CIOL: What are the likely hazards that lead to disruption or potential disaster?
KP: Hazards could be many, like the Mumbai floods of last year. These floods have now made basements and ground floors unacceptable as recovery locations in Mumbai. Post 7/11, the hazard perception has changed tremendously. Hazards can come from multiple sources -- both external and internal to the company. Weather hazards, terrorism, power problems, bandwidth/connectivity problems, hardware failure, virus attacks, hacking, etc., could lead to disruption/disaster. Similarly, there are reasons such as espionage, willful disruption of service by disgruntled employees, lack of idiot proofing on business applications, unintended mistakes by users, incomplete implementation of data access, security and end use policies could also cause disruption of business.

CIOL: What are the deterrents for business continuity?
KP: The dettrents can be listed: lack of resources to make the plans; overestimating what the business can withstand; assuming that many problems are 'too small' or 'too big' to plan for; assuming that if a crisis hasn't happened yet and it's not urgent enough to plan for; and the cost of a DR site or redudancy in capacity could lead to increase in cost of business.

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