Dalmia cement has taken a step forward moving to cloud and latest security applications to support rapid growth
NAVDEEP SINGH AHLUWALIA
DALMIA CEMENT (BHARAT)
We have undertaken several projects such as moving emailing system to Cloud, deployment of IP telephony on MPLS network, securing official critical data on Cloud with access permissions and deduplication and centralised, secure and green printing.
Since 1939, Dalmia Cement has dominated the fast-growing cement sector in the country. Though the modern cement manufacturing market in India is getting more and more competitive with each passing day, Dalmia Cement is registering manifold growth in terms of capacity, both organically and inorganically.
In fiscal 2017 alone, the company's volumes grew 20 per cent. To support this rapid growth, the cement firm's CIO Navdeep Singh Ahluwalia has been working on a digital transformation journey to ensure the growth remains frictionless.
Legacy had created several challenges for the company's IT infrastructure. “Legacy infrastructure was increasing risk due to non-availability of patches, default and hard-coded passwords configured in applications,” explains Ahluwalia.
Customisations in legacy systems were a limiting factor to upgrade to new versions and compatibility of applications with older versions of browsers and Java. While in-house developed applications and developers had moved on, the Operating System was at the end of life for support and patches which were specifically Windows XP and Windows 2003.
After doing an impact analysis of changing hard-coded passwords at regular intervals and deploying monitoring tools for identifying and managing these legacy systems for suspicious or unusual activity, Dalmia Cement probed the possibility of migrating these legacy systems to Cloud. Once the results of the cost analyses of maintaining the current legacy system came out, it became clear as to where the company had to head.
“Digital transformation is a new advantage for the business and is affecting all areas of the organisation i.e. business models, processes and infrastructure. To achieve this, a collaboration is a must between employees/ users of different departments,” he opines.
Various tools have been deployed by Ahluwalia to increase collaboration between different business groups which include Cloud-based programmes like Google Drive for sharing files, Hangout on mobile devices for video conferencing, providing access to old hard copies of data by converting into digital data and accessibility via Document Management System (DMS), deploying mobile applications for collaboration and centralised, secure and green printing – removed individual desk printers, reduced paper and toner cost.
What this has resulted into is an anywhere-anytime access to emails and secure and encrypted telephone communication between all plants and regional offices. In addition, competitive and sensitive company data is now secure on Cloud and is not dependent on the hardware. Employees can connect to emails and data using dual factor authentication.
Ahluwalia has also introduced internal campaigns to ensure that the users are now aware of the pro and cons of data copying and leakage of official data. But the journey does not end here. As it is an agile environment, it was also important that Dalmia Cement itself turned agile.
“We are working with start-ups to adopt the fail fast approach as organisations do not want to spend months in projects and new business requirements,” says Ahluwalia, adding, “With the evolution of technology – innovation and business models are becoming more disruptive. This is instigating established organisations and start-ups to learn from each other. For creating start-up culture, established organisations require change in management and leadership. The irony is that in lean/ agile start-ups, the impact of failure is smaller in comparison with established organisations.”
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