A good banking software provides alternate solutions and technical stand-in mechanisms for scheduled downtimes, opines T. S. Venkataramanan, Head - product management and delivery - Finacle, Infosys Technologies Ltd. For unplanned failures banking software leverages availability features like clustered solutions and other redundancy options available in the hardware to ensure continuous business operations, he told B.V.Shiva Shankar in an interaction. Excerpts:

CIOl: What is the importance of business continuity in the current scenario?
T.S. Venkateswaran: In a flat world, customers of mission critical applications such as banking, expect business to continue round the clock, 365 days, year after year. The major business drivers include the safe guarding of corporate reputation, financial performance, customer loyalty, risks, and regulatory compliance. The stakeholders expect business agility, flexibility and availability in the face of change and disruption. A well defined, tested and implemented business continuity plan ensures continuity of businesses by protecting multiple business interests including that of the brand, corporate reputation, market share, shareholder confidence, supply-chains, customers, employees and sustaining operations.

CIOL: what are the likely hazards that lead to disruption or potential disaster?
TSV: Causes of disruption and potential disasters come in various avatars. Some types of threats such as human error, network, hardware or software failures, and planned downtime are avoidable. Unanticipated disruption arising typically from environmental, political and natural causes is more difficult to avoid. In all types of industry including the banking industry human errors like failure to configure correctly and other administrative errors have been sited as one of the major reasons for disruption to business. The likely disasters that banks face is related to network and hardware failures causing disruption to the branch or channel operations, as they form a significant percentage of failure. The BCP of the bank should have a solution for each of the avoidable disruptions and workaround for unavoidable disasters.