Disaster Recovery Could have Saved $200 bn

Disasters are so unpredictable that they can strike anywhere, at any time, with little or no warning. In 2012 alone, natural disasters caused losses of almost $200 bn globally. In today's business scenario, a company cannot afford to lose data even when there is a disaster.

If enterprises are not ready for it; recovery from disasters, natural or man-made, can be stressful, expensive, and time consuming.

Disruption isn't a matter of ‘if', but of ‘when'. Reputation is tied to revenue; and risk is tied to resilience-the company's ability to protect people, assets, data, and technology through proactive measures. In an increasingly digitized age, enterprises run a huge risk of losing data whenever a disaster strikes.

Even minutes of down time could be fatal to businesses. Therefore, it is of critical importance to have a post-disaster, fully-integrated recovery strategy that can optimize business continuity, improve regulation management, and enable quicker recovery from unanticipated disasters. This is no longer something that only large enterprises invest in, and there are options available in the market to fit the requirements and budgets of a range of enterprises.

DISASTER IS NOT A CHOICE

To broadly look at demand and urgency, the company cannot afford to risk data due to disaster. "Any sort of IT risks have a major impact on a company's reputation. In IT, disaster is not a choice. Not surprisingly, organizations have made it a high primacy to improve and implement consistent business continuity plans to ensure that IT services are always available to internal users and outside customers," says Lingraju Sawkar, director, Integrated Technology Services, Global Technology Services, IBM India/South Asia.

It might impact customer service and hence means loss of reputation. "Disaster preparedness and recovery is imperative in today's world. The implication of any business ‘interruption' is costly and significantly impacts customer service," says Anoop Handa, Executive Vice President/CIO, Fullerton India Credit Company.

"The need for uninterrupted business operations has become crucial for companies to ensure enhanced customer engagement and protect critical business data," opines Chander Khanduja, CIO, Luminous.

IMPORTANCE OF RTO AND RPO

According to the experts, two things which are very important are RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). These two effectively define the business impact of a disruption in service and define disaster recovery not necessarily something which has happened when a disaster is declared but any break in service, for whatever foreseeable or unforeseeable situation. So any disruption in service is disaster. "Today most of the enterprises have a lot more interactions happening with the end customers. So any service interruption is actually a disaster. There are people who lose thousands of dollars for every minute of breakage of service; whether you are collecting data, collecting bills, or selling retail merchandise and if you are a bank then imagine the scale of loss," remarks Sawkar from IBM.

According to the experts, preparedness is the key to minimize the risk of failure. Integrated approach on preparedness i.e. not only IT but work force recovery, business continuity in terms of processes, applications, prioritizing the area based on business impact are some of the important factors to be evaluated.

"Strategy should be prepared with a well-defined scope of stake holders and vendors to manage the disaster situation and reduce recovery time," adds Sawkar as he shares cases in depth. In his opinion, these strategies and processes need to be reviewed every year to check their effectiveness with current scenario of risks. In order to improve recovery time, organizations can look for new approaches on managing disaster recovery.

DISASTER-PROOF CLOUD STRATEGY

The traditional disaster recovery dedicated model in which customer buys hardware, all the required middle ware and tools to setup disaster recovery site is costly and time consuming to implement. While this model can reduce RTO because of hardware and software being pre-configured, it does not eliminate all the delays. RTO in dedicated model is from 4 hrs to 72 hrs depending upon the investment. Cloud model can also be approached to reduce the RTO.

"The enterprise-grade cloud can help companies-even in the most mission-critical situations such as disaster recovery-gain more efficiencies in their businesses," says Anoop Handa of Fullerton India Credit Company. Fullerton has deployed solutions to ensure disaster recovery from IBM. The company has deployed IBM SmartCloud capabilities. The company now claims that it will be able to reduce service recovery time and ensure high availability and increased operational efficiency, without the typical capital investments required in a dedicated infrastructure for disaster recovery.

Cloud disaster recovery and business continuity solutions also save companies from hiring skilled staff in-house. "Choosing the right infrastructure recovery service provides businesses with a secure and risk free environment avoiding the complexity associated with hiring highly skilled resources. It also equips them with an alternate work environment to minimize the loss of employee productivity, thus meeting their needs for continuous operations." says Rajesh Garg, VP Business development and Technology, IREO

"Businesses look to cloud-based virtual server recovery (VSR) for reliability, scalability, and ability to dramatically reduce recovery time. This helps improve server recovery time and reliability by leveraging high quality automation and cloud tools," shares Khanduja.

Onkar Sharma
onkars@cybermedia.co.in