For a company with varied interests in the financial services space with offerings ranging from equity research, equities and derivatives trading, commodities trading to loan products as well as investment banking, it is necessary that it optimally maintain its IT backbone. On this front, India Infoline Group (comprising the holding company, India Infoline Limited and its wholly-owned subsidiaries), did conduct an experiment much heard of, when it comes to
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cloud
computing for the enterprise. A year ago, India Infoline needed to upgrade its trading
software, which runs at its peak during trading hours, and ran on 70 odd servers. India Infoline
took ten days to migrate around 54 broadcast servers to the cloud, as against the almost six weeks
timeframe required to provision a server in-house.
"For the success
of cloud computing in our enterprise environment, it was essential to ensure that both the
versions of our trading application ran fine during migration. It was a tough call when it came to
procuring 70 more servers to run the new application in parallel," says Sankarson Banerjee, the CIO
of India Infoline.
Since it was not possible to buy 70 additional servers, Banerjee settled on using Netmagic's cloud
computing service. "We must have been one of the first companies in India to run production servers
on the cloud," says Banerjee. These projects started off with the migration of two servers. Since
the performance of broadcast servers is time sensitive, there were doubts about the Netmagic cloud's
performance capabilities. Scalability issues were also concerns, when it came to auto scaling.
Another concern for India Infoline revolved around backups of data on the cloud. However, these
worries proved to be quite unfounded in nature.
India Infoline's second experiment with cloud
computing for the enterprise started off when the company encountered issues with its email
system. "Email is not a core function, but getting it wrong can be costly. Most of our users are
basic email users, and we had to make sure they are not inconvenienced," says Banerjee. These
glitches were numerous, including unreliable email delivery, limited features, poor spam filtering,
and excessive usage of bandwidth. India Infoline had many options on this front, but they were
expensive. So India Infoline decided to opt for Google Mail as the cloud
computing platform of choice for the enterprise. "It integrates really well with Outlook and
has low predictable TCOs. The best part was that everyone was familiar with it," says Banerjee.
Google Mail's built-in spam control is a blessing, according to India Infoline.
Talking about cloud
computing's benefits for enterprise applications, Banerjee says, "I don't have to worry about
predicting our technology roadmap now." Apart from this benefit, utilizing cloud computing for the
enterprise also reduces India Infoline's technology infrastructure management headaches.