Journalism of Courage
Data centre of various companies that houses computer systems,servers and associated components and are the heart of the company lack adequate disaster management measures,feel employees of around 50 IT and IT-enabled companies. In fact,55 percent employees of these companies have reported that their disaster recovery plan is average or needs up gradation. Eighteen percent report their plan is informal or undocumented. The employees were responding to the second annual survey by Symantec Corporation titled ‘State of the Data Centre report’.
Anand Naik,Director,Systems Engineering,Symantec Corporation in his presentation about the findings have even suggested that data recovery should be a part of overall governance framework and not individual to the companies.
Commenting on this,Deepak Shikarpur,Chairman,IT Committee,Mahratta Chamber of Commerce,Industries and Agriculture (MCCIA) said that India is gradually turning into a destination for data centres,where companies are in compliance with BS 7799 security standard by British Standards Institute. “However,it is a gradual change and there has to penalty for IT companies that do not have foolproof data security plan,” he said.
Another important finding of the study is that staffing in data centres is a big issue. Forty one percent employees reported that their data centres were understaffed probably because finding qualified applicants is a huge problem,said 52 percent respondents. In addition,75 percent felt that skills of data center employees did not match the needs of their position,while 61 percent also cited that retaining data center employees was a big problem.
The study states that in order to overcome this staffing problem,many companies are depending on outsourcing and training. About 33 percent of companies said they have outsourced their work and the primary driver for outsourcing is to increase the staff’s access to specialized skills. Training is seen as strategic by 77percent of the respondents,with 91 percent expecting training budgets to rise or stay constant over the next two years,’ the report cited.
0Shikarpur agreed that there was crunch of skilled staff in data centres,primarily because there are hardly a couple of training institutes that provide quality and modernised training in security and data resource management .
