'Consolidation helps disaster recovery'

Instead of distributing applications and data across multiple branches, you should bring them to a centralized data center and plan disaster recovery (DR) for this data center, says, Dhananjay Ganjoo, VP- Enterprise Solutions, Nortel India. Consolidation not only simplifies the DR planning, but also optimizes the IT resources, he said in an interview with B.V.Shiva Shankar. Excerpts from an interview:

CIOL: How do you find business continuity preparedness among Indian enterprises? Do they comply with global standards?

Dhananjay Ganjoo: A local survey on the business continuity preparedness of the Indian industry shows that as high as 79 percent of the respondents did not have a documented and tested business continuity plan in place. India is now a global player. Global businesses are not interested in getting into a customer relationship (with Indian businesses), unless these are prepared for a disaster. To be able to do business as aglobal player, it has become important for an Indian business to provide assurance to business partners and stakeholders.

Indian companies need to understand that the very way in which business is conducted is undergoing a change with high dependence on IT, to facilitate business processes with the 24x7 environment being a given. Further, with the declining attention span of the customer, to maintain loyalty it is imperative for organizations to ensure the undisrupted availability of business operations.

CIOL: What are the likely hazards that lead to disruption or potential disaster?

DG: Disasters, both natural and intentional, are unpredictable. Natural disasters could be earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or fire. Disgruntled humans cause intentional disasters that range from virus/hacker attacks to nuclear attacks. Then there are other causes for business disruption like hardware and communications failure. Many organizations are heavily dependent on IT infrastructure and apparently, are not well prepared for disaster recovery. Therefore, if disaster strikes and these organizations cannot recover quickly enough, the consequences could affect business along the entire value chain. Business revenue drops, brand equity takes a beating; there's loss of customers (who choose alternatives) and permanent loss of shareholder value.

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.

CIOL: What must be the steps taken by an organization, in terms of best practice, to prevent a possible potential disaster?

DG: The general guideline will be to consolidation the business and IT tools, and to plan for an effective alternate way to make these tools available to the users.

CIOL: Can you tell us about the products that you are offering for business continuity?

DG: We have couple of solutions under our Business Continuity System 3000 (BCS 3000) portfolio. The BCS 3000 Data Center is an extensible platform that is capable of multiple optimized configurations, which enables maximum WAN efficiency, consolidates data and storage networks into a common WAN facility and delivers definable application specific time-of-day bandwidth management. The BCS Mobility Client provides telecommuters and mobile users with the industry's most comprehensive and powerful solution for network optimization and application acceleration. BCS Mobility client dramatically reduces the time it takes individuals to browse the corporate web, download e-mail and attachments, and transfer corporate files - all while maintaining data integrity.