CIOIN

Satish Kumar Das

CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions

What’s radically different is presenting a concept as complicated as BCP in a simplified form.

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: A company as big and as widespread as the Rs 13,500 crore, 62,000-strong Cognizant Technology Solutions, is more vulnerable to risks - good  business continuity and disaster recovery solutions saved the day for them.

When you are as big and as widespread as the Rs 13,500 crore, 62,000-strong Cognizant Technology Solutions, you are exponentially more vulnerable to risk. Terrorist attacks, swine flu, transportation strikes and bad weather for instance threaten your business more than it does most others.

Then there are those SLAs. All of which make planning for business continuity a must. Cognizant's various departments and projects did create their own business continuity plans (BCP), but "compliance to the process was very low," says Satish Kumar Das, CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions. "We were always prepared, but there were gaps."

That's why Das launched a BCP portal in June 2009. This enables the project teams to register online and create an entire business continuity plan - and get it reviewed and approved - using an online workflow system. The challenge was to make the system simple. "What's radically different is presenting a concept as complicated as BCP in a simplified form," says Das. "The portal has a simple form-based structure and some details are pre-captured from PeopleSoft. It has no complicated templates and can be created with just a few clicks."

The system supports automatic document versioning when a plan is updated and reviewed. It packs a dashboard which allows executives to view all projects in a specific facility, location, or country and set priorities for recovery in an emergency. It also is intelligent enough to verify if specified recovery time objectives and recovery capacity objectives are feasible given various needs including project location and network architecture.

Das also had to ensure that the portal didn't get lost in a company that launches many in any given month. He says he had to "brand the portal through e-mailers, posters, intranet websites, screen savers, and workshops to make associates aware of how easy it is to use the portal."

With an investment of nearly Rs 50 lakh, it'll take anywhere between seven months and a year for the project's full payoff to emerge. But, in the meanwhile, it's already helping project teams achieve faster turnaround in terms of plan documentation and approval. And come the next crisis, Cognizant will be prepared

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