“Companies want a resilient function for core business processes”

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Charles Woods, Asia Pacific Director of the Risk & Resiliency Center of Excellence, IBM, talked to Jasmine Desai regarding trends in the Indian DR market and how virtualization and Cloud computing were impacting this space

How is DR-as-a-Service evolving in India?

In past six to seven years DR has evolved from the ability to recover x hours to being able to run certain processes without interruption. Companies want a resilient function for core business processes servicing open markets and consumers. DR is focused mostly around protecting data. The need for traditional DR has changed. Continuity in BCP has merged into the continuous service availability framework. It has become one work stream now. Globally, there are certain places that have a greater capability and dedicated resources to deliver this kind of service framework. Many organizations in India are already into implementing highly resilient frameworks.

What is the DR approach of SMBs as opposed to that of large enterprises?

SMBs have the same needs as large enterprises. It is driven by compliance, risk to reputation, rules and regulations associated with data etc. Every organization has some level of backup. Cloud services have grown to meet the market demand of SMBs who require the same level of resilience. Part of IBM’s strategy is to enable Cloud services to cater to this market. Earlier customers did not want to make leap to DR was because it came with a huge upfront infrastructure cost. It also depends how much recovery you planned for your organization.

Cloud computing and virtualization bring in lot of complexity to DR. How can these be minimized?

From a solutions and design perspective, it is complex; for the user, it is the same. There are various models available in the market. The functionality or BCP in any of these models remains the same. There is a huge dynamic shift in other parts of the world around the mentality of services. APAC and India especially still look at managed service providers in a horizontal view. The service is not delivered in pieces in terms of network, process etc. All of it encompasses any service delivery. In other parts of the world it is a vertical view. e.g. a global bank wanted in their contract with IBM that their CBS should be functional at all times. This was not associating it with infrastructure, but about delivery of services. Organizations want their mission-critical applications to be delivered without being bothered about how are they delivered. What India can derive from this is to learn to tackle the growth that is present not just today but also that which they are expecting. The challenge is how to tackle growth in these highly fluid enterprises to make sure that customers are not impacted.

What is IBM’s take on PPBA (Purpose Based Backup Appliance) and its adoption in India?

Backup is part of the BCP. In India, backup is not as mature as it is in other geographies. Many organizations are still adopting primitive ways of doing backup. Customers in India are not very willing to adopt SLA-based backup services. The customers are not really measuring the backup that they are taking and how useful it is. e.g. what is the quality of the data, are they losing something? We have started backup-as-a-service as one of our offerings.

In the coming years, what will be the key drivers of investment?

BCP is the larger term here. Compliance is added to that and it forces customers to have a redundant center. Most of the customers are using their redundant center effectively. They are not loading the production with test and development. This is being moved to redundant centers. They are making use of it more efficiently to make sure that it does not remain as an insurance investment against natural disasters.

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