Must we wait for disaster to strike, as it did in Nepal, to ensure that business doesn’t come to a standstill? It is now common knowledge that the North part of India sits on shaky ground, seismically. The government of India has listed 38 Indian cities in high-risk seismic zones. Isn’t it high time we planned for business continuity?
Yes it is, said the CIOs and senior IT professionals participating in our 3rd CIO meetup, Cloud Champions @ Progression. And so we decided to have an idea generation exercise on getting a disaster recovery plan template in place. A moderator asked questions and the participating CIOs, senior IT professionals and cloud experts jotted down ideas on Post-its. And soon we had a trail of ideas going!
Here’s what emerged from the sessions.
- Causes for IT Standstill and Failures: The first step to have a good DR plan in place is to have a great understanding of what constitutes the disaster. It’s not just earthquakes. We unearthed many more, including rodents and riots.
- Challenges in Implementing Disaster Recovery: Once we know how we can gear up for a solution, let’s look at the real challenges we have in making them happen. And the key theme for this, across the table covered Management buy-in and Costs. Ignorance and over-confidence were highlighted as well.
- Disaster Recovery Solution Requirements: So what would your dream DR solution have? “Almost free of cost”, read one Post-it. “Same response as we have in the primary setup”, said another. Zero data loss, transparency, regular DR drills…we caught quite a few.
- Disaster Recovery Plan Checklist: What should one keep in mind while planning for DR? Some of the ideas we got included people and training, location, costs, connectivity, future needs, DR test frequency, etc.
Here’s a single view of the ideas collected at the brainstorming session we had. We hope IT teams across the country will use this graphic as their starting point when the discussions on DR and BCP come up. If you have any questions, write to reach@progression.com
