Disasters and Black Box

KATRINA and Rita don’t sketch the image of svelte belles any more. And they are just glimpses of the intensity and impact that disasters like hurricanes, floods, Tsunamis or bomb blasts bring forth. Apart from the decimation of human lives, houses, or towns; the ruthless gusts take along some business wreckage into their strong torrents too. Specially when it comes to the salvage phases and recovering precious corporate data. That’s exactly where the emergency response technology called disaster recovery comes to fore.  And it’s not surprising to see how pain killers and vaccines can sell like hot cakes.

According to a study by research firm The Gartner Group, 43 per cent of companies were immediately put out of business by a "major loss" of computer records, and another 51 percent permanently closed their shutters within two years, and that leaves only a tiny six per cent "survival" rate. No doubt then that aanother report from New York-based ABI Research highlights that the global business continuity and disaster recovery space will reach $31 billion by 2015, up from $24.3 billion in 2009.

Then there was a Honeywell-sponsored survey saying that disaster recovery (DR) planning and preparedness are a bigger priority than securing their networks. In this survey 55 per cent said a pandemic was the biggest threat to their organization. Natural disaster was ranked second by executives with 52 percent, followed by data security and telecom failure/power outages, which grabbed 35 and 45 percent respectively.

So how robust and fool-proof is a DR plan actually? How does it keep up with other key ingredient called data and storage technologies? How comprehensive, non-disruptive and adaptive can it be? We ask all that and more in this interview with Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Co-founder and VP Products,  Sanovi Technologies, that is a player in the Disaster Recovery Management and business continuity space. Its client roster so far includes ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Corporation Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Vijaya Bank, Yes Bank, Bank of Baroda,  L&T, Essar etc and Narayanaswamy is bullish on a lot more that will board the bandwagon. Excerpts.

To quote first a recent study churned out by Symantec Corp in India findings of its 2010 State of the Data Center report – while 62 per cent said backup and recovery is somewhat/absolutely important showing that there continues to be room for improvement in DR; yet One-third of DR plans are undocumented or need work. Would you agree with the gap pointed out on policy and documentation front vis a vis DR readiness?

Yes, that’s right. And interesting part apart from documentation needs is that technology adoption goes out from centre to edge in the case of DR and managing the apart of remote office can be challenging. Typically in that remote set-up, skill sets are not that high and so the whole centralized Vs decentralized model comes into play. It depends on skill sets and information complexity within that company.

How strong is the DR landscape in terms of adoption apart from the usual segments like BFSI? Doesn’t the ROI (Return on Investment) mindset play a barrier here, because investing in DR is like buying an insurance. You don’t see its worth until an exigency happens. And what role does the business-downtime factor play in a DR market?

Lot of utilities and manufacturing players are getting ready for DR even without regulations because they know it’s bad for business if they don’t. If there’s a downtime, there’s data loss. For example, roll-out of a new patch or installation of a new hardware need attention on DR fronts. It decreases downtime and increases confidence. Of course most DR customers are big-sized companies with a critical mass and are up the maturity curve. Talking of the ROI issue, deployment of DR solution actually helps in ROI on other investments. If you are not confident that you can’t recover, it affects. You don’t want to wait for an act of God.

So sectors like manufacturing are opening up?

Yes, sectors like manufacturing are getting important. This is primarily due to ERP penetration and so many business processes are getting automated with ERP. The back-up needs increase. We are seeing more and more customers investing in DR. We have manufacturing sector clients like Essar, L&T, Tata Power and NTPC

Can DR be more proactive than what it is so far? And talking of ‘unified DR’ how much of that is happening?

Today’s challenge is that IT is siloed – talk of how servers and applications etc are on different islands. This makes it difficult at a recovery site. So it has to first be unified and then proactive. The biggest challenge is to keep the primary site and the DR site equivalent, in the smallest sense of a change or entry in primary site. So we are focusing there instead of just replicating one. Our spotlight is on application and providing for each phases of DR lifecycle, from monitoring, provisioning, automation, reporting, real-time drills, drill capability etc.

Talking of DR drills, how do you ensure that it meets the twin anti-polar pressures of being non-disruptive to day-to-day business and being as complete and full-proof a drill as possible?

Quite a real scenario question. DR Drills are ensured by us to be quite comprehensive. It covers all services and primary recovery site aspects. It is fairly comprehensive and simulated for a real outage incident. As to being non-disruptive, we have the concept of non-disruptive testing along with support conditions for successful tests, besides having the real-time monitoring of an equivalent.

With all the advancements on the storage side of technology, be it disks, tapes, de-duplication, CDP etc, does it make the job of DR easier or tougher?

The answer is both yes and no. Evolving technologies are making recovery matrix cheaper and affordable which is good news. But all new stuff involves some level of virtualization which adds a layer of complexity and management infrastructure issues. Therefore end-user makes a judicious mix of higher recovery matrix and does it in a way that has more automation and visibility. Do it less manually and use more management layer which automates and tracks the whole path.

What can DR interpret from developments like virtualization, WAN optimization, replication software or application-based email back-up then?

Server virtualization is a very interesting and fascinating angle to DR capability. It allows you to capture a painful area very easily and hence brings a new dimension. But there are no free lunches and requirements on replication technology, hardware capability and bandwidth come up. So it’s catching on and SMB is faster to adopt the new technology bracket. Mid-market though would be using a judicious mix with DR. End of the day, management processes serve as glue. The world is evolving to a hybrid model - Load-balancing and outage mixed together. This is based on recovery time, Budgets, application criticality etc.

Where do other data recovery, downtime-related clustering solutions end and where does DR start? What happens on the overlap?

In an ITIL stack, continuous delivery is one part and so businesses have to define continuity in two matrix areas – recovery time and criticality. Based on risk impact and analysis you can choose an appropriate solution. You have to answer – what are the risks you want to guard against? Clustering can be for protection of hardware part of the failure. DR is for DR Failover. So different scenarios call for different solutions. A mature organization in my opinion would come to conclusion after a fair assessment for each scenario. But yes, at the end of the day, in some cases it could be a mix of both.

Is the interplay between hosted or cloud models and DR a conflicting one?

No, there’s no negative impact because of cloud models. In fact, several of our customers have a hosted model and therefore it’s a great approach to deploy a solution faster. Hosted DR model is very interesting. DR as a service is going to be the future direction. We are already exploring that with some of our partners.

What is Sanovi’s future pipeline like after the new DR Suite 3.1 launched and new customer wins like Alhi United Bank (Middle East), Cosmos Cooperative Bank etc.

We started the quarter with a client win. There are several government projects and some in private sectors looking strong. Our product-wise focus would be in setting new standards on flexibility, automation and heterogeneity.