CIOIN

R.D. Malav

VP-IT, Jindal Poly Films

“Collaborative technologies are great, but they have side effects. This made information security vital.”

Executive summary

Colleborative techniques are great, but they also make your organization vulnerable to security threats. This CIO made security a priority during the slowdown and saved over Rs 80 lakh annually.

A part of the Rs 3,000-crore B.C. Jindal Group, the 25-year-old Jindal Polyfilm is the largest manufacturer of PET film and BOPP films in the country with revenues of Rs 2,000 crore.

Like all companies, Jindal Polyfilm depended heavily on the Internet, e-mail and its intranet for communication and collaboration. But these technologies were also the source of great insecurity. They posed significant risks to the company's intellectual property and left it open to spam, virus attacks, and hacking. There was also the issue of internal users violating the Indian IT Act, which held legal implications for the organization.

"There are good things about collaborative technologies, but they come with side effects. This made information security the need of the hour," says R.D. Malav, VP-IT, Jindal Poly Films.

Because the problem was on multiple levels, Malav came up with a two-pronged plan to secure the enterprise. The solution he envisaged defended the company at the gateway and desktop level. He installed Barracuda's anti-spamming solution, UTM boxes from Sonicwall and deployed a central active directory policy as well as central Microsoft patch management at the server level. At the desktop level, Malav deployed Microsoft ForeFront Client Security.

Although he needed to invest Rs 32 lakh into the project, that was not the only challenge he faced. "We needed to bring all desktops and laptops to the requisite patch level and standardize operating systems across all locations," says Malav. Another issue he had to face but managed to tame was change management.

Unlike many security projects, Malav quantified the results of his efforts clearly. According to his calculations, each spam e-mail cost the company Rs 0.50, which accounted for network bandwidth, space on the server, and employee productivity. With about 46,000 spam e-mails pouring into the company every day, Malav calculated his savings at about Rs 82.8 lakh a year. In addition, he saved Rs 1.2 crore in downtime due to virus attacks (about four hours a month for 2,000 users). "And this does not even take into account the cost of legal liabilities and the value of our intellectual property that would have added to the company's loss," says Malav.