Sanjay Motwani, Vice President, APAC, Raritan

Business Continuity during Crisis

Sanjay Motwani, APAC Vice President, Raritan Asia Pacific, shares his outlook and advice on how to ensure business as usual amidst concerns about COVID-19’s adverse impact.

Ensuring Business Continuity has been the foundation on which all Data Centres are built. The massive disruptions to life and work demand urgent relook at business processes to keep staff safe, while maintaining operations as usual. Different times pose different challenges and the current scenario does pose an interesting challenge of being able to work remotely and securely. While sending and receiving e-mails would suffice for most part, ensuring that e-mail servers and all other business-critical equipment and applications are running smoothly is quite another matter. Providing access to these resources to a select few using secure KVM-over-IP solutions seems to be the answer.

Hence my recommendation would be to enable remote access using these secure KVM-over-IP switches. If the organization does not have these, then they should invest in a bare minimum number of these switches to be able to ensure Business Continuity.

Other considerations for remote access include: uninterruptible 7/24 control and monitoring; remote maintenance; remote and local access with multiple users; integration with existing enterprise systems; and features pertinent to your particular industry. Read more on how to keep your business going.

According to a recent Gartner webinar poll, 91% of attending HR leaders in Asia Pacific indicated that they have implemented ‘work from home’ arrangements since the outbreak, but the biggest challenge stems from the lack of technology infrastructure and lack of comfort with new ways of working.

Unfortunately, it takes disasters, accidents and other unforeseen crises to make us realise how unprepared we are. ‘Learning’ is always the biggest ‘take-away’ from any crisis situation. If we look back, disaster recovery sites, fire protection system, security equipment and other safety solutions have come about because of disasters. The COVID-19 situation is no different. While in the short term there may be a slump in business, we will hopefully build a robust system involving people, processes and machines in the long term to overcome these scenarios.

We need to change our mindset - view money spent on safety, security and Business Continuity as INVESTMENTS, not EXPENSES. For instance, every building has a staircase as a life saver in case of fire. Thus, investing in various tools that help protect you in future is like paying premium on a medical policy, which similarly applies to Business Continuity.