Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL) has grown rapidly by taking a road less travelled. When most large banks were averse to lending to low- and middle-income groups, DHFL took a bold approach and offered loans to this segment. As a result of this innovative approach, DHFL is now one of India’s largest housing finance companies. To cater effectively to its customers, the firm has an extensive network of 105 branches, 67 service centers, 26 camps and seven regional processing offices spread across the length and breadth of the country.

The firm, with its corporate office in Mumbai, communicates with its branch offices primarily through e-mails. Over time, as its business dependence on e-mail increased, the firm also faced the growing menace of spam e-mails. For example, the firm was dealing with more than 6 lakh e-mails per month, of which 20 percent were spam.

“On an average, our users were getting around 8-10 spam e-mails per day. Our IT team soon became inundated with calls from frustrated users as spam mails continually clogged up the company’s e-mail bandwidth. Our IT team also found that resources were being over-burdened with approximately two man-hours per week allocated to operational duties dealing with security issues,” states Satish Kotian, Head-IT, DHFL. For a fast expanding firm, this issue was not only restricting the IT team from focusing on innovating in IT, but was also proving to be a highly expensive activity for the firm.

Cloud advantage

DHFL scouted for solutions and finally decided to go for a cloud-based solution. The reasoning was simple — the firm wanted a solution that required little or no management on their part, and at the same time, provided comprehensive protection for its network. “We discovered that traditional solutions in the market required extensive investment on hardware, appliances and licenses, including costs related to management,” says Kotian. Thus, the firm turned to Symantec for availing its cloud-based security solution.

The cloud-based service has given DHFL the capability to tackle huge number of spam e-mails and virus attacks. For example, before DHFL started using Symantec’s services, it was receiving nearly 120,000 spam e-mails each month along with hundreds of virus attacks. Today, the cloud-based service detects and identifies all viruses, spam and phishing attacks. “The service removes 99 percent of spam off-site, even before it reaches our network. It has also reduced our administrative overheads as the latest updates on the spam mails and antivirus are managed by Symantec. We are least bothered about the availability since we do not have to maintain any hardware, which was the case earlier,” explains Kotian.

The DHFL IT team now saves valuable time as it no longer has to go through hundreds of spam messages to fish out legitimate e-mails from clients, colleagues and partners. As a result, DHFL has been able to reallocate its limited internal resources to other critical IT missions such as risk management and regulatory compliance. The incidence of spam and virus arriving through e-mail has since dropped to almost zero.

Highlights

• Cloud-based service has almost eliminated more than 120,000 spam e-mails each month along with hundreds of virus attacks
• Saved approximately two man-hours per week allocated to operational duties related to security
• DHFL has been able to reallocate its limited internal resources to other critical IT missions such as risk management and regulatory compliance