Mohit Rochlani Director, Operations and IT, IndiaFirst Life Insurance
Banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) enterprises today are increasingly realising the need to digitise their operations and become a part of an interconnected ecosystem of cross-industry providers to meet the everyday needs of customers. In doing so, the role of telecom and IT is critical. As such, BFSI enterprises are stepping up investments in IT and telecom infrastructure to enhance operational efficiencies and meet customer demands. Leading enterprises in the BFSI industry discuss their IT strategies, current and emerging technology trends, and plans for upgrading their IT infrastructure…
How has telecom and IT helped banks enhance their business performance?
I believe financial services organisations would be dysfunctional in the absence of telecom and IT enablers. The Stable and Scalable Mobility platform is the current game changer and its adoption is essential for any enterprise to succeed.
What are the key enterprise services and solutions adopted by the banking sector?
At IndiaFirst, we have moved our disaster recovery (DR) operations fully to the private cloud and this works on the pay-per-use model. This gives us flexibility during our actual drills. In addition, we have implemented the pay-per-use collaboration platform, which has helped us immensely. IndiaFirst has also launched a mobile app for its sales force to facilitate the automation of data capture at the point of sale and minimise the policy issuance time.
What is your company’s telecom and IT blueprint? What new IT initiatives has the company taken recently and what were its benefits?
Our IT needs are similar to what other enterprises require in general. The role of our IT infrastructure is to enhance productivity and efficiency. IndiaFirst has data centres in different seismic zones. We recently shifted our DR operations to the private cloud, which was the first-of-its-kind set-up by any insurance company in India. The initiative involved the implementation of a strategic and technological innovation for transforming the existing IT infrastructure dedicated to DR. The recovery is done through the use of emerging technology in the form of cloud-hosted infrastructure-as-a-service. This has resulted in extensive cost benefits of up to Rs 130 million (approximately $2 million) by making adequate resources available for upgrading existing data centre infrastructure post the DR migration to the cloud from the erstwhile on-premise or co-located DR site.
What are the challenges faced in implementing new technologies?
The biggest challenge was finalising a cloud service provider. This was successfully resolved as there was a security concern of ensuring that data and information hosted on DR is limited within India and preventing the same from moving outside the country. This decision proved to be particularly useful as six months after the implementation of DR, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority released new regulations, as per which insurance organisations are required to ensure storage of policyholder information in information systems located within India. Thus, the biggest challenge was successfully resolved with the foresightful decision that helped us comply well in advance with the regulatory requirements on hosting data, even before the regulations were officially published.
What are the company’s plans for upgrading its telecom and IT infrastructure?
IndiaFirst is implementing key changes in its infra architecture such as redesigning the backup architecture, revamping networking devices with next-gen devices for better performance and add-on security controls. We are also planning to activate our DevOps structure on the pay-per-use model on the private cloud.
What are the emerging IT and telecom trends for BFSI players?
The trends that enterprises are driving include analytics, data security, mobility, cloud adoption, digitisation and automation.
