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DRP: Answer to peril

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CIOL Bureau
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ATM, though it stands for automatic teller machine, is all time money for an end user. For a mere depositor, who wants to withdraw his money, it is an Akshaya nidhi that gives money whenever he needs it. If an ATM behaves contrary to this belief, the customer is disappointed and he turns toward an alternative, which proves to be costly to that particular bank. A small disruption in the system hampers the continuity in the process that may lead to a bigger business disaster. So, for an insomniac business demon, powered by technology, continuity is the life-line; hence Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is the buzzword.

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Disruption can be a result of many factors. Unforeseen natural and manmade incidents have potential to bring the system to a grinding halt. Downtime due to power outages or network failure results in huge revenue losses for enterprises and brings down human efficiency and productivity. "Disasters, both natural and intentional, are unpredictable," says Dhananjay Ganjoo, VP- Enterprise Solutions, Nortel India, "Natural disasters could be earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or fire. Disgruntled humans can cause intentional disruption by various means ranging from virus/hacker attacks to nuclear attacks. Then, there are other causes for business disruption like hardware and communications failure."

Are we prepared?

The cause of disruption may be natural or manmade. However, once you know that it is unforeseen and unavoidable, you have to be prepared to face the impending disaster and gain potential to recover from it at the shortest span so that business continuity is not affected. Enterprises realizing this are going for a disaster recovery plan (DRP), which is a part of BCP.

 
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Though there are various solutions available in the market, in the form of DRP, the preparedness is still dismal. 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. "In India, the preparedness is not very strong," says Visweswaran. M, CIO, Macmillan India, "It is more of gamble game, which means lot of assumption contents, goes into decision-making process."

Analysts are of the opinion that the disaster recovery plan is more of a business challenge than a technological one. Technology works, but the DR plan is mostly dependant on people and processes. It has been seen that even when technology works, the plan fails because of the failure of people and processes. Hence, the preparedness means the readiness of the workforce to tackle the situation utilizing technology as the tool. "DR is not about what you do when failure happens. It is about anticipating failures and minimizing damages. Another important thing is how fast one can recover," says Ravi Raman, chief risk officer, Infosys BPO.

Strategies and challenges

To be up and ever running, enterprises are resorting to various techniques that can be termed as best practices. A common method is to create redundancies for almost all systems and set up a hot site at another location that is called the DR centre. Of course, identifying key risks and prioritising systems that are most critical to business is the first step. As data tops the priority list, it is secured and moved to DR centre along with the other processes and systems.

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A DR centre not only ensures the data availability, but also enables the enterprise to continue with activity as it was before the disaster. Infosys BPO has a DR centre in Mauritius. HDFC's DR centre is in Bangalore. N. Chandrasekaran, GM, IT, Ashok Leyland, who is planning to have a DR centre in Hosur near Bangalore, says: "We are in the process of commissioning a disaster recovery center at Hosur. The main objective is to provide business continuity to prevent total disruption of operations. The operational switchover to a mirror infrastructure has been created to address up to the last committed transaction before the failure of the first data center at Ennore. In order to ensure the health of the backup center, a planned periodic switchover has been made part of the operational strategy."

Even with the availability of quality DR solutions from various venders, maintenance of a DR centre remains to be delicate and expensive. After being commissioned, the DR centre need to be modified and updated continuously, which calls for a huge investment. Since the DR centre is like an insurance that can only be invoked in the face of a disaster, the reluctance for investment is quite natural. ROI justification is one of the biggest challenges for business continuity practice, according Visweswaran.

There are some methods of doing it with less cost. Certain areas of DR can be outsourced. "While the cost of setting up a DR centre 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 (NOC) or data centers." says Dhananjay Ganjoo.

To have a disaster recovery plan may be expensive. However, since disaster without recovery plan proves to be more expensive for an enterprise, business continuity practice has become mandatory. In this sense, cure is as important as prevention rather than 'prevension is better than cure'. Realising this, the enterprises have kept disaster recovery plan at the top of thier check list.