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Business Continuity must make business sense

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CIOL Bureau
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BC

Investment must be commiserate to impact on business



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Arial">“Not in business” due to outages hurts. More so when

IT systems vital to the running of the business are not available. Depending on

the size of the company, the market it is in, the impact of an outage will be

quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative impacts can be measured. As examples,

loss of revenue and loss in production can be measured per time unit or customer

transaction. Qualitative impacts are in the form of reputation, trustworthiness

and employee morale. A business must weigh both these factors when considering

the impact of an downtime.



Arial">Outages are a fact of life; they can be caused by acts of

god, hardware/software failures, security breaches and/or human errors. It is

instructive to note that 93% of the outage a business suffers are caused by

events that we can met without causing outage by prudent planning and the right

IT technology solution in place.



Arial">By understanding the critical business process and their

impact on your business, you can identify and make the optimal investment in

business continuity.

As an example, if the impact to business due to primary data center not

being available for 24 hours is Rs 1 Cr, it does not make sense to invest more

then Rs 1 Cr for IT disaster recovery. Investment in continuity is not an all or

nothing proposition, instead a though out risk mitigation plan, will go a long

way in preparedness.

As certain business functions assume more importance the company can

invest in keeping them continuous.



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Arial"> 



Leverage

your alternate site investment



Arial">At the time of an outage, the IT DR plan calls for

applications to failover to an alternate site. The alternate site comes alive

when services from the primary site are unavailable. This operating model

expects capital investment in servers, networks, storage and operations to be

made upfront, only to be utilized during unforeseen circumstances.



Arial">A different approach would be to distribute certain

operational tasks between the primary and alternate data center. Based on

business impact analysis, every corporation's IT applications/services can be

divided as critical, essential and support. Examples of support applications are

data warehousing and record archival. An operating plan that runs support

applications from its alternate data center will leverage the investment in the

alternate data center. There are several benefits of doing this. Improved

performance and server head room at the primary application server and faster

turn around times for support activities. This also keeps the operations at the

alternate data center “warm” such that people and process are in place when

required.



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Arial"> 



Cost

of Operations



Arial">Having made capital investments in an alternate DR center,

it is important to keep it operationally active and ready for a failover

scenario. The cost of operations & investment in people for the alternate

data center is an easy target for debate. Further, if business critical

applications are varied, then the expertise required for recovery at the

alternate data center goes up. The cost of operations and recovery can be

contained by focusing on the following factors:



Ö

Arial">Centralized monitoring for all sub-systems of the solution



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Ö

Arial">Pre-determined responses to outage events



Ö

Arial">Automate steps required for failover of application & network



Ö

Arial">Automate step required for data recovery and bringing it to an

application consistent state.



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Ö

Arial">Regular DR drills and audits



Arial">By putting the right technology solution in place, IT

operations can minimize people dependency and ensure the solution delivers when

required.



Arial">Business Continuity and IT disaster recovery are business

imperatives today.

The risk of not investing in continuity far out weights the investments

required. Business Continuity is a culmination of people, process and technology

for the plan to deliver. By adopting the right strategy to continuity, business

can ensure their investment delivers the promised returns.