'The cost of downtime is multi-faceted'

Lakshman Narayanaswamy
Co-Founder and VP-Products, Sanovi Technologies

Disaster recovery is an organization's ability to recover and operate core process/services which enables it to transact business with its customers and partners.

What is Disaster Recovery Management?

Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) is the process of designing and managing a set of application recovery processes that are designed to meet your business recovery objectives. Application recovery service level is measured by two metrics, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Why do organizations need disaster recovery and business continuity solutions?

You cant manage what you cant measure. But measurement of your recovery solutions' ability to perform has been problematic at best. Testing is a painful, time consuming, disruptive and a costly process. It requires significant coordination between groups and is labor-intensive. Today's IT operations are complicated and dynamic. Every day, things change

in the environment that could potentially cause restarting operations at a remote site to fail. Also the cost of down time is multifaceted. Further, in several vertical markets, disaster recovery is required by regulatory authorities.

What are the common reasons cited for not deploying a disaster recovery plan for an organization?

Following are the common reasons that are cited for not deploying a disaster recovery plan:

• We have not been hit by a disaster, these things do not happen here.
• We are replicating our data, that is our disaster recovery plan.
• My team of experts can bring up our infrastructure in case of need.
• Data recovery is for big companies, my company can postpone the decision.

Which are the ideal target sectors for these products/services?

DRM solutions are most applicable to verticals that have critical IT applications and by regulation need to demonstrate disaster recovery capabilities. Banking and finance, manufacturing, e-government, telecom are some of the verticals that are targets for these products/services.

The current market for DRM solutions in India? What are recent trends in this space?

ABI research forecasts that global market for business continuity and disaster data recovery solutions will grow from $24.3 billion in 2009 to $39 billion in 2015. Sanovi estimates that the Indian market size will be $75 million by 2014. Business continuity and disaster recovery technologies are becoming
less expensive and easier to use, because they are being integrated into larger IT systems, and also because they're increasingly taking advantage of aspects of cloud computing and virtualization.

DQC News Bureau