Disease Outbreak Response System Condition (DORSCON) refers to a colour-coded framework that provides Singaporeans with general guidelines on what to do in the event of an outbreak. On 20 February 2020, DORSCON alert level orange went into effect forcing businesses to activate business continuity measures.
While the intent of business continuity plan (BCP) is to ensure that businesses continue in the event of buildings, systems, equipment, and products or services are somewhat damaged, and assume that employees can return to work site(s) following the incident – conditions that may not necessarily apply in the event of a major outbreak.
Consider what happened when an employee at a bank’s middle office operations is diagnosed with coronavirus. Even as the entire floor shuttered and everyone forced to go through screening for the virus, the building itself also went into full alert with all the elevators (lifts) as well as areas where the public can go were sanitized.
“Companies who have moved operations – even core functions – onto the cloud, and have moved along the process of digital transformation, will find themselves in less pain during this period when business continuity plans are tested to their limits,” said May-Ann Lim, executive director, Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA)..
BCDR: not designed for pandemics
Danny Mu, principal analyst at Forrester, says many organisations still don’t have scenario-specific BCPs, opting instead for BCPs that address the loss or impact, such as loss of facilities, loss of technology, or loss of people.
“Impact-based BCPs are useful because response teams can invoke them regardless of the event (and it’s impossible to predict every possible event that might disrupt your business), but they’re far less helpful when the scenario requires a very customized response. Firms need to develop a response plan specific to a pandemic/epidemic and exercise your new or existing pandemic plan,” said Mu.
Anthony Spiteri, senior global technologist of Product Strategy at Veeam Software, concurs with Mu’s observation and added that business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) measures have not thought about mobilising the workforce “while you are remote”.
“Certainly in the COVID-19 situation today, I don’t think companies will think of BCDR as a first response, because it is not really a tangible threat to their infrastructure, it is a threat to their personnel, he added.
He clarified that in the context of infrastructure like data centres, modern BCDR is both complicated and evolving and he attributes this to data itself. “Data is in dispersed locations, it is growing significantly, and you have to be aware of everything. The good news is that software is around to make backups, for example, easier,” he continued.
He cautioned however that it is recovery that is more important. “Because if you do have a disaster, and you do have to recover that data, you need to be sure that the data can be recovered, in the best way possible, and the most compliant way possible as well. Where traditionally people just thought about backup, today you think of both ways,” suggested Spiteri.
In roundtable discussions across Asia, FutureCIO has come to the conclusion that enterprises of all sizes and nationalities are migrating their infrastructure in the cloud. Forrester noted that enterprises are using the cloud to modernise core business apps and processes. More recently, CIOs in Asia have been openly considering multi-cloud as an extension of their cloud strategy – to mitigate against the risk of cloud vendor lock-in.
Skills gap
While virtualisation is the underlying technology behind what enables multi-tenancy possible in the cloud, most cloud service providers use a combination of technologies and add-on applications that give their solution its unique features.
For enterprises, the choice of platform has expanded beyond purely on-prem versus cloud. These days options include private, public, hybrid, multi-cloud or a combination of these.
But regardless how cloud vendors present the platform to the C-suite when selling the idea, Veeam’s Spiteri cautioned that there is a learning curve regardless of what platform is taking.
ACCA’s Lim stressed that the skills gap runs the gamut from provisioning staff with devices, ensuring that these devices are set-up well with the required software, staff are prepared to use these devices on a day-to-day basis, and that staff are already used to some form of working from home, such as a company having flexible hours, or allowing staff to have the option to work from home upon request.
“The current challenge is a skills-gap challenge from a technology perspective – can my employees use remote working cloud tools – as well as a psychological challenge: can my employees focus enough in a remote-work environment, to continue to be productive, even at a reduced level?” she asked.
Tracy Woo, senior analyst for infrastructure and operations at Forrester, reiterated the importance of recognising the skills gap to effect change and help develop a business case for the follow-on actions.
“Besides low salaries driving competition, there’s also the issue that many technical recruiters don’t know how to look for cloud talent beyond the requisite AWS or Azure certification on the resume and that many universities lack formal cloud training programs. Change in these areas requires massive momentum but, when implemented, can make a huge difference to the entire cloud industry in terms of hireable resources,” she elaborated.
Gartner says multi-cloud warrants provider independence. The presence of in-house cloud skills will be a key indicator of enterprise agility, including the ability to distribute cloud services where customers want to consume them, on-premises and on the edge, noted the analyst.
Post WFH-shock
Spiteri believed that the shock or novelty of work from home will wear out quickly enough as employees adjust to the new normal. He expected an increase in the uptake of software-as-a-service (SaaS) driven by the WFM exodus.
He opined that there will be a need to educate workers around data management.
“Enterprises need to understand that when opting for a SaaS model, the responsibility for the data side remains with the users – not the SaaS vendor. There is no automatic backup. There needs to be more education around that space but in terms of a general impact, it’s not going to be huge for the backup and disaster recovery market as such,” he added.
Spiteri pointed out that as part of the move to the cloud, there is a significant increase in the uptake of cloud-based storage, particularly as enterprises use services like Amazon S3 to store longer-term data. He also added that as enterprises start to deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning, vendors like Veeam will need to make it easier for users to mount an object and backup repository, he cited as examples.
“To get backup right, to make sure we recover quickly, to make sure that this data that is growing and costing enterprises work them. That’s a trend that we’re seeing, and again that then leads itself into the future of machine learning and into AI, and then making sure that data gets even smarter as we move forward,” he concluded.
Never too late the hero
In social circles we often say better late than never. Enterprise Singapore issued its “Guide on Business Continuity Planning for COVID-19” offering a rather comprehensive but not overly worded guidelines on what organisations need to follow to try and operate “business-as-usual”.
