Thoroughly study your IT infrastructure and identify areas where cloud can fit in with minimum challenges -- It is not something which can fit all sizes.
What started with Dinesh Thakkar beginning operations as a sub-broker with two employees and a client base of 25 is now a company with 158 branches with 20 regional hubs. A member of BSE, NSE and two leading commodity exchanges NCDEX and MCX, Angel Broking has a robust IT infrastructure to meet its varied needs. It is linked with the largest trading terminal base of 18,893 terminals and has a base of 8500+ sub-brokers and business associates, employee strength of 5200+ and a 100-member research team in equities and commodities, not to forget more than 7.91 lakh clients. Ketan Shah, associate director, IT and business development, Angel Broking, talks about how crucial it is for the company to be IT ready for future and where cloud features in its scheme of things. Excerpts:
What are some of the IT needs for a company such as yours?
At Angel, IT infrastructure supports 160+ branches, 8000+ franchisees and over eight lakh customers. Our branches and franchisees are connected to us using heterogeneous technology -- be it MPLS, Vsat, VPN or wireless. We have ensured 100 per cent resiliency at each layer, accompanied with high-end auto fail-over technology and stringent IT processes.
This has enabled us to meet 99.99 per cent business up-time in such a humongous IT environment. The focus while building IT infrastructure is on robustness, user-friendliness and cost-effectiveness for our customers.
Does cloud computing feature in your IT infrastructure in any way? If yes, in what capacity?
We started using infrastructure over cloud many years ago when we hosted our facilities for trading content delivery at service providers and now it has become the trend in the industry. With different kinds of cloud technologies available in the market -- infrastructure over cloud, application over cloud and so on -- we are quite open to such promising technology and have already moved our mailing application over the cloud. Industry agnostic applications like mail, CRMS, HRMS and so on are the prime candidate to be moved over the public cloud while primary business applications are also considered for private cloud as the TAT defined are very stringent and the response time expected is minimal.
What are the benefits you have derived from cloud and what are the hurdles that posed as challenges in the beginning?
We consider cloud as a gen-next technology that will be adopted widely across industries. We strongly believe that the right strategy towards cloud deployment can improve uptime and RoI. It also addresses the scalability issues and organizations can scale up or down their infrastructure on the fly. We have migrated our email and collaboration infrastructure on public cloud and have done away with hectic management, maintenance and high availability routines and now our same resources can focus on innovation and other operational aspects.
Proper evaluation plus a good interactive session with public cloud provider will ensure that your infrastructure is in the right hands. The initial decision of moving services on public cloud had raised concern over security and user acceptance. But various security aspects available with the product and in-house campaigning and promotions have made migration successful. It is now a win-win situation where IT is offloaded with infrastructure management of public cloud resources. At the same time private cloud has helped us consolidate the IT infrastructure. However, along with consolidation, the risk too got consolidated, which was taken care of by creating an effective BCP for such high-risk infrastructure.
Do you plan to use cloud more with time?
As I said, we are quite open to implement such promising technology that can show business benefits. We have already moved our mailing and collaboration application over the cloud and are exploring the possibilities to move many more industry agnostic applications like CRMS, HRMS and so on over the public cloud. We have seen lots of benefits from cloud and are also open to move business critical applications over public cloud with the right strategy and the right partner.
What is the kind of advice you would give to a person looking for a cloud service provider?
Our advice would be to thoroughly study one's IT infrastructure and identify the areas where cloud can fit in with minimum challenges. It is not something which can fit all sizes. One needs to identify the area where cloud can be deployed, draw a roadmap and identify the right service provider, design proper processes to handle cloud or else it can go against you.
