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What if? Businesses should ask themselves

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Sonal Desai
New Update
Kshitij Kotak e

MUMBAI, INDIA: Ten days after the lives of devastated families crawl back to normalcy, a new set of despair has set in among the business community in Nepal. Most of them have lost precious customer and financial data!!!

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Earthquakes are devastating. Of course all natural calamities are, but floods, tsunami, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes cause insane and complete destruction. My friend was in Kathmandu when the earthquake admeasuring 7.8 on Richter scale hit the Himalayan country on April 25.

This forced me to rehash the two dark realities of life:

One: disasters strike unannounced, and two: disasters don’t just cause death, they destroy lives!!!

The earthquake in our neighboring country shook me to the core, but it also forced me to re-think and question myself: What would happen to my business? Would I ever be able to rise from dust? Would we get paid in absence of our contacts, contracts, service records, accounting data? Would our product survive with our server under the rubble with all our research work and software codes burst inside?

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The answer, refreshingly, was Yes!

It felt unbelievable at first, but at the risk of sounding conceited, I have got certain things right.

To begin with, all my fixed and liquid asset documents are stored in digital format. And so is my business data. And the entire data is updated in near real time in a different city and available to me on demand.

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Let me put things in perspective: when we go tom-toming our homegrown data protection product to the world, it would be a shame if we lost data or took days to get back from dust. As an individual or SOHO, I can store my data on public cloud like Skydrive or Dropbox; but as a company developing software, we are very finicky about our data being 100 percent within our direct control and not on a public cloud that hackers get a kick out of breaching.

In our Pune office, our disaster recovery site, our entire data is replicated as it is written on our Mumbai server. This means that the entire data is instantly available from Pune office and we are back to business within seconds. Insurance can pay me for my tangible assets after I lose them, not assure me a future.

It is documented that in 1993, when the World Trade Center in New York was bombed, 260 out of 300 companies were affected by data loss and 150 of them closed shop in a year. But in the 9/11 terrorist attack that brought towers to a rubble, not one company lost data.

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Only a fool learns from his mistake; the intelligent learn from others’ mistakes to not repeat that mistake themselves. New tenants of World Trade Center were intelligent to protect themselves against data.

Significantly, the SME segment in India has started accepting that not only data, but staying in business is valuable. Many will be investing in protecting their future after the Nepal quake. Sad but true, the business owners in Nepal may rebuild their houses with the insurance money, but may forever stare at the devastated business they may never be able to rebuild in absence of data.

I cannot challenge the Almighty’s decision on my life and death, but I can protect my data and bring it back to life within seconds if Mumbai is flattened.

The article is authored by Kshitij Kotak, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director, Gre@cells BlackBox, and opinions expressed are his own

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