Trust and Business Continuity
ComputerWorld Singapore Vol. 9 Issue No. 7
By Louis Chua
Recently, a colleague of mine learnt the need for identity management,
disaster recovery, business continuity, the power of storage,
the differences between viruses and worms as well as the stranglehold
technologies have on her. All that within a day.
(Could have been longer, but bless the technicians for getting
everything back online within a few hours.)
Anyway, she was so exasperated, she declared she wanted to be
less reliant on technology (though I would bet my last dollar
that by the time you are reading this, she would have forgotten
the pain and gotten back to her old ways ... again.)
This was not the first time viruses had corrupted her system.
Yet time and again, she would just grumble whenever her system
crashed due to whatever the reason of the day was, without reflecting
on the reasons why it happened to her and not to me (Okay, I
know I'm being smug.)
The pain of the crash was simply not enough to shake her out
of her inertia. There was not enough incentive to get her to
be more proactive in doing backups, or to make contingency plans
when the email does not work.
And that is the same problem being faced by many companies that
do not flesh out their IT policies. The pain is not great enough.
In a sense, the excellent infrastructure that exists in highly-developed
countries, could be the biggest obstacle to investments in disaster
management. For why spend so much on something that has such
a low risk of occurrence? When was the last time you had to
worry whether the phone would still be working when you picked
it up? In terms of risk management, there is little perceived
return on investment when building so much backup and redundancy
when the systems are always available. The IT people in more
developed nations have just become soft.
In United States, the 9/11 incident shocked many companies out
of this stupor and suddenly, security and business continuity
became all the rage. It almost seemed as if business continuity
were an American invention!
However, in countries like India, business continuity has always
been very much part and parcel of the business plans of different
companies. Though many still have the image of India as a place
of cheap manpower, in terms of business continuity and disaster
recovery, it is a country that easily stands head and shoulders
above other more developed countries.
And no wonder. According to some Indian reporters whom I have
met, due to the frequent failure of the power grids and phone
lines, IT companies need to have a good backup plan always available
- a plan which they have to put into action quite frequently.
But whatever the state of infrastructure development, business
continuity should still be an area that companies pursue vigorously,
simply because people have became so dependent on technology
that failure is no longer an option. Sometimes, missed opportunities
cannot be measured strictly in monetary terms.
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