As a country, India is no stranger to disasters. From floods to earthquakes or cyclones, India has constantly experienced a series of natural disasters.

Disasters can be critical to organisations in the extremely important BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sector, as the impact of downtime can have serious consequences. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan that ensures business continuity is hence vital.

Downtime can also be caused due to cyberattacks, which has spiked recently. NTT’s 2021 Global Threat Intelligence Report states that in 2020, as organisations raced to offer more virtual, remote access through the use of client portals, application-specific and web-application attacks increased, accounting for 67 per cent of all attacks.

This makes it imperative for every organisation in the BFSI sector to understand and create the required approach to implement resilience so that the principles of “Predictive Intelligence”, which include incident prevention, detection, response, recovery and restoration. are put in place. In the context of business continuity, RTO and RPO are important. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) refers to the maximum acceptable data loss in terms of time, and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) denotes the amount of time between an outage and the restoration of operations.

The speed at which businesses are supposed to act today makes it important for organisations to ensure that their disaster recovery process is also fast. The traditional disaster recovery process involves setting up an alternative DR site, which requires infrastructure from power to cooling to IT equipment.

Configuration is another huge challenge, as the applications and the networks have to be tested thoroughly to ensure that the alternative DR site works seamlessly, in case of a disaster at the primary site.

In current times, thanks to the cloud, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), is a powerful option, as it helps enterprises achieve the balance of a fast disaster recovery solution, but at a lower cost. Some of the key reasons why an enterprise should consider DRaaS, include:

Lesser probability of errors : In the case of DRaaS, every process is automated, and hence, replication of data is efficient as compared to, say, a manual process, which has the probability of errors. DRaaS also gives organisations the ability to consistently repeat the testing process for determining the reliability of their DR process. This is made possible, thanks to lower testing costs. It is a win-win situation for organisations.

Faster availability: As every component can be mapped in a disaster recovery tool, critical information related to the operating system, network information, security policies or application-related data can be quickly replicated in an offsite DR site and made live. The most crucial part is the capability to access information from any part of the world.

This allows enterprises to even launch a DR site from even their mobile phone. For smaller organisations that do not have the financial capability to create a DR site, the DRaaS option gives firms a level-playing field as the organisation has to pay only when the DR option is used.

Enhanced security: Managed service providers who give the DRaaS option can include encryption on cloud-based backups, which ensures security of data and reduces the chances of data loss. This is also useful in the current scenario, where there are more remote workers accessing corporate applications.

A DR automation tool, which is a crucial component of DRaaS, is of great advantage in the Covid-19 situation, where organisations have been asked to work with minimal staff. In the digital age, business continuity planning is a must have capability, which can be gained by using DRaaS.

The writer is Sales Director, Cybersecurity, NTT Ltd in India

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