With almost two decades of technical experience, Joy Bagish is an asset to the Apeejay Surrendra Group, where he is responsible for driving end-to-end IT infrastructure management practices and implementation — including telecommunications across the group companies. Joy has profound knowledge in setting up mail servers on different platforms. He is also a certified ITIL professional.
His mentor Subhasish Saha, CTO, Apeejay Surrendra Group, says Joy has the ability to take up new challenges and provide solutions. For instance, he has a unique personal attribute — a high degree of enthusiasm and courage to take up new technology challenges. “We did not have an answer to provide secured e-mail access to company mails on iPad without compromising network security. Joy quickly came up with a unique solution to use an external SMTP service, integrating it with a separate in-house POP3 setup — and delivered this in a week’s time,” says Saha. While it is common to hear mentees talking about what they learn from their mentors, few mentors are outspoken about what they pick up from their mentees. In this case, Saha learned some important best practices from his mentee, Joy Bagish.
“While creating the virtualization strategy, I was initially not very comfortable in integrating multiple technologies, and was concentrating on VMware only. While discussing this with Joy, I found out that mix and match of multiple virtualization technologies would provide better business benefits. Joy had really pushed me to think differently,” says Saha.
CHALLENGES These days Joy’s biggest challenge is protecting the group’s IT infrastructure in the advent of employees bringing in their own devices and plugging them into the corporate network. He says new technology (and gadgets) set him thinking about striking the right balance between control and providing access. “While users have a defensive attitude, my priority is towards safeguarding technology rather than providing customer delight. We faced a similar problem while providing access to social networking sites,” says Joy.
The other challenge that he grapples with is changing people’s mindsets. According to Joy, IT is no longer seen as a technology department; rather it is a group of people who are supposed to be business partners.
“I see challenges in the team emerging from the technology mindset. A framework has been created to foster a discipline of participating and learning business processes through a formal learning and development program. They are also participating actively in business projects, with a substantial KRA percentage,” informs Joy.
PROJECTS
Joy has proved his IT infrastructural skills through large project implementations like consolidation and virtualization of the group’s data center, implementation of multi-tier network security and other projects. He was also involved in the Check Point firewall implementation. Virtualization at Apeejay was a unique implementation where existing low-end servers were used as VM servers, thereby consolidating almost 38 servers. Joy contributed by implementing multi-layer and perimeter security. He was also involved in the planning and strategy. Currently he is busy revamping the SAN for the entire group. Joy’s contribution in setting up the group’s DR data center at Badarpur for key applications, has been appreciated.