We should be efficient in mitigating security vulnerabilities and finding the best possible solutions: Ajay Gupta, Group GM – IT, Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd

The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Limited (DFCCIL) is a Public Sector Undertaking under the Ministry of Railways, Government of India. It is a high speed and high capacity railway corridor that is exclusively meant for the transportation of goods and commodities. It is also responsible for planning, development, and mobilisation of financial resources and construction, maintenance and operation of the Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFC).

At Express Computer’s, Government Data Center & Infrastructure Summit, we had a chance to speak to  Ajay Gupta, Group GM – IT, Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd on a variety of topics related to migration to cloud, feasibility and security. 

Here’s an excerpt of his views on the same:

Reminding that the Railways’ Dedicated Freight Corridor is a greenfield organisation, Gupta said, “We are constructing new tracks – from Delhi to Kolkata and from Delhi to Bombay and being a lean organisation,  IT is the only saviour for us.  Most of my business processes,  my end to end solutions are run on an IT platform. We have also shifted to SAP within our organisation. And, I won’t be discussing whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience but I will say we need a system where we can have our end processes mapped properly. So an ERP solution was required, felt or decided and we moved in that particular direction.”

Talking about the infrastructure, he stated, “Initially we had to purchase the servers and hardwares, and our server was on-premise, however with the passage of time we shifted to cloud.  I can say that it’s easy to manage, it’s flexible and most of the work is given to the professional people to look after. Usually people talk about what kind of infrastructure is available on the cloud, about the humidity around servers, the electricity requirement to run it, people are talking about so many things but in my opinion, one of the most important factor to emphasize on is that the prices are still very high. We have to be more competitive and judicious; if we have to spend a lot on the hardware, the aim should be to reduce that tendency of over spending.” 

He further added by saying, “So for SAP, we have moved to the cloud, for my mail- it is on NAC Cloud or NIC Cloud and for other applications we  post it on the Railtel Cloud. As it is flexible, easy to manage and one can focus on other important works within the organisation. These days we are also concentrating on the dashboard; Government organisations are working a lot on the dashboards.”

Speaking about data analytics, Gupta mentioned, “We have the software and from the data lake we are generating the required analytics.  We are going for the predictability factor,  and deciding how to solve a particular query.” 

Talking about key challenges from a security point of view, Gupta stated, “Security and vulnerability, it’s like a thief and police situation, who stays ahead and who stays behind, that’s mostly the situation that comes to play. I would like to tell you all an example: one fine evening we got a message from CERT-In, at evening 8 o’clock there will be a possible attack, a cyber attack on DFC share infrastructure. It has been asked that everybody should be alert and the log should be shared, minute by minute. Now the question is, are you ready for that? Do you have an infrastructure like that? Can you provide the data?  Although SAP server is a cloud server, they can provide us the data but only after two days. “

“In my opinion, one has to see what more can be done from a security angle, and we should be efficient in mitigating the vulnerabilities and finding the best possible solutions in a timely and cost effective manner,” he asserted.