Forget RoI in DR, Focus on TCO

All About DR: CIOs Recommendations

n How
Does One Perform Impact Analysis for DR

The impact analysis should take risks and challenges into account
that vary from industry to industry. One must understand that actual cost of
recovery is not just loss of revenue in those few hours, but also includes costs
of customer attrition, customer acquisition, business goodwill and more. The
solution clearly lies in planning business processes from day one–rather than
in technology. It may be good idea to spread your locations to mitigate your
risks.

n How
to Justify RoI in a DR Investment

When you just have put in place a basic infrastructure, it’s hard
to go to CFO and justify investing in another, mirror infrastructure for safety
and business continuity reasons–because it is hard to justify a RoI. This is
where the option of outsourcing of DR, that is to evade from building a complete
DR infrastructure of your own.

There is no RoI–it is the TCO that matters in DR. How to
manage costs and how to reduce negotiable costs is the key question. Also, top
management is usually aware that an IT disaster can put them out of business. It
is usually only a question of getting the thought across to them to get the
process rolling.

"There is no standard set of guidelines that you can follow to become a DR-compliant organization" "The biggest challenge is to move DR and BCP from IT table to business table, as that is where final decisions are taken" "Every single fire drill to check on disaster readiness may throw up new challenges, which may have never existed before" Ajay Nair, GM-IT Royal Sundaram Insurance Robin Sarkar IS director, Asia region Whirlpool India Sudipto Sen MD, Comsat Max

n How
to get the DR right?

How you plan your DR is dependent on your relationship with clients–you
have to engage with them and understand their own businesses, apart from your
own. Then comes your own infrastructure–if you have a large data warehousing
solution, it is impossible to replicate in under two weeks. Typical recovery
time can be between 24-28 hours, depending on size and value of business.
Therefore you must have a warm site close to the core site, which is going to be
a huge cost. The bigger challenge is to move DR and BCP from IT table to
business table, as that is where decisions are made. It is important to get down
to minute details. Every single fire drill to check on disaster readiness may
throw up new challenges, which may have never existed before. There are
solutions available which can provide multiple levels of replication for data
stored in users’ desktops.

Top management is usually  aware that an IT disaster  can put them out of business. It’s only a question of  getting the thought across "The RoI does not matter in DR, you must focus on decreasing the TCO as much as you can" "It is hard to justify investing in mirror infrastructure for business continuity reasons–as there is no way to justify a RoI" Anand Sengupta senior manager–IT Daikin Shriram Vikram SriHari director-business systems, Coca Cola India Easwar Das associate editor, Dataquest

n Outsourcing:
Build vs Buy Issue

Economics come at a second stage. The company should take a call
whether it really wants to take an IT challenge upon itself or leave it to
specialists. Some companies for example in financial segment will build their
own infrastructure, whereas a white-goods company will be best placed to
outsource its DR requirements.