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Is India Prepared for Disasters?

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DQI Bureau
New Update

In a world where uncertainties abound, it is imperative for every business to have a business continuity plan ready. Heightened exposure to disruptive and uncertain events in recent years coupled with increasing government and commercial inter dependencies make disaster recovery and crisis management a critical business imperative. Any interruption in operations represents potential losses in revenue, opportunity,

and reputation.

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While organizations are increasingly adopting newer technologies for virtualization, cloud computing, data management, etc, but are they equipped to deal with the security challenges that come along? What happens if these systems crack down due to

natural disasters, human errors, or even technical disruptions?

A recent survey by EMC probes into the disaster preparedness of organizations across India and the APAC region. Some extracts:

IT Spending on Backup and Recovery

IT lies at the heart of almost every business operation today, but are enterprises spending enough to secure their IT infrastructure? With increasing vulnerability toattacks from multiple fronts, it has become absolutely critical for an organization to have a strong disaster recovery plan in place.

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The EMC Disaster Recovery survey shows that a majority

of Indian organizations (51%) are likely to spend at least 10% of their annual IT budget to secure their infrastructure through backup and recovery processes. In comparison, organizations across APJ (Asia Pacific and Japan) are spending a minimum of 38% for the same.

The awareness towards DR in Indian organizations is also much lower. Findings indicate that organizations in India (0%) are less likely to not know how much of their IT budget they are spending on IT systems backup and recovery than organizations overall across the Asia Pacific and Japan (9%).

Data Loss and/or System Downtime       

Increased usage of critical business applications by Indian companies to increase productivity and growth over competition has posed a major risk on the security of critical business data. Most organizations agree that loss or theft of critical data is a serious information security risk. Though, enterprises have been investing heavily on building their IT infrastructure, adoption of technologies to prevent or detect data loss for business continuity is extremely low due to lack of awareness of a proper and secure disaster recovery plan.

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According to the survey, almost 80% of Indian organizations have experienced data loss and/or systems downtime within a span of one year.

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Causes of Data Loss and/or Systems Downtime?

The most commonly reported cause of data loss and/or systems downtime in India is data corruption. Whereas overall across Asia Pacific and Japan, it is hardware failure. Organizations in India are more likely to have

reported the following as causes of data loss and/or systems downtime are data corruption, loss of power, loss of backup power.

Organization Focus

Interestingly, Indian organizations are more focused on securing their websites and microsites against any disaster. Whereas, their counterparts in APJ are more focused on creating a proper DR plan for their regular operational files and emails. However large business houses in India have started adopting DR plans for their mission critical ERP applications, which is definitely a step forward to ensure business continuity.

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Conclusion

The business continuity and reliability of operations of any organization depend on the management's awareness of potential disasters, its ability to develop a plan to minimize disruptions of critical functions, and the capability to recovery operations expediently and successfully.

The plan should cover consistent actions to be taken before, during and after a disaster and properly documented and tested to ensure the continuity of operations and availability of critical resources in the event of a disaster.

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IT needs to resolve unplanned outages. However, at the end of the day, business needs to essentially calculate how much money it will lose for each hour (or minute, or another time increment of your choice) of downtime.

For enterprises with revenue models that depend solely on the data centers ability to deliver IT and networking services to customers-such as telecommunications service providers and e-commerce companies-downtime can be particularly costly.

Moreover, in the ever increasing competitive scenario, any outage can severely damage an organization's reputation and long-term sustainability. Can organizations afford it?

 

 

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