Is Your Business Service Availability Solution Prepared for a Real Catastrophe?

Why some traditional business service availability solutions may not prove effective in a real catastrophic situation?

The recent Chennai rains have exposed the city to a spate of new risks, where even the biggest IT firms have been grappling with their contingency plans. Such unforeseen situations, natural calamities or even simple human mistakes can lead to costly business disruptions. The Chennai floods have shown how even the organizations that seem to be well-prepared and strong may not be able to cope in a real disaster situation. Quite often the extent of damage or loss is too large to overcome or recover.

According to a news source, crippling floods in Chennai have caused huge losses to various industries. IT insiders have pegged the losses at $5-10 million for mid-size IT firms and $40-50 million for large companies. On the other hand, Telecom Operators have suffered some Rs 300 crore of losses amid the unprecedented rainfall in the city. Out of the Rs 300 crore losses estimated by Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), Rs 100 crore is on account of network restoration and Rs 200 crore on account of revenue losses over the past seven days.

Overall, The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) on Wednesday estimated that the financial loss due to the rains may exceed Rs.15,000crore with Chennai and several parts of Tamil Nadu coming to a virtual standstill after the catastrophe.

Few common mistakes that organizations can avoid in recovery planning, and business service continuity and availability management:

                Need for greater visibility: In order to be effective in a business disrupting situation, the organization needs to have Real-Time visibility of a critical IT service and infrastructure that supports this service. Also, Real-Time visibility into the financial impact of a critical IT service, unplanned outage or degradation of service needs to be enabled. Most availability management solutions are not equipped to provide with the real-time visibility needed to gauge the impact of an occurrence.

                Avoid unnecessary costs and complexities: Over engineering your IT infrastructure to build multiple redundancies does not result in better visibility, but only adds to your incremental recurring costs.

                Data Replication is not enough: Traditional Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans usually work towards building multiple redundancies and data replication to safeguard your critical data. However, this approach is not enough to insulate your organization from the risk.

                Make it simple and effective: The design and approach of any contingency plan should be very simple and easy-to-implement so it can be quickly put into action in the case of an eventuality.

                Focus on speed and efficiency: Too much dependence on subject matter expertise may often result in loss of time and adds to operational inefficiencies.

Disruptions can happen anytime, anywhere and can affect anyone. Don’t wait till it strikes you!

Credits – PerpetuuitiTechnoSoft Inc.