Alchemy Capital Management Pvt Ltd's: Data Center Optimization with a 3-Way BCP and DR Implementation

This key initiative has brought the RTO/RPO levels to 30 minutes, which is as per requirements of 3 Indian and international financial security regulators

Alchemy is a financial services organization with global presence. It provides Capital and Wealth Management Services and focuses on sustainable wealth creation for the long term. No wonder then that the company boasts of giving a return of 72% CAGR in USD to its customers.

Business Challenges Faced

The company is regulated mainly by three financial and securities regulators--SEBI (India), MAS (Singapore) and SEC (USA). All three regulators put together has very stringent rules and framework to safeguard Investors’ money. One of these includes IT systems and business continuity planning and the process that Alchemy as to Follow.

The maximum system tolerable downtime for the company is 30 minutes. Till last year, Alchemy had traditional data centers and an un-consolidated infrastructure. The Backup, replication and BCP-DR were not as per the requirement.

So to set things right, last year, Alchemy’s IT Head, Umesh Mittal came up with a plan to virtualize the company’s entire fleet of servers and did data center Optimization using software and hardware from VMware, DELL and Brocade.

Along with this, Alchemy also implemented a three way BCP-DR, with the primary data center located at their HO in Mumbai, a near BCP-DR site implemented at a co-hosted Data Centre in Navi Mumbai, and a Far BCP-DR site at Bangalore. Plus, to avoid any National level risks, a remote BCP-DR site has also been created at a Data Centre in Singapore.

Moreover, all important prospective) users are given virtual desktops to connect to the data and servers from anywhere, in case of any eventuality or office being inaccessible.

‘The Man with a Tech-Fist’

Besides data center optimization and BCP-DR, Mittal also has many other business technology initiatives to his credit. He has setup an ITIL based Incident management system with well defined IT SLAs and matrix. He has consolidated the client service portals for all channels of communication (Phone, email, chat, web, social media etc). This has improved client servicing reducing service time from an average of 8 Hrs to 4 Hrs. Mittal also dabbled with doing marketing automation for the company, by setting up a fully automated campaign manager, with inbuilt approval matrix and management. It helps analyze all campaigns and their effectiveness. He also helped sales and marketing setup a social analytics system based on wisdom of words, to provide 98% accuracy in sales forecasting. For HR, he has undertaken sentiment analysis based activities to bring down employee attrition to a near zero level.