Sanovi Technologies has announced its DRM for Banking solution. This software complements the company’s existing DRM Suite, helping banks automate their Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness plan and comply with the regulations and guidelines set out by the Reserve Bank of India.
This launch comes in the wake of the approaching one-year deadline set by the RBI’s Working Group on Information Security, Electronic Banking, Technology Risk Management and Cyber Frauds (also known as the Gopalakrishna Committee) for implementation of their recommendations on Business Continuity Planning (BCP) in Banks. In its role as regulator for banking operations in the country, the RBI had issued its policy guideline contained in the report of the Working Group under the Chairmanship of Shri G. Gopalakrishna, Executive Director, RBI.
The Committee’s report extensively covered BCP/DR standards that banks must strive for. RBI has made it mandatory for banks to deploy and demonstrate their business continuity and IT DR capabilities. Key points including such recommendations as:
- Banks must test their BCP/IT DR of critical applications regularly to ensure they are up to date and effective. It is recommended to test the individual components of the plan at least once a year (reference: Chapter 7, Section 3)
- Banks should periodically move their operations including people, process and IT DR to the DR site (C7, S3)
- Bank should consider having unplanned DR drills (C7, S3)
- Banks must submit to RBI an annual statement describing their critical systems, their RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and the bank’s strategy to achieve it (C7,S4)
- Bank must submit a quarterly statement reporting major failure of critical systems and customer segment and/or service impacted by this failure (C7,S4)
- Banks must test medium and high impact process on a quarterly and half yearly basis
IT application availability is of paramount importance in Banks. Big headline making events like the Mumbai floods of some years ago, or the most recent power grid failures in July 2012 that impacted 22 states highlight the need for banks to put in recovery capabilities that can enable banks to continue their services in spite of systemic failures.
Sanovi worked with leading Indian banks to understand their regulatory and operational needs, and also consulted with RBI to understand the Gopalkrishna Committee report. A result of these efforts, the vendor’s DRM for Banking claims to be the first DR management product in the market that helps banks report on their Disaster Recovery capabilities and how they are meeting RBI regulatory requirements. The DRM solution also aids the banks in improving the availability of their services to their customers.
DRM for Banking provides all the features that will enable banks to address various recovery aspects as laid out in the Gopalkrishna Committee report. It offers the following features related to compliance with RBI requirements:
- RBI specific reporting module that offers readymade reports on the banks BCP test status, DR readiness capability, DR data integrity besides other standard reports on RPO and RTO
- Ability to recovery at the application level or a component level enabling banks to test recovery capabilities of the complete application or at the component level
- Ability to capture and automate DR steps such that banks can test and recovery their critical operations
- Ability to monitor recovery metrics such as RPO and RTO for critical applications
The main business benefits to banks implementing Sanovi DRM are: reduced business exposure to IT outages, higher operational efficiency, adopt industry best practices and enable an agile organization. Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Sanovi’s co-Founder and Vice President of Products, said, “Demand for DR Automation Solutions is growing, as customers are looking for ways to reduce production downtimes, and perform successful DR Drills. Critical banking applications, such as core banking, internet banking and RTGS, where any stoppage due to natural calamities or human induced errors can result in major business impact for the bank that translates to financial loss and customer dissatisfaction. The inability to recovery critical IT application in a timely manner due to dependence on manual intervention can severely impact the banks’ operations. By implementing DRM for Banking, banks can be assured that their critical IT applications will recover within set recovery SLAs and business impact due to outages is minimized.”