Mark Kolodzej, VP of IT and head of the Infrastructure Services Department (ISD) for ING Invesment Management Group, LLC

Letter Perfect

Consolidation, archiving, and compliance generate tangible returns for ING Investment Management Group

To many people the letters "ING" are nothing more than a suffix that adds action to verbs: eat becomes eating, think becomes thinking, and so on. To many others, however, "ING" is a means to doing things such as compounding interest, growing personal and corporate investments, or providing a range of financial services in more than 50 countries.

ING is the acronym (and the legal name) that evolved from Internationale Nederlanden Groep, the Dutch-based financial services giant formed by the 1991 merger of the insurer Nationale-Nederlanden and the banker NMB Postbank Groep. A child of the wave of economic liberalization and privatization that swept Europe during the early 1990s, ING is the culmination of more than 250 years of growth, mergers, and acquisitions, with roots reaching back to Koog in Holland in 1743.

To Mark Kolodzej, VP of IT and head of the Infrastructure Services Department (ISD) for ING Invesment Management Group, LLC, ING means he is a very busy technology executive, managing a complex web of compliance regulations while struggling to contain costs amidst daily operational growth. "It's resource- and administrative-intensive," he says of the operations he oversees, which support the more than US$400 billion in assets ING Investment Management Group manages in North America. "It's not discretionary whether or not we comply, and that corresponds directly to head count and impacts how staff spend their time."

Kolodzej has been with ING Investment Management Group for 10 years, half of which have been under the shadow of the regulatory compliance edicts that began with the U.S.'s Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002. Like other organizations, ING Investment Management Group has put a number of processes and procedures in place to meet regulatory requirements, though not without challenges. "Personnel become less and less motivated with each new requirement," he says. "They've already jumped through so many hoops, it's difficult for them. In some respects, it's become a witch hunt as to how low you have to go to be compliant because there are so many gray areas."

Simple things, he says, such as a developer moving something into production, are no longer simple. "We have to separate out duties and have multiple bodies involved. What one person might have been able to do before requires a change-control form now and involves other personnel and other groups. Things take twice as long to accomplish as they used to take. The cost and complexity that have been added into our IT environment are enormous."

To combat compliance fatigue, Kolodzej attempts to make things as simple as possible. "That might mean having mandatory fields or pre-populated form fields," he says. "I assigned one person just to interfacing because I knew it would consume a significant amount of staff time. That helps keep our IT processes centralized."

Consolidation lifts burden

At the same time, seeking greater operational efficiencies and lower costs, ING Investment Management Group embarked on a major IT infrastructure initiative, designated as Atlas, which included, among other elements, consolidation of a silo-based, disparate storage environment.

After conducting a thorough RFP process, Kolodzej and his team selected Symantec Partner Network Appliance as its primary storage technology provider. Working with the Network Appliance Global Services team, the ISD team designed and implemented a storage area network (SAN) based on NetApp hardware and software.

"We actually boot off the SAN now," Kolodzej explains. "The operating systems sit on the SAN, and those are replicated almost continuously around the clock. Software patches, updates, everything is run through there. We have identical hardware on the other side, and we can power up and be running in minutes."

The next-generation storage infrastructure is configured into three tiers, with data allocated to a specified tier based on its criticality. This tiered storage approach reduced storage costs by more than 30 percent. In addition, the storage consolidation effort allowed the ISD team to reduce the number of data center servers by nearly 200 percent, equating to approximately US$750,000 in savings.

It's not going to get easier anytime soon

ING Investment Management Group is spread out across three primary sites located in Atlanta, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut, and three secondary sites located in Minnesota, Arizona, and Colorado. As part of the Atlas initiative, the ISD team identified email archiving and e-discovery as critical areas to address. Email plays an important role at ING Investment Management Group. "Because our operations are so distributed, we're very much a virtual organization with virtual teams throughout. We have phones, but people aren't always at their desks-email is vital."

With this level of importance came challenges. Email volume was growing at a rate of 100 percent annually, and end users were exceeding their email storage quotas and moving their files off to PST folders. For the reason of compliancy, the latter was a concern. And the management of PST files was a productivity drain on end users. In addition to email, Kolodzej wanted to address unstructured data as such data must be produced when requested by regulatory agencies or during litigation. Storage cost was also a core consideration. Kolodzej and his ISD team wanted to store email and unstructured data on less-expensive storage while compressing files through single-instance messaging.