The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the gaps between business continuity plans on paper and what needed to deployed in practice, says Anand Ramakrishnan, CEO of Qtek Systems, part of Quess Corp
As countries and economies start opening up, enterprises will look to accelerate their move to the cloud. This, along with information security, will become more central to their strategies, says Ramakrishnan in an interview with Forbes India. Edited excerpts:
What are the biggest challenges (and any opportunities) your customers are facing because of the Covid-19 pandemic?
The top four challenges are the following: First, managing the differences between a planned business continuity plan (BCP) and an actual BCP—most customers had a BCP on paper but its full-scale implementation was not envisaged and hence, untested. Now, companies are discovering that implementation is not that easy and requires a lot more planning and fine-tuning.
Second, partial work-from-home has resulted in challenges of work allocation and efficiency measurement.
Third is the challenge of tiding over the short term without impacting the long term. For instance, taking decisions on vendor contracts’ scope reduction and at the same time retaining the ability to scale these contracts back once normalcy returns, without having an adverse impact on either the business or cost.
Four, small IT vendors are unable to manage cash flows and resources, which, in return, is proving to be a continuity risk to the customers.