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Lessons from Mumbai rain of woes

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CIOL Bureau
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Unfortunate as tragedies are, they are the times when people sit up and take serious notice of how to deal with contingency situations. The monsoon rains-related floods in Mumbai last month caused untold damage to property and equipment. The days of water could well be a wake-up call for enterprises to do more than mere lip service to disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity practices (BCP).

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But some are skeptical whether any positive change would happen soon. Pronish Prakash Jain, IBM’s manager for business resiliency and continuity services, feels that a change in customer mindset is needed. “I doubt if this event would evoke more seriousness and interest. This is mainly because enterprises look at DR and BCP as an IT issue rather than a business issue. Ideally there should be a top down approach where the CEO, COO and CFO perceive the risks and have a mitigation plan in place and not merely leave the decision to the CIO.”

He also feels that customers need to adopt DR as a practice and not just as a reaction to an incident. He is hopeful that SMBs, which were badly affected during the floods, would take up DR solutions.

Srinivas Pothapragada, co-founder and CEO, Sanovi Technologies, which provides DR software, is confident that DR adoption would pick up now. “India is quite advanced in DR since we are late adopters and have leapfrogged technologies. The real turning point was 9/11, which made people realize the vulnerability of systems and the need for putting back-ups in place,” he said.

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Sanovi’s engineers were involved in helping their customers, banks and FIs in particular, in shifting their work to servers located at data centers elsewhere in the country.

DR adoption in banks and FIs, which can’t afford a lapse in their mission-critical daily operations, would see an increase. In fact, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) recently issued a circular to banks in April this year, urging Indian banks to pursue business continuity planning as a part of their efforts to manage operational risk. The circular reads: “Business Continuity planning is a key pre-requisite for minimizing the adverse effects of one of the important areas of operational risk , business disruption and system failures. It is imperative that all banks have BCP's in place to be in readiness to tackle serious business disruptions.”

Banks would soon be required to submit their BCP and a quarterly statement starting June this year, reporting major failures and also steps taken to avoid such failures in future to the RBI.

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Ajith S, software and services research manager, IDC India is hopeful that enterprises especially banks and FIS would revisit its existing systems.

“Though many banks/ telcos in India have installed comprehensive BC/DR systems, with top-class hardware and software, these have been more of a one time implementation.”

“What has been lacking is the people / services aspect - or the BC/DR services - the policies and procedures for which, are not well defined,” he added.

IDC India pegged the business continuity space in India at $47 million in 2004 -- the major customers being banks and telcos.

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