In an interview with Biztech2.0 Vikram Kaushik, MD & CEO, Tata Sky Ltd talks about the important role of a CIO and the security initiatives at the company.

What is the role of a CIO at Tata Sky?

The organisation structure of Tata Sky is such, that it follows the belief that all domain expertise must be respected, but at the same time make sure that they all at the same level, integrate into the management committee of the company, which runs the company on a day-to-day basis. So, the CIO is also on the management committee and operates interactively with the rest of the decision makers.

The role of a CIO is not a back room function at Tata Sky. The reason for this is that all the marketing efforts that we make, the promotions that we run, the special functionalities and the various kinds of incentives that we offer, all require a day to day interface with the marketing and the IT team. This is where, the head of consumer marketing as well as the head of IT, interrelate and interact on a virtually daily basis.

What according to you are some issues that a CIO needs to address?

A new challenge that we believe we need to look at now is how to be more cost effective. As we go forward and as our numbers grow, we are very conscious about the fact that we will have to make the service available to a larger number of people. In order to that, the service has to be affordable and offer good value. For that to happen, we have to make sure that the costs, right across the infrastructure of the company have to be competitive and truly get the most out of the scale that we are building. The single most important message that I would like to give to all, in this regard, is that we have to be cost effective and truly remain competitive, in order to grow rapidly.

What are the security initiatives that have been taken at Tata Sky?

There is a company wide security initiative that has been launched by Ratan Tata and we have taken a very proactive approach there, for the reason that it affects our business directly. We have many things that we need to secure. First of all, our subscriber information and our subscriber base. We have to keep that information very secure, because the consumer expects us to keep it confidential as he/she shared it with us. Apart from that fact that there also is a competitive threat, that requires for the information not to flow out of the company.

The second very important aspect of security in the television business is that the set-top box should not be misused by somebody as a distribution device, rather than watching it himself/herself. For instance, the set-top box should not be misused by the cable operator, to take the box and start feeding the same programming to other users. To do that, the middleware in the box has to be completely secured. We have invested in NDS’s middleware to make sure that the set-top boxes that we provide are absolutely secure. Thus, we have made serious investments in security.

Apart from that, the IT system should have security measures put in, so that the information that is shared with people down the line is not leaked out to other people who might want to misuse it. For that, we have a security committee working in the company and have already implemented some stringent measures.

What are Tata Sky’s Disaster Recovery Projects?

We have a collaborative approach with a lot of companies that have provided our infrastructure. For instance, our telecommunications infrastructure is run by VSNL and we have built in adequate redundancies to make sure that if there is ever a problem, we would be able to very quickly cope with that. So, we have focus on disaster recovery. It should also be recognised that full-scale disaster recovery projects cost a lot of money. This is so, because you have to virtually create a parallel set up, to back up the whole set up. Many companies wait till they have enough critical mass, to create a disaster recovery process. We have been selective and have created some disaster recovery units in crucial areas, but for the whole company and its functionalities to have a disaster recovery unit, is going to take some time.

What are the company’s future plans?

We are looking at re-engineering some of our processes to cut down on the amount of time taken and the steps in order to become more cost effective. Our latest initiatives are focusing on being cost effective. Other than that, we continuously try to make sure that our uptime across the IT functions never comes down below 99.7%. That is the kind of figure that we are achieving consistently. Our objective is to take it to an even higher level and as close to a 100%.