Be it a terrorist attack or a virus attack on servers and networks, big or small, natural or man-made; a disaster can result in monetary losses, legal ramifications, loss of customer’s confidence and in some extreme cases, the company's existence too. Upon realization, organizations are increasingly laying business continuity plans (BCP) in place to recover their assets, which include people, facility, business applications, processes and IT systems. However, BCP needs to be considered as a part of strategic planning, rather than fire-fighting. Right from doing a precise risk and vulnerability assessment to identifying the most vulnerable business functions and testing the disaster recovery (DR) plan, there are challenges at every stratum of disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

EcomNetsInc, headquartered in Sterling, Virginia, meticulously addresses these challenges and safeguards the reputation and brand name of enterprises through its innovative and prudent approach towards disaster recovery and business continuity.“We take disaster recovery as service continuity and we account for both major and minor events to align recovery efforts and investment with business needs of our clients.” says Raj Kosuri, Founder and CEO of EcomNets. He strongly believes that continuity is driven by the customers while recovery is driven by the enterprises, and if continuity planning is combined with disaster recovery, the continuity can be ensured and simultaneously enterprises can recover their downtime. “As continuity of operations is most critical, we frame our solutions based on the Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) of CIOs, their backup requirements and the type of customers they serve.” adds Kosuri.

Proactive Approach
EcomNets, having its India division in Hyderabad, helps enterprises develop and execute effective disaster recovery and business continuity plans. The company assists organizations in drafting IT Disaster Recovery Plan to restore IT application and infrastructure services following a disruption. To manage a wide range of crises from health and safety incidents to business disruptions to reputational damage, EcomNets comes up with Crisis Management Plan. The company has set a benchmark for providing business continuity plans to disparate business units of an organization. It enables enterprises to identify business processes and dependencies, define an appropriate recovery timeline based on a business impact analysis and create a step-by-step incidence response plan.

EcomNets starts the process of business continuity planning with Risk and Business Impact Analysis. The company determines an organization’s risk tolerance and the potential impact of an interruption on employees, customers and the corporate entity. It then establishes Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Minimum Operating Requirements (MOR).This is followed by proposing appropriate continuity strategies to meet the established requirements. Finally, the company encourages and manages routine tests of the DR plan and the testing results are used to continuously update the DR plan, so that it is always in sync with the organization’s requirements.

Disaster Recovery
To effectively restore operations in a disaster situation, it is essential to have a disaster recovery team. EcomNets helps organizations build disaster recovery team led by a DR Coordinator. It guides enterprises to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of the DR Team and over-provision the requisite skills to minimize the potential for recovery efforts impacted by lack of personnel.Considering the fact that organizations that test their DR plan are substantially more successful at recovery than those that do not, the company prioritizes DR plan testing as a strategic issue rather than a budgetary one. It advises to leverage the full spectrum of DR exercises when testing a DR plan, to identify gaps in the plan and enhance the skills of the DR Team.

In a disaster situation, EcomNets suggests enterprises to begin by notifying key stakeholders, and making an initial impact assessment of the damage. Enterprises follow by activating the DR plan, implementing EcomNets’ documented recovery procedures and determining if recovery will be short-term or an on-going operation. Finally, the disaster hit organizations evaluate the damage at the primary site, analyze the potential need to rebuild any infrastructure and begin repatriation. After a DR situation, a post-mortem review of the event is conducted to determine shortcomings in the plan or communication and the observations are addressed in the DR plan to prepare for the next disaster.

Showing the Way
Many organizations approach backup in the wrong direction. The emphasis should be on recovery rather than backup. This slight shift in paradigm can not only lead to a better backup and recovery solution but can also help to better convince stakeholders about the value of the work the backup team does. Data loss is rarely the result of a natural disaster but more frequently caused by human error. Nevertheless, organizations build their backup solution around the former and, as a result, do not have a solution that fits actual need. EcomNets protects an organization's valuable data with an approach to backup that is based on actual need, rather than a brute force solution that is driven by the backup window. The company identifies the areas where to spend and where to save by matching recovery objectives to the value of client’s data. EcomNets creates SLAs and SOPs that transform backup into recovery services, clarifying for users their shared responsibilities in ensuring recoverability and improving service offerings.

Depending on an enterprise’s desired business operations recovery time, EcomNets offers solutions based upon various levels of disaster recovery services. For short recovery times, the company offers hot site, an offsite facility that houses all servers and technology components necessary to continue business operations in case of a disaster. For comparably longer recovery times, EcomNets offers cold sites which provide the customer with datacenter facilities, but without system or prearranged communications. In addition, the company provides Mobile data center (MDC) which is basically a data center in a state-of-the-art wagon that arrives with the data center configuration that was pre-designed by the enterprise in collaboration with a vendor.

Cost Reduction
Many of the current DR services available to small and mid-sized market come at a very high price, when the entire cost of lost data, the time required to restart operations, and the price associated with failing over to the cloud, is factored in. EcomNets, with an objective of ensuring that recovery times and data loss are minimized during a recovery event, helps organizations in making disaster recovery affordable. The company builds a plan for protecting and recovering mission critical data. It creates a detailed list of procedures for restoring key applications. After identifying a single source for DR plans and processes, the company develops a repeatable DR planning process for continued expansion of applications and services.

The Road Ahead
Disaster recovery and business continuity have been in the market since the late 2000s. However, the buzz amongst organizations about DR and business continuity is just a few years old. The global DRaaS and business continuity market is estimated to grow to $5.77 billion by 2018. This represents a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.2 percent. As a result of an increase in the adoption of the hybrid cloud, SMEs have found that applying the same to disaster recovery brings huge benefits. Major unfortunate incidents such as 9/11 terrorist attack and, more recently, Hurricane Sandy in US have increased external and internal pressure to have a DR.This market is growing every year and need for DR sites are increasing. With a management team having around 20 years of experience in cyber security and disaster recovery, EcomNets is well positioned to spread its DR solutions all over the world. It is because of the extensive expertise and innovative approach of the company that it is confidently considering to develop Global 2000 companies for DR practice.