About Usha Martin

Founded more than 50 years ago and headquartered in Kolkata, India, Usha Martin is a leading steel and wire rope manufacturer. The company’s products are used in sectors such as oil and gas, aerial haulage, and general engineering.

Industries: Manufacturing

Location: India

Usha Martin operates several wire and rope manufacturing plants in India, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In 1974, Usha Martin established an integrated alloy steel plant in Jamshedpur, India.

The business operates a range of joint ventures internationally, including a partnership with Joh Pengg AG of Austria to produce oil-tempered wire for the automotive industry and a venture with TESAC of Japan to manufacture and sell specialized wire rope.

Usha Martin’s ICT strategy had traditionally been highly localized, with independent IT infrastructures in all the manufacturing plants and businesses globally. These infrastructures were not integrated, leading to extensive duplication of effort and activities across the business.

In 2016, Usha Martin corporate started a project to integrate ICT across the business and establish centralized financial and technology controls.

“We established a program to integrate our communications infrastructure, security policies, and software licenses and implement a centralized enterprise resource planning system across our business,” says Jayanta Bhowmik, SVP-IT and CIO, Usha Martin. This program is being initiated primarily in Usha Martin’s Indian businesses before being extended to international markets.

In parallel with these initiatives, Usha Martin decided to consolidate the disparate email infrastructures and systems used by its corporate team, plants, and business units.

“We faced security threats and control problems managing and interconnecting all our very different email systems,” Bhowmik says.

“For example, we experienced on average about three to four ransomware attacks every year. We decided there was no alternative but to deploy a centralized email system.”

Usha Martin weighed its options and went so far as to purchase a license to run a single email system on its in-house infrastructure. However, the challenges of migrating a 4,000-strong workforce from up to seven existing email systems to an in-house platform proved difficult to overcome.

“We would have had to plan for server infrastructure, backups, security, and disaster recovery and execute smoothly, which would have been a time-consuming, expensive exercise,” Bhowmik says. “We estimated an in-house deployment would take seven to eight months to complete.”

“We looked at cloud-based services and Google presented a unique opportunity for us to consolidate our email without having to plan for our own infrastructure and worry about project planning, architectures, and deployment,” Bhowmik says.

“We also considered another service, but realized Google also gave us the opportunity to move our personal productivity applications to G Suite.”

A competitive evaluation regarding hosting and disaster recovery confirmed Usha Martin’s positive impressions. Google technology and processes in these areas outstripped the capabilities of the company’s own data centers.

“Google came up with a migration timeline and process that met our needs, with an expert partner to ease the transition,” Bhowmik says. “This was extremely important as the change represented a paradigm shift for a business that is very traditional and conservative.”

The Google partner worked closely with the internal Usha Martin team to complete phase one of the migration to the senior executive team. The partner also undertook training and worked with the IT team to hold meetings at various plants and locations to explain the changes. In addition, the partner conducted a skills transfer exercise to enable Usha Martin team members to complete the remaining phases of the project.

The business migrated the 1,500 team members in its Indian operations, as well as those in its Austrian joint venture, to the new platform.

“Using Google gives us wonderful alternatives to traditional systems,” Bhowmik says. “For example, using Google Hangouts Meet for video calls means we can reduce the number of video conferences that occupy large rooms and help ensure there are enough time-slots to meet demand.”

Improved Security of Information and Systems

One of the key differences between Usha Martin’s existing email systems and Gmail is the improvement in security and online safety.

“We had an anti-spam engine but, despite this, our employees received a lot of spam emails and messages carrying ransomware viruses,” Bhowmik says.

“With G Suite, we don’t receive these messages anymore and we minimize the risk of our network being compromised by malicious infections that could prevent us from accessing our files.”

Using G Suite has reduced team members’ use of USB drives to share large files that would otherwise be blocked due to email attachment limits.

“In addition, people are reducing the practice of printing documents for meetings. One person in each meeting can now steer and control documents, reducing duplication and the possibility of errors.”

“Document sharing is now happening much more in the cloud rather than through external media, improving control and security,” Bhowmik says.

Manage Calendars More Effectively

G Suite now enables Usha Martin team members to manage their calendars more effectively and share documents with multiple people without having to aggregate feedback or manage version control.

“Thanks to G Suite, our people are coming into a world of collaboration and modernization,” Bhowmik says.

It’s been quite a year. In general, and for work. Just the other day, I read a new study from Pew Research that shows 71% of people are currently working from home, and 50% of employees say they want to continue working from home at least three days a week. That’s more than half of people wanting to be remote over half the time!

As we’ve been navigating our own return to the office here at Google, one thing has become more clear than ever: the browser is no longer just a portal to the internet—it’s one of the most critical components of our tech stack. And we know we’re not alone in this. As our organization, and other organizations of all sizes, transition to a more hybrid way of working, it’s absolutely key to have a modern browser that’s built to support both admins and end users. 

The good news is, Chrome is made for this! Literally. It’s purpose-built for flexible work—and as the future unfolds and businesses’ needs continue to evolve, we’re committed to making sure our browser is even easier to manage, even more secure, and even more helpful, so all of us can be more productive. 

What’s next for Chrome

As we design and build Chrome to be a stronger asset for the enterprise, we are focused on these key areas:

1. Simple management
2. Modernized security 
3. Productivity enhancements 
4. Helpful integrations 

We’ve already made great strides in all four areas, with more exciting releases to come soon. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new and available right now, what to look forward to, and how each feature is equipping Chrome browser-based businesses (and their users) for what’s next.

When it comes to simple management there have been a lot of exciting developments—Chrome Browser Cloud Management is built for this new hybrid reality, giving IT teams the advantage of powerful and flexible management capabilities both in the cloud and on premises, so they always have the visibility and insights they need to make more informed decisions, quickly. 

With recent new releases admins can:

1. Track all versions of Chrome from one place. Our new daily version report allows IT teams to see all versions, including minor versions, in a single report to support compliance and make it easier to see and manage their entire deployment.
2. Report on apps and extensions across the organization. A new Apps & Usage report provides helpful visibility into all installed extensions, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), Chrome apps, and Android apps. You can see versions and permissions for each individual app and even force install or block, right from the report. 
3. Remotely troubleshoot and clear browser data. This is one of my favorites because not only is it incredibly helpful, it was created from customer requests! Admins (and a lot of service desk employees) told us how useful it would be if they could clear an end user’s browsing data, cookies, and cache remotely – and our team made it happen.
4. Extension management improvements. Coming this summer: extension request workflow will empower admins to change the behavior of Chrome Web Store so that end users request extensions and admins then approve or deny the installations from a centralized list in Admin Console. Another new release is extension details, where admins can now find out exactly what extensions are installed where, who makes them, what resources they’re using, and all other extension-related details – also right from the Admin console.  

Of all of our priorities, modernized security often feels most urgent. In a recent security report, 65% of US and UK employees said they received a phishing email during the remote working period initiated by COVID-19.  Further, a study by the Ponemon Institute found that 41% of responding organizations had dealt with an attack involving the compromise of employees’ passwords, costing an average of $267,408 per organization. Between the regular emergence of new threats and the increase in targeted mobile attacks, our new ways of working definitely demand a fresh approach to security. 

• BeyondCorp Enterprise, our new modern zero trust solution, enables secure access to critical apps and services with integrated threat and data protection, all delivered through Chrome browser, was introduced in January 2021. Its agentless approach simplifies the admin and end-user experience. We also just launched BeyondCorp Enterprise protected profiles to help organizations protect their extended workforce, including contractors, frontline workers, and anyone working from home who needs to securely access corporate resources from shared or unmanaged devices. 

To learn more about Google’s approach to modernizing security, tune into the Wall Street Journal’s Advancing Security in the New Business Environment event tomorrow from 10:35 am – 10:55 am EST, with very own Parisa Tabriz (Head of Chrome Engineering, Product Management and UX) and Phil Venables (CISO of Google Cloud). 

When it comes to productivity enhancements, I’m proud to share that we’re consistently releasing features that support users no matter where they’re working. Now that the browser is where so much of our day-to-day work happens, it’s more important than ever before to build in new ways to save time and work together while apart. 

Recently released productivity-boosting features include:

1. A faster way to take action right from the address bar. Chrome Actions is a feature we launched last year,  where you can simply type in commands such as “clear browsing data ” or “open incognito window”and get down to business in just a few clicks. We’re excited to announce new Chrome Actions are now available through our beta channel! Try one of these actions to check it out: “ Run Chrome safety check,” “Create doc,” and “Manage Google Account.”
2. Link directly to highlighted text. If you like to share snippets and quotes from articles or websites with your colleagues, you’re in luck. Now, instead of sharing the URL link from the address bar, you can take advantage of the new “link to highlight” feature in Chrome to point to the specific content. Simply choose the content you want to share, right click, select “Copy link to highlight,” and then send the link – to the exact part of the page you want people to see. It’s available for desktop and Android now, and coming soon for iOS. 
3. Decreased Chrome CPU usage. This means more battery life, less heat coming off of your device, and less fan noise. 🎉 🙌🏻
4. And there’s more! To explore additional productivity features, check out this blog post. 

Our final area of focus is all about giving Chrome customers more choice with helpful integrations. We’re actively partnering with best-of-breed organizations to bring integrations —and your favorite tools— into Chrome, to create a more seamless and productive experience across the board. Stay tuned on this as we’ll have more to share later this year. In the meantime, hear from our Modern Computing Alliance partners, such as Box, HP, RingCentral, Okta and VMware, as they explore many of the most important questions about returning to the office.

We’re constantly thinking about how we can help people and organizations adapt and thrive as they begin to return to the office. See below for three events from the team that cover how to make the transition to hybrid easier for your team, be sure to check them out.

Modernizing Your Approach to Security session at the Wall Street Journal’s Advancing Security in the New Business Environment event

• Tomorrow June 2, 2021
• 10:35 – 10:55 AM EST
• Register here

Chrome Insider: Browser tips & tricks for IT admins

• June 10, 2021
• 10:00 AM  – 11:15 PT
• Register here