Expect the unexpected

Court disaster long enough, and it will accept your proposal.

— Mason Cooley (b. 1927),
US aphorist. City Aphorisms,
Third Selection, New York (1986).

Disasters don’t wait on human beings. They happen in the blink of an eye, and before you know it, all the carefully-made plans of mice and men are scattered to the four winds.

July 2005 saw Mumbai facing the kind of downpour that would not be considered commonplace anywhere except in Cherrapunji. The torrential rainstorm exposed chinks in the disaster recovery set-ups of India’s leading banks as ATM networks collapsed like dominoes.

Banks weren’t the only ones to face the brunt of Mother Nature; every enterprise in India’s financial capital found its world turned upside down. Does this reflect a lack of planning or is it that the unexpected by its very nature is unplannable?

The truth, as in most things, lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, the planning could have been better, redundancies more robust, and contingencies accounted for better. That said, nothing could have prepared India Inc.’s finest for a squall of monstrous proportions.

The important thing is that the lessons of 26/7 seem to have been learned. CIOs are taking a hard look at their DR strategies and going back to the drawing board to refine the same.

This time around we bring you a collection of case studies from key industry verticals that put the spotlight on DR and BC. We picked BFSI, telecom, manufacturing and IT/ITES as these are some of the biggest deployers of IT.

To add a little paprika to the mix, there’s an account of how CIOs from leading institutions and companies dealt with the unexpected and came through 26/7, battered and bruised but in one piece.

Will things change for the better? Is the script going to play out differently the next time nature strikes? The jury’s out on that, but we at Network Magazine believe that the lessons of 26/7 will not be soon forgotten. India Inc. will do better the second time around.

Prashant L Rao
Head of Editorial Operations