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Defending their turf with DR

Threats from attacks, disruption due to natural calamities as well as the need to maintain business continuity and recover from disasters have become significant and critical. Indian businesses are gradually adopting DR solutions to secure themselves from the unknown. By Faiz Askari.

Business continuity, natural hazards, operational hiccups are just some of the reasons as to why disaster recovery solutions have a good scope. Storage and security vendors, these days, aggressively working with systems integrators and VARs to ensure that their clients are satisfied with best of breed back up, disaster recovery solutions that serve as the backbone of any business.

The business scenario post 9/11 led a majority of US based businesses to adopt disaster recovery (DR) solutions. This suddenly became an indispensable business process, in US. After that, there were some natural hazards that hit the US and its business community. These provided additional pressure for enterprises to get their disaster recovery plans in order.

Although the technology has been known for many years it took a spate of calamities in the recent past such as the unusually heavy rains in Mumbai, earthquakes and tsunamis for India Inc to get serious about this concept.

There are a lot of technologies out in the market starting from good old tape backup systems, virtual tape boxes, de-duplication technologies, database replication solutions right up to storage based replication and hot sites. Even disaster recovery management solutions for managing the entire DR process end-to-end, are available.

Indian CIOs know the technology and most grasp its relevance. Anand Sengupta, Head IT, Dakin India says, “In today’s fiercely competitive market and in the post 9/11 scenario, the most important thing is business continuity. If recovery time from a disaster is very high, then it becomes an opportunity for a competitor to gain a lead or capture the market.”

Talking about the Indian market’s maturity towards technology and highlighting the acceptance of DR solutions amongst Indian enterprises, Hilal Isar Khan, head IT at Honda Siel Cars India Ltd, said, “Indian industry is well aware of disaster recovery solutions. It is good for the industry because most Indian players have exposure to the international market. To an extent, threats from natural disasters also have to be factored in.”

CIOs want DR

Companies need to store more information, and more types of information, than ever before. This trend, along with the enhanced value and vulnerability of data and the expanding volume of regulations governing its retention, has resulted in greater emphasis being placed on data availability, protection and security.

As far as logical demand is concerned, the industry believes that CIOs need to understand their various applications in terms of business criticality. One needs to categorise each application in terms of data criticality. One can have multiple levels of data replication and data protection depending on the category of the data classification. This classification helps evaluate the cost as opposed to the value of data. 

As organisations come to depend more on IT systems and the threats from various areas like terrorist attacks, disruptions due to natural calamities, business continuity and recovery from disasters have become more significant. PJ Jacob, DGM – IT, The South Indian Bank Ltd says, “There are enough reports and studies, which indicate that organisations, which are not prepared to face disasters in any form, may even go out of business. CIO’s are in fact, mandated by regulations to have robust, and well tested disaster recovery/business continuity plans and procedures in place, as a part of risk mitigation process. Since disaster recovery invariably involves IT assets, CIOs are responsible for ensuring that proper systems are in place for meeting any eventuality and in that sense both demands on and of the CIOs have gone up drastically over the years.”

Sengupta cites some key demands of CIOs while selecting a DR solution for their business environment, “From the perspective of cost, DR solutions have to justify their implementation for the respective business. Scalability is another key issue which has to be clearly understood at the time of selecting a solution.” He stresses on the importance of support, “As the business grows the infrastructure should be able to support. Also there should not be any redundancy in the infrastructure.”

Offering another perspective, Khan of Honda says, “It is good that Indian CIOs are aware of advanced technologies. At the same time, vendors have to critically think about whether they are over highlighting DR. Vendors should not create unnecessary hype about this concept in the Indian market.”

DR for Business Continuity

A disaster recovery and business continuity plan is essential to protect the existence of any organisation. Although this cannot be overemphasised, many organisations still side step the issue, or have plans that are out of date or just unworkable.

CIOs and CTOs have realised that various types of information require different DR strategy and storage systems. For example, mission critical data that is generated and accessed frequently will require high performance primary storage with real-time synchronous replication to a DR site. For less critical data, asynchronous replication or tape vaulting suffices. The key is to apply the best DR strategy for each class of information so as to meet the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) at the lowest possible cost. There are a number of reasons for this, including complexity, and of course the fact that some vendors sell planning products which are difficult to manage. The recent trend though is to seek simplicity and high productivity in the planning process: to create the plan directly using a quality template along with supporting guides and forms.

In some cases, organisations are not taking business continuity seriously. Agreeing to this, Sengupta says, “The common feeling amongst top management is that business does not require such solutions. Business continuity does not only encompass the IT dept. It is about how the entire organisation works in case of a disaster. A high availability network design is often the foundation for disaster recovery and can be sufficient to handle some minor or local disasters.”  

As IT infrastructure becomes richer there is the challenge of managing it. Commenting on role of DR in the business continuity plan of any business, Khan says, “For doing this, one need to examine some critical gaps, also in all this, prioritisation is necessary. It means, for every business its continuity is always on demand. So keeping the business continuity aspect alive, DR solutions have to be implemented and managed.”

Raising the importance of business continuity while designing DR strategy for a business, Jacob says, “Definitely, business continuity has to be the top priority for any DR policy or strategy. Any responsible organisation would like to take care of its stakeholders and at the same time there are also regulatory requirements to be met. I would say that companies do not have any option or choice in the current scenario.”   

DR tech: CDP, granularity

Long distance data replication is an area that has discussed threadbare at various CIO gatherings. The requirements are a direct result of compliance and for data protection. Vendors are receiving requests from customers to help them in their DR. 

For a DR site to be completely effective it should always be ready with the latest copy of live data, all the changes at the primary data centre (application software, network, hardware etc) should be implemented at the DR site so that the latter is always available to the organisation as a “hot site”. Jacob highlights the key aspects of a DR infrastructure, “The user who connects to and works from a DR site should not feel any specific problems and more important, the customer should not be troubled in any way. These requirements impose challenges in terms of higher bandwidth to ensure prompt transfer of data, change management at both primary and secondary sites such that both sites are in sync as well as retention of trained manpower or outsourcing as the case may be etc.” 

Growing storage requirements have also spurred demand for business continuity. In such scenarios, CIOs are looking for a technology that can reduce the time taken for data recovery. Sengupta adds, “Businesses have less time to recover data. Hours of system failure or shutdown because of a disaster can have major repercussions in terms of loss of business and reputation.”

Pinpointing the potential and relevance of cost-effective communication, Khan says, “In today’s scenario, communications is a key component in running any business. In fact, communication supports a business. Along with this businesses also require a 24/7 business model which does not allow any breakdown to occur. Vendors and IT managers have to acknowledge the fact that there is no tailor made solution available for all companies. So a vendor needs to cater all the issues as well as they have to come up with a customised solution for an enterprise in any given line of business.”

Sudhakar Rao, National Channels Director, Hitachi Data Systems India says, “Most financial institutions and large customers are taking the lead in deploying multi-city DR.” Some SMB customers are using host-based replication; enterprise storage customers use only storage based replication. Customers are using different levels of DR readiness depending upon the criticality of their data. Offsite tape backup is very widely used and even today is the most common way of doing DR. Improved connectivity has encouraged customers to put more applications on DR. Customers who have implemented DR are presently planning for DR drills. As many of the organisations have to adhere to regulations they need to incorporate this into their routine activities.” 

Times have changed and the litigious climate, regulatory compliance, and corporate governance place new demands on end-users in terms of the sheer volume of data that must be protected and ultimately made recoverable. Sunny John Country manager for India at Quantum says, “In particular, end-users face much more stringent recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs) than ever before.” 

Emphasising on the acceptance of new DR technology in India, he says, “New recovery techniques, such as CDP, and granular search or indexing capabilities, along with existing tape- and disk-based backup technologies, will go a long way toward ensuring that data is recoverable when it needs to be—and at a price point that makes sense. The convergence of the four market drivers listed above will create a market ripe with opportunity in India.”

In today’s scenario, companies need to store more information, and more types of information, than ever before. This trend, along with the enhanced value and vulnerability of data and the expanding volume of regulations governing its retention, has placed much greater emphasis on data availability, data protection and data security.

The DR requirement in India is quite active. The requirements are coming due to compliance and for data protection. Vendors are busy in receiving multiple requests from customer to help them in their DR requirements. With such signs and signals, the future of these trends looks firm. The only factor that can decide is — the ability to understand the need, criticality and importance of DR for that respective business—and this have to be at both ends—the vendor’s and the customer’s.