Sanovi

Disaster recovery management, going forward

D.Murali

Disaster recovery as a service makes it very easy for organisations to adopt and be recovery-ready, says Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Co-founder and VP, Products, Sanovi Technologies, Bangalore (http://bit.ly/F4TSanovi). In a services model, the service provider brings all the expertise required for recovery and ensures the required recovery goals will be met, he reasons, during the course of a recent email interaction with Business Line.

Excerpts from the interview.

What were the differences that 2011 brought to DRM (disaster recovery management) for enterprises?
The Indian and Asian economy grew in 2011, reflecting an increasing investment in IT as a key enabler for business growth. In 2011, we registered an increased awareness and interest from companies and analysts in various DR offerings.

Manufacturing companies, banks, telecom amongst others had specific mandate to reduce business risk and hence looked at building a more reliable and resilient IT infrastructure. The tsunami in Japan, and other major attention-grabbing events made an impression on business leaders, enough to get them to think about the need to have processes and tools in place to ensure their business and supporting IT infrastructure can be recovered.

Can you mention some of the surprises that enterprises encountered as regards DRM, in recent times?
The Government of India has several major e-governance projects that are making huge investments in IT to enable better and more transparent services to citizens. Decision-makers in the government were receptive to the idea of building a resilient IT application by building recovery capabilities into the design of IT applications. DR got a lot of attention from research companies; specifically, Gartner in its recent research report spoke about DR management-related tools and how their adoption is helping companies build a recovery-ready IT infrastructure.

The level of interest and discussion around cloud technologies was a surprise; IT managers were exploring possibilities using the cloud as a recovery mechanism and the ways to limit their investment in building recovery capabilities. We were pleasantly surprised at the creative usage of recovery capabilities that DR management tools can enable.

One of our customers conducting DR drills regularly and hence very confident in their ability to recover their applications had an outage in their primary data centre due to a server problem. While waiting for the server to be fixed, they invoked their recovery capability and started services at the DR site resulting in reduced application downtime.

It became clear that DR management tools enable organisations to move from recovery to resilience.

On the unfolding regulatory developments in the DRM space.

Regulatory requirements are strong drivers for various industry verticals to adopt business continuity and IT disaster recovery capabilities. In India, the RBI has been playing a stellar role in driving regulation that requires financial organisations to put IT recovery in place and further demonstrate recovery capabilities every six months by conducting test and drills.

What we feel would be good is to have the government drive an appropriate regulation that requires e-Government projects to advertise service level metrics that they will have to meet. This, in turn, will ensure that all important projects offering services to citizens will protect important data and also have built-in recovery capabilities to ensure government services are available at all times.

Your outlook for 2012 for DRM.

Our outlook for 2012 is positive, we expect an overall increase in awareness about risks that organisations face, and methods, approaches and tools to mitigate risk due not non-availability of IT applications. There are several new technologies that now enable building a more resilient IT.

IT recovery is no longer the domain and need of large business only; small and medium businesses are using IT in a critical way, and hence have to have a plan where their business will recover predictably when their IT infrastructure suffers an outage. One of our focus areas will, therefore, be to address the growing mid-segment of the market with innovative solutions like offering recovery as a service.

	23 January 2012

Disaster recovery management, going forward D.Murali Disaster recovery as a service makes it very easy for organisations to adopt and be recovery-ready, says Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Co-founder and VP, Products, Sanovi Technologies, Bangalore (http://bit.ly/F4TSanovi). In a services model, the service provider brings all the expertise required for recovery and ensures the required recovery goals will be met, he reasons, during the course of a recent email interaction with Business Line. Excerpts from the interview. What were the differences that 2011 brought to DRM (disaster recovery management) for enterprises? The Indian and Asian economy grew in 2011, reflecting an increasing investment in IT as a key enabler for business growth. In 2011, we registered an increased awareness and interest from companies and analysts in various DR offerings. Manufacturing companies, banks, telecom amongst others had specific mandate to reduce business risk and hence looked at building a more reliable and resilient IT infrastructure. The tsunami in Japan, and other major attention-grabbing events made an impression on business leaders, enough to get them to think about the need to have processes and tools in place to ensure their business and supporting IT infrastructure can be recovered. Can you mention some of the surprises that enterprises encountered as regards DRM, in recent times? The Government of India has several major e-governance projects that are making huge investments in IT to enable better and more transparent services to citizens. Decision-makers in the government were receptive to the idea of building a resilient IT application by building recovery capabilities into the design of IT applications. DR got a lot of attention from research companies; specifically, Gartner in its recent research report spoke about DR management-related tools and how their adoption is helping companies build a recovery-ready IT infrastructure. The level of interest and discussion around cloud technologies was a surprise; IT managers were exploring possibilities using the cloud as a recovery mechanism and the ways to limit their investment in building recovery capabilities. We were pleasantly surprised at the creative usage of recovery capabilities that DR management tools can enable. One of our customers conducting DR drills regularly and hence very confident in their ability to recover their applications had an outage in their primary data centre due to a server problem. While waiting for the server to be fixed, they invoked their recovery capability and started services at the DR site resulting in reduced application downtime. It became clear that DR management tools enable organisations to move from recovery to resilience. On the unfolding regulatory developments in the DRM space. Regulatory requirements are strong drivers for various industry verticals to adopt business continuity and IT disaster recovery capabilities. In India, the RBI has been playing a stellar role in driving regulation that requires financial organisations to put IT recovery in place and further demonstrate recovery capabilities every six months by conducting test and drills. What we feel would be good is to have the government drive an appropriate regulation that requires e-Government projects to advertise service level metrics that they will have to meet. This, in turn, will ensure that all important projects offering services to citizens will protect important data and also have built-in recovery capabilities to ensure government services are available at all times. Your outlook for 2012 for DRM. Our outlook for 2012 is positive, we expect an overall increase in awareness about risks that organisations face, and methods, approaches and tools to mitigate risk due not non-availability of IT applications. There are several new technologies that now enable building a more resilient IT. IT recovery is no longer the domain and need of large business only; small and medium businesses are using IT in a critical way, and hence have to have a plan where their business will recover predictably when their IT infrastructure suffers an outage. One of our focus areas will, therefore, be to address the growing mid-segment of the market with innovative solutions like offering recovery as a service.