Glenn Warden, CIO and Principal at Bahl & Gaynor

WHAT WE DO:  

“Bahl & Gaynor is a private investment firm and our goal is to always be private, never public. We are one hundred percent employee-owned; all of the portfolio managers and investment professionals who work here, own the company, and we find that this employee ownership is the best value for our clients. It is a hard thing to maintain with the transitions a firm faces as people age and retire, but we’ve put some things in place to ensure that we remain employee-owned and can continue to provide that best client experience. We’re a portfolio management company with a niche in the industry – we invest in dividend-paying and growing stocks. Some companies try to offer all types of products and services, but we feel that our strategy of doing one thing and doing it well works for all our clients, whether an institution or a private client, our slow and steady strategy wins the race in the long run. We are one of the top players in town and in the country; we have clients in all fifty states, but we are headquartered in Cincinnati.

Bahl & Gaynor has a big outsourcing model. Even though we’re a small company, we are regulated by the SEC, which mandates that we must do all the same things the bigger investment companies do; follow all the same guidelines, facilitate all the same security procedures and standards. So we have a lot of technologies in place, more servers and more applications than people in fact. One of my goals is to use technology to create efficiencies in order to not hire more people. We have been able to grow our assets under management and have not had to add people, and we have relied heavily on technology to help us do this. Industry-wide the trend I see is many more businesses going toward outsourcing; getting rid of IT departments, or IT departments using IT vendors. There is no less IT in business, in fact there is more and more reliance on IT and technology, but that reliance is going to the vendors, not internal IT departments.”

What are the top 2 challenges facing IT organizations this year? What are the top 2 opportunities? 

“Security is a top priority for us. It is a top priority for the SEC obviously, so we have been ramping up all our technologies around security; updating all our policies and procedures, putting in firewalls, protections and preventions, real-time packet monitoring, virus and spam filters and so on, but people are beginning to realize that it is not entirely IT’s responsibility to keep everyone safe. We can build all the walls around the castle, and we must as part of due diligence, but it is the human element trying to get in and the biggest threat to that happening is the human user on the inside. So training and educating our users, our employees, is most important to our security.  It is also a real challenge to get everyone on board. They may know that security is important, but they tend to think that it is IT’s job to make sure that nothing gets through.

We’re also embracing a lot of the cloud technologies and we have built a hybrid cloud environment here. When there is a cloud solution that works for us, we definitely utilize it in our infrastructure. We don’t get stuck in the hard ROI’s of just measuring dollar costs. Instead, we consider whether putting something in the cloud is going to give us greater operational efficiency and whether our people are able to access their data more quickly. Using a hard ROI, it would be much cheaper to stay with old fashioned PC’s, but using a soft ROI; the business efficiencies, remote access and disaster recovery capabilities and security – for me the conversation ends with security. To have everything contained within the cloud and the virtual desktop environment gives us the biggest bang for our buck. Cloud computing can have its security issues; we don’t want people uploading their files just anywhere, for instance, and risk private, intellectual property getting lost in the cloud. So I facilitate a way for people to access things very easily, so that they are not tempted to use any of the hundreds of storage places out there. People can access our virtual desktop through any device, anywhere in the entire world at any time.”