Tale of a Falcon

Disasters, natural calamities, terror strikes and even pandemic attacks such
as bird flu have gradually spelled a wake-up call to corporate India on their
level of business preparedness. The value of Business Continuity Management (BCM)
is gaining momentum and is being appreciated by India, Inc more than before.
According to a recent survey conducted by Market Pulse in conjunction with BCM
Institute, 44% of the companies in India have faced some form of disaster since
2006. What is startling is that the average loss caused by disruptions was Rs
20.5 crore up from Rs 7.7 crore in the previous year. This shows that not only
has the incidence increased but also the financial impact. This has prompted a
large number of companies, especially the ones that promise 24x7 services, and
are heavily dependent on IT and data management to look at BCM/BCP seriously.

A well-planned business continuity/disaster recovery solution becomes
critical to any organization as its better to plan for incidents, which may
affect your business rather than having to catch up when a problem occurs.

BCP in a Nutshell

Business Continuity Planing(BCP) is a management process that provides a
framework to ensure the resilience of businesses against any eventuality, to
help ensure continuity of service to key customers and the protection of the
brand or reputation. It provides a basis for planning to ensure long-term
survivability following a disruptive event. While DR is a small part of BCP, it
is often mistaken as an alternative to BCP which is why many enterprises are
continuing to sustain losses. While Europe and the US have seen significantly
strong BCP services players, there are only a few players in the Indian
subcontinent who offer DR/BCP as an exclusive, dedicated service. However, now
that a new standard BS27999 for (BCP) is gaining significance, the scenario
might change for the better. According to the Market Pulse study, almost 50% of
the surveyed respondents were planning to apply for the BS27999 certification
and 15% are keen on getting their employees certified in BCP.

DR&BCP Providers

Some of the prominent BCP providers today are companies such as Omnitech,
Kale Consultants and even certain hosted infrastructure providers such as Sify
and Netmagic. IBM too has created advanced BCP and DR for its customers
internally. While most Indian companies are quite mature in their IT back-up and
data vaulting, it is the broader BCP planning that they lack. All disasters have
different characteristics and affect one or more of the four pillars of Business
Continuityworkplace, infrastructure, data and people, and BCP helps sustain
them. While the infrastructure and data bit has been tackled by the vendors, the
people and workplace recovery is a space that is only recently gaining traction.
Omnitech recently launched its OmniCentre as an alternate workplace destination
for its customers. While most of the players provide workplace recovery and BCP
as a part of their managed services or IMS offerings, there are very few who
offer BCP and especially workplace recovery as a focused offering. One such
company is Falcon Disaster Recovery which went live with its operations in
December 2008a month after the Mumbai terror attacks.

The Unique Proposition

FDR has positioned itself as a workplace recovery provider and BCP
consultant. Presently, its first facility is in Navi Mumbai, which has about 260
seats and the company plans to set-up eight such centres all across India. We
will have approximately 2, 400 physical seats over the next three years. At the
moment we have 240 physical seats and we plan to share this across eight
customers and across regions which will provide 1,920 virtual seats, says
Jehangir Panthaki, director, FDR.

It is also specialising in providing testing services to customers before
they deploy the BCP measures. Panthaki says that global companies today are
concerned whether their Indian counterparts have a robust DR plan in place.

Target Customers

The present financial scenario is prompting the Bpos to move from a capex to
a pure outsourced or opex model. Also, most Bpos rely on their branch offices
and hub-and-spoke model as a buffer to deliver the necessary DR measures to
customers. However, they have to maintain additional empty seats or a bench and
infrastructure to absorb the migration of employees. This again is an expensive
proposition for BPOs. Hence, CFOs today do not want to keep seats empty or
maintain a bench so as to optimise costs. As a result, many BPOs are turning to
outsource their DR and BCP on a shared model to balance SLAs and budgets. The
cost of building and maintaining this empty site for the entire year has become
very expensive. About 2-3 years ago, banks had that capex as a part of their
budget especially for the captive BPOs. With the increasing number of captive
set-ups being acquired, the third party is no longer interested in owning the
BCP sites which are like white elephants. explains Panthaki.

Building Redundancy

The most important aspect is that FDR has built the technology
infrastructure that can easily connect into any customers network and help him
go live within one hour. It has built a level 3 datacenter and designed the
entire telecom and network layout as per the TI 942 international standards with
n+1 redundancy. As it plans to provide virtual seats and the seats will be
shared between companies, security is a key area that FDR has worked on. The
seats, the network and even the security access to work area are physically
separated for every customer. As soon as a customer plans to invoke into the FDR
site with a request for fifty seats to be ready, the facility right from the
seats, network, IP controlled CCTV access and employee access cards is all
isolated from the rest of the facility and is controlled only by the customer on
invocation. FDR has also set-up Emergency Operations Center (EOCs), where there
is a facility for videoconferencing and all modern office amenities that help
the middle management or team lead to strategise and communicate to their head
offices, senior management and customers.

Future Plans

FDR plans to set up another site in Jaipur in Q3 of this fiscal that will
cater to the northern region. Its entire BCP and workplace recovery network will
include Navi Mumbai and Pune in the west; Jaipur and Faridabad in the north;
Mysore and Coimbatore in the south and Secunderabd and Vijayawada in the
south-east.

We are trying to build scale and work on a hub-and-spoke model where we can
leverage on our chain of DR facilities, says Panthaki. It plans to invest
another Rs 40 crore in building its eight new facilities over the next three
years.

Priya Kekre

priyak@cybermedia.co.in