the CIO of a software company?

Maintaining technology freedom from users while ensuring maximum protection is the biggest challenge for the CIO of a software company. As we’re into software development, we cannot put a stop to innovation. Ensuring compliance along with security and at the same time bringing innovation is the biggest challenge before me. It is very essential to try new technology and put them in place as and when required. We can’t give our responsibility to any vendor. It is our job to take the responsibility of setting up the infrastructure and maintaining them simultaneously.

Maintaining a balance between technology freedom and security/compliance enforcement makes our job challenging. We have to solve our problem and check different levels of security to provide to different levels of employees. Therefore, we’ve compartmentalised the entire system and processes into various zones depending on the compliance standard, users and security levels.

What is the biggest innovation done by the internal IT team so far?

Developing identity management is the biggest achievement by our internal IT team so far. It ensures integrity in managing identities across all applications in the company and also doubles as an employee portal. We’ve been using this identity management solution internally for the last seven years. We’ve also started marketing this product as Adrenalin to our customers and it’s been getting good acceptance across verticals.

As a software development company, security is a major concern. Could you throw some light on your security strategy?

We follow a very strong and robust security implementation policy at Polaris. We have deployed intrusion prevention systems, entry point firewall on the Internet, firewalls between internal network segments, encryption devices on our network, network storage systems for DR, and spam and virus control devices. We also have a very strong identity management solution in place. We selectively permit connections from personal mobile devices of our staff to the company network for official use whenever required, for which we also have a security policy. Our sales staff can use their personal devices but the software development teams working on customer projects are bound by strict controls to ensure that we don’t compromise the information related to our customers.

Which enterprise technology do you think is most important to a software company?

As far as Polaris is concerned I think virtualisation is the most important technology for us, whether it is application or server or desktop virtualisation. We have already taken various initiatives in this regard. We’re using high-end software tools so it is very important to virtualise the application environment. The benefits of virtualisation vary depending on the objectives of the organisation, the specific virtualisation technologies selected and the existing IT infrastructure. A key motivation for its use is to run more applications on a single server, making better use of its processing power while reducing the number of machines.

The IT services delivery is also an important technology for us. We’ve developed a service delivery model along with CA’s solution. We have mixed our solutions with CA and customised the solution according to requirements, and extended the use of it to HR and other departments.

What enterprise component or technology will be growing most in terms of its slice of your company’s budget pie in the next year?

We have already started deploying an integrated network solution to handle the voice, conferencing, chat and other interactive applications with the help of other vendors. It is a kind of ‘unified communication’ but there are many other collaborative applications attached with this.

We have used multi-vendor solutions in the whole processes. We’re integrating solutions obtained from Polycom, BT managed network, CISCO network solutions and links from multiple service providers to build this network. We’ve already finalised most of the design and within the next three months we hope to roll out the first phase of implementation.