Monthly Archives: December 2009

Aujas @ CIO Year Ahead | 2010

December 16, 2009 6:18 am 1 Comment

We are just back from the “CIO – The Year Ahead” event organized by IDG Media. The event is a premier forward looking annual event for CIO’s in India. We had about ~ 90 CIO’s & IT Heads there to examine technology trends for the coming year.

The last CIO event was held at Singapore, but this time it was held in India – at the beautiful locale of Royal Palms, Bangalore. A very nice place and add to it the beautiful Bangalore weather. Maybe that explained the high turnout for the event by senior folks from the IT industry?

The keynote session was from Mr. B. S. Nagesh, MD of Shoppers Stop. It was probably the best presentation of the event. He spoke more from his heart than his head – challenging the present CIO’s on their next role in the organization.

As with all events there were a lot of sessions from industry folks and large technology companies – some good, some not so good. The recurrent theme was around SAAS, Cloud computing and virtualization. Reality or too much hype?

Aujas was one of the knowledge partners for the Security session. Sameer Shelke, co-founder & COO talked about “IT Risk Management – As the Economy Revives”.

He spoke about how organizations, when the economy revives, will start investing in new markets, employee growth and productivity.  But along with planning for growth, companies need to seriously look at the key Information Risk as we plan for more growth. If this down-turn hopefully taught us anything, it would be to look at Risk a little more critically.

You can find a copy of his presentation online at http://www.aujas.com/presentations.html. Feel free to download the same and if you need any more information do drop a mail at contact@aujas.com.

It was a great event. Some of the discussions around lunch and dinner were obviously more interesting than some of the presentations on the stage. Thanks to all the CIO’s for making it an interesting event. Thanks also to IDG Media team from organizing a great event. We look forward to the next event.

Filed Under: Events and Premieres

The Four Diplomatic Principles

December 16, 2009 5:44 am Leave a Comment

For those of us working in the information risk management space, times are challenging. For the last 12 to 14 months, the focus was on how we can get more out of our information assets while controlling the risk management costs. Now that the economy is showing signs of revival, we might get challenged with new forms of risk as organizations become aggressive and would try to regain lost ground and market share.

One key element which we need to manage always are our relationships, many times we hear ourselves say “My management doesn’t understand the value of risk management and security” or “My users just look at convenience and any controls we define are met with resistance” etc. Hence relationship management is important for us to be successful in our function (like most others I guess).

At a high level following are our interfaces or “Configuration items (CI)” (a term borrowed from ITIL!).

§  Management: They look at the strategic view­ – e.g. how do I grow market share?

§  Business Operations: They look at the tactical view – e.g. how do I ensure this customer 
                             is happy?

§  Employees: They look at the convenience view – e.g. I need access to this resource 
               and now.

§  Security: They look at the control view – e.g. Do exactly as I say!

Each of the above CI’s would need to align for an organization to runs its business and manage risk effectively. As Risk managers and CSO’s how do we ensure this happens and everyone contributes?

Srimad Bhagavatam speaks about Catustayam—the four diplomatic principles:

§  Saama: The process of pacifying

§  Daama: The process of giving money (rewards)

§  Danda: The principle of punishment

§  Bheda: The principle of dividing

We need to effectively apply the right principle to the right CI at the right time for the right situation to get the desired result. Hence a matrix needs to be built mapping the four CI’s and the four principles, examples of which I have attempted to explain in a presentation.

The presentation is available online at:

http://www.aujas.com/presentations.html

 

 

Filed Under: Risk management