When one emerges from a difficult period such as the downturn, it is time to retrospect and share experiences. And this is just what an exclusive gathering of CIOs did recently. During September 2009, Trend Micro, in association with United Business Media, organized a series of CIO roundtables in Mumbai, Bangalore and New Delhi. During this series there were interesting discussions on best practices, Security Compliance, Cloud Computing, SaaS, Cloud Security, Data Leakage, Green IT, open source and Virtualization.

The events began with a presentation by Mahendra Negi, CFO and COO, Trend Micro. Negi spoke about the challenges that cross-national companies face when dealing with security compliance standards, which vary across continents. There are various standards such as SOX, JSOX, ISO and PCI among others. How does a cross-national company maintain a uniform security policy and yet comply with different standards? What are the security challenges faced by companies that have centralized or distributed architectures? Trend Micro has a presence in 30 countries and Negi shared some case studies to show how his company tackles these issues. He also explained how the Cloud simplifies security management, yet introduces new challenges.

CIOs also shared their strategies for coping during the downturn and some of the bold moves they made. Sunil Mehta, Senior VP and Area Systems Director, Central Asia, JWT, said, “[In times like the downturn] you have to start looking at ways in which you can manage costs more effectively. You learn to look at areas where you can manage projects better. You learn to use IT to improve efficiency and save costs. People now want to see faster ROI.”

Some CIOs said they had set up an SBU to offer IT services to all the group companies. This not only saved costs but also ensured better response times and service levels.

Companies like HDFC Standard Life continued to invest during the downturn, with a long-term vision. Sharad Sadadekar, Associate VP-IT, HDFC Standard Life, said, “This year we invested in storage, servers and virtualization.”

Devender Manral, Data Center and Infrastructure Head, Tata AIG, said “We are a global business company. To save costs during the downturn we moved our global IT infrastructure to the Asia Pacific.”

In the downturn many businesses embraced open source solutions as a means to cut costs. The discussion on open source adoption broke into an impromptu debate on the merits and demerits of deploying open source solutions. But the unanimous conclusion was that open source adoption is a business decision, which is not done solely on the assessment of the technology.

Dinesh Kumar, Executive Director (IT), NTPC, said the public sector companies have taken a fresh view of IT and it was now easier to get a buy-in from top management for new projects.

The confidence in Cloud Computing has also increased. CIOs who have already moved their applications to the cloud agreed that it provides good security and uptime. They have worked closely with the service providers to ensure this. But they opined that widespread adoption of Cloud Computing is still three years away; it will happen once there are common cloud standards.

Vikram Watave, Head, Infrastructure Management Service, Patni, said, “There will be hybrid environments with both private and public clouds in the enterprise. In the US most of the applications that have been moving to the cloud are of the CRM and collaboration type.”

Nilesh Kumar, IT Manager, Punjab & Sind Bank said public sector banks were averse to virtualization due to security concerns.

Investments in information security continued and did not slow down during the recession. With regards to DLP (Data Leakage Protection) it was agreed that the threat is largely internal and that organizations had to enforce a policy that checked all the endpoints. Some organizations are using the existing policy-based features in the operating system, such as disabling USB drive access.

Ajay Dhir, CIO, JSL, said security vendors must offer a 360 degree solution that also takes care of compliance and risk assessment. M D Agarwal, Deputy GM – IS Refinery, BPCL, said, “Security companies should work closely with hardware and software vendors at the development stages itself. This will make for more robust security solutions.”

Murali K K, VP and Head, Information Systems, Infosys Technologies, and Laxman Badiga, CIO, Wipro Technologies, shared the sustainability initiatives taken by their respective companies to reduce the carbon footprint and to protect the environment.