'Telecom as an infrastructure tool crucial for business continuity planning'

NEW DELHI: Telecom as an infrastructure tool is the most crucial ingredient

for Business Continuity Planning and it has to be developed on a combination

based on three basic guidelines - the need to establish a reliable service, the

need to develop diversity of services and the need to have a redundancy in the

system. This was stated by Shyamal Ghosh, Chairman, Telecom Commission and

Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, in his keynote address at a

conference on Business Continuity Planning - Evolving Solutions for Business

Contingencies and Disaster Management, organised by the Confederation of Indian

Industry (CII).

Ghosh said that planning has to be made for natural calamities as well as

manmade disasters and a developed telecom sector as an infrastructure tool is

required for a quick recovery both for the individual as well as for the

community.

He stressed for the need to develop linkages through alternate routes.

Another important aspect of BCP, apart from maintaining connectivity, is

availability, protection and restoration of data, according to Ghosh.

CII National Committee chairman, Pramod Bhasin, on IT Enabled Services, in

his theme address, said Business Continuity Planning includes the actions,

resources and procedures to ensure the continued availability of essential

operations in events of unexpected interruptions.

Giving examples of leading MNCs who were hit hard by the September 11 World

Trade Centre attack, Bhasin said, ''It is not about disaster recovery alone but

minimizing its downtime." He narrated the experience of the $39 billion

American Express who lost more than three thousand employees, 30 floors in WTC,

3200 PCs, e-mail and web servers and a server farm for American Express Bank's

transaction systems in the terrorist attack. However, despite huge stakes, its

losses were hardly devastating because of effective disaster management. As the

company had backup servers, there was no loss of customer service or bank

transaction processing and the employees were relocated to five locations by

October 2001.

Bhasin said that IT enabled companies run a number of mission critical

processes for their customer, which would have severe financial and marketing

impact if there is a breakdown. All service providers, therefore, need to plan

for business continuity for varied eventualities. A response plan is about

creating full redundancy for telecommunication technology and IT infrastructure,

which basically means duplicating the infrastructure at an alternate location.

However, towards building these redundancies, service providers suffer idle

capacity and wasted time and effort in the logistics of operating these

additional infrastructures, Bhasin added. Hence the industry feels that the

concept of hot sites would be of great help, he stressed. Hot sites are the

ready to serve sites where mission critical processes can continue operations in

the event of disaster of an original location.

CII has therefore recommended to the government to allow service providers to

cross-match their critical processes in each other's location, so that the

additional costs can be avoided, Bhasin said.

Bhasin said that rigorous security checks and prevention mechanism along with

pro-active rather than reactive awareness has to be created. According to him,

significant investments should be made in the IT industry and IT enabled

services should directly interact with the end customers.

Revamping the legal infrastructure along with removing the restrictions on

sharing bandwidth across sites, cities and entities are essential for making BCP

in India a reality, Mr. Bhasin added.

Sanjiv Geonka, President, CII said the key to sustaining competitive

advantage in today's world is the ability to ride uncertainties and offer

uninterrupted service, which has become manadatory at every level ---- from

individual organisations to nations.

Goenka also said that natural disasters remain the most likely cause of

business disruption and mitigating them effectively should remain the top

priority of corporate's business continuity program.

CII National Committee on Information Technology chairman, Arun K

Thiagarajan, delivering the vote of thanks, said that networking and telecom

facilities should be upgraded for effective Business Continuity Planning.