Audience

CXO's and those responsible for deciding on and monitoring the organisation's investments, and especially where they involve technology budgeting and planning for focused technology initiatives to address key business issues. The session will focus on two key business challenges for financial services as follows:

•  Realizing the full potential of underutilised computing resources across the organisation
•  Ensuring delivery of trusted and secure applications across the software lifecycle, given the current challenges     in IT security

Outline

Surveys of CEOs and senior managers indicate that a lot of their time today spent in justifying expense on technology and to be able to project a healthy return on investment. Also, given the fact that a lot of systems in production, specially those on the net, face a high risk of security breaches, through networks, etc. and also through inadequate security checks and balances in the application development lifecycle. Given the kind of transactions in financial services and the serious consequences of security failure, there is a lot of time being spent by senior management in risk management, reviewing IT security practices, etc.

Infosys Technologies has a Software Engineering and Technology Research division with around 500 engineers and research practitioners working closely with business units like the Banking and Capital Markets unit to evolve solutions which will address top industry challenges like these.

This workshop will address the two challenges mentioned above and present the Infosys point of view of how organisations can address them, with some relevant case studies. It will also provide an interactive forum to the participants to discuss best practices in their organisations and also get some pointers for future technology investments to address these challenges.

A brief description of the topics follows:

1. Grid Computing to realise the true potential of under utilised resources for business edge –
    A perspective

The rapid spread of IT systems post the dot com era has led to server sprawl across the LOBs. Applications are running in silos and most of the servers run underutilised. The companies all over the globe are realising the underutilised potential of the investments in the infrastructure and the necessity of sharing the resources and data to achieve operational efficiency for agile business.

Infosys has developed a framework using Open grid services architecture and Globus toolkit for accelerating the financial analytics applications like Monte Carlo .

The framework comprises of:

•  Grid Infrastructure Setup
•  Grid Enablement Of Applications
•  Application parallelisation
•  Grid performance tuning

Grid computing is no more confined to the R&D laboratories but makes much more sense in today's scenario where financial services companies sit upon a pool of under-utilised resources in spite of spending of millions of dollars in them. Grid computing provides open standards driven viable option to harness the unutilised potential to achieve operational efficiency by means of a virtualised, flexible, responsive and resilient infrastructure.

2. IT security – Security vulnerabilities introduced through the application development stage are a     major risk today

Security practices imbibed as a culture & the need for a secure environment are tightly coupled… be well prepared to address this combination.

Our research indicates that application Security in today's SDLC concept is almost always an afterthought. i.e. the applications developed by the client is subjected to various Vulnerability assessment methods AFTER the development & integration testing is done.

This practice not only increases the cost of fixing these vulnerabilities but also causes significant delays in the deployment. It is precisely this gap that Infosys aims to bridge by its Industry defining Trusted ADM programme.

This programme ensures adherence to security best practices in ALL stages of the SDLC starting from requirements going all the way to implementation. This tested & proven Framework has been accomplished thru a series of deployable checklists & guidelines currently focused on J2EE & .NET applications.

The success of the Trusted ADM framework is however the concept of “Always Secure”, which ensures security of the applications by continuous updates to these checklists & guidelines to address the changing security circumstances.

The Trusted ADM Framework can work on any Security Assessment Product making it an extremely flexible & scalable proposition.

About the Speakers