CIOL: what are the main challenges for business continuity?
TSV: Designing, verification and validation of the appropriate BCP for a bank is a challenge. Business continuity for banks involves detailed analysis of possible threats, defining and designing an appropriate solution for the size and the business risk faced by the bank.

The plan should be defined with cost effective alternatives based on the extent of damage, location of disaster, cause of failure and duration required for recovery. The BCP should also describe the exact measures that should be taken by every individual before, during and after the disaster. These individuals may be located or may be managing remote service outlets with no connection and communication in the event of a localized disaster.

BCP for a bank covers the communication plan, data and operations recovery, the business plan and measures in the event of all possible disasters for all locations, including unmanned business outlets and finally documenting them.

CIOL: How well the industry is prepared to manage an impending disaster?
TSV: The frequency, magnitude of disruption and causes of threats for the different geographies influence the extent of preparation of the industry. Most banks have some type of BCP in place. The extent of coverage of the BCP is influenced by the percentage of investments in IT and other alternate business setup. Smaller banks with lower business risk can live with a simple BCP; where as a high risk geographical area (like seismic zone) may influence even a small bank to invest in a complex and detailed BCP.

Typically banks' data centers, branches, ATM, and other service outlets are designed to have alternate locations in another seismic zone. Every component in the banking environment is designed with redundancy to ensure business operations like redundant networks, Servers, redundant delivery channels with sophisticated technology based fail over solutions.

A good banking software provides alternate solutions and technical stand-in mechanisms for scheduled downtimes. For unplanned failures banking software leverages availability features like clustered solutions and other redundancy options available in the hardware to ensure continuous business operations.