Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti
It would be quite cliché to talk about the significance of business continuity planning for banks, but has IT disaster recovery automation become an inevitable necessity for the banking sector? That would be quite an interesting aspect to look into. Ever since RBI mandated banks to deploy and demonstrate their business continuity and IT DR capabilities, the investment in this area by banks have seen an upsurge.
A disaster or an outage can affect the various services provided by the bank. Typical banking business functions – including ATM services, mobile banking, credit cards, point of sale services, settlement clearing, cash management and treasury – are all interdependent and IT is the key enabler for their smooth and hassle free functioning. Critical IT systems need to be available 24×7 for customer confidence and avoiding business loss. An outage in even one branch can disrupt any of these services leading to flak from the customers and loss of reputation.
HUGE IMPACT
The causes of outage could vary ranging from natural, technological or manmade disasters including security threats such as viruses or man in the middle attacks. The impact of these disasters could be huge – loss of revenue, delay in customer request processes and transactions to name a few – which would in turn affect the brand image and reputation of the bank and subsequent downfall and failure of the organization.
While the banks have been adopting business continuity plans, few key challenges faced by them for successful execution of business continuity plans include:
- Dependence on manual recovery efforts, based on static run-books, prone to errors and delays
- Heavy dependence on experts to ensure recovery, leading to large teams of experts being required for any recovery effort
- Lack of visibility into DR readiness and recovery operations, leading to uncertainty of time and effort required for recovery
- Shortage of skillsets for IT DR
These challenges need to be addressed by the organizations to ensure effective management of disaster recovery efforts. Customers require immediate results and uninterrupted services. With competitors on the rise, the banks will have to ensure that the expectations of the consumers are met in a timely and effective manner.
NEED FOR AUTOMATION
So, it is not just enough to adopt a business continuity plan; the entire DR management and operations should be automated to ensure successful, repeatable implementation and execution of the plan for eliminating service outages. Use of effective DR automation software would help in mitigating risks – operational, legal, financial, and reputational – that might arise due to any disruption.
Another significant aspect during a crisis is effective communication. Both internal (within organization) and external communication is necessary to understand the impact of disruption on the organization as a whole as well as on its employees, and to make appropriate decisions within a short span of time. This is one key factor to retain public and employee confidence.
The process and procedures for communication with various stakeholders – employees, public, other industry participants and government authorities – must not only be precisely designed in the business continuity plan, but there is also the need for a command center to provide proper framework and direction to the recovery efforts. An efficient command center covers all aspects for successful execution of business continuity plan – preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. Such a command center should have secure communication, intuitive user interface, ability to act as a one stop solution and be easily accessible from any medium (whether it is web, email, SMS, or app).
We can therefore see that there is an increasing need in the banking sector, driven by customer demand, for swift IT recovery solutions. Business continuity and IT DR automation have thus become imperative for both the traditional and new age banks and they are here to stay and grow!
Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti, is founder & CEO, Sanovi Technologies.
