CIOL: What are the main challenges for business continuity?
DG: When implementing BCP (business continuity planning), an IT manager will confront with all types of obstacles, the primary one being investment. However, industry analysts advise companies to identify key risks first and give priority to systems that are most critical to business. Of course, the ultimate objective is to create redundancies for almost all systems and set up a hot site at another location.

While the cost of setting up a hot site may be exorbitant for smaller companies, there are other innovative alternatives. For instance, organizations with similar infrastructure could have reciprocal arrangements to act as backup/recovery sites for each other. One could also outsource this to Network Operations Centers (NOCs) or data centers. The other impediment is attitude. Disaster recovery has traditionally been considered a technical issue, and the purview of the IT department. However, analysts say this is more than a technical issue and it concerns even the highest levels of management.

CIOL: What type of disaster recovery planning do you advise Indian organizations to adopt?
DG: First is the consolidation of the business processes and applications, by which, I mean that instead of distributing your applications, data and CUG-multimedia applications across multiple branches, you should bring them to a centralized data center and plan disaster recovery (DR) for this data center. This will simplify the DR planning and also optimizes the IT resources. Second, we need to plan a backup way for employees to access to business information and tools. Suppose an employee is not able to reach the office, he should be able to access to all the business tools like his desk phone, email, ERP and all other application using broadband or dialup from his home. This can be a big challenge if, say, 50 percent of employees want remote access to all the business resources. The low bandwidth available at the user end and the high latency of the remote access medium is a key criterion in this sort of planning.