DAY 2/ Power Breakfast

Managing BC/DR

Indian Express organized a Power breakfast Round table for IBM India with the discussion revolving around Managing Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Anil Kumar Khadke, SPL leader-BCRS India & SA., IBM India with the CIOs in the round table speaking on 'Managing Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

IBM India initiated the discussion giving insights into challenges and opportunities in this space and suggesting ways as how cost effective models can be evolved.

Anil Kumar Khadke, SPL leader-BCRS India & SA, IBM India spoke about business resilience and how it could help mitigate risks.

Khadke pointed that business resilience is critical as it helps in rapidly adapt and respond to risks, and opportunities, to maintain continuous business operations.

Given the challenges of the changing environment such s expanding risk exposures, increased global and regional interdependencies, heightened impact of business disruption, complex regulations etc., According to him the disruptions came in various forms such as power failure, IT hardware failure, human error, software failure, network failure, terrorism, and earthquakes etc. Both risks and opportunities affect clients’ business resilience needs which are driven by data, business and events.

Business resilience and security are top areas of concern and spend for midsize companies, given the data growth which is growing from 161 exabytes in 2007 to 988 exabytes in 2010.

Khadke pointed that resilience strategy could be developed by way of accepting, mitigating and transferring of risks. The most suitable way to evolve this strategy and protect the infrastructure as Khadke suggested was to avail service products which include assessment, planning and design, implementation and testing, work area recovery, information protection and continuous availability.

This could achieve almost 50% cost saving or ROI on the investment made which could beef up the DR.

Satish Das, CISO, Cognizant Technologies was curious know who how the risks related to satellite phones be mitigated with business resilience initiatives, given the challenge of not having a dedicated executive earmarked for business continuity.

Khadke suggested that every organization need to create an apex body for addressing BCS who would come out with a clear draft policy to suggest ways to handle risks.

Some of the resiliency services Khadke recommended hosting DR infrastructure, monitoring and management services, replication solutions, testing etc., which could be outsourced.

— N Geetha