No Oil Spills S.S. Soni, Executive Director (IS), Indian Oil, needed to set a business continuity solution for all IOCL businesses across the country. But he also needed to keep the cost of the project — especially hardware and software investments — under control. “The major challenge we faced in designing the business continuity solution was to keep new investment low or nil.” Although he could use compression techniques to shrink data that needed shipping, the requirement for bandwidth was high. And data
SNAPSHOT DIreCTOr fINANCe: S.V. Narasimhan reveNue: Rs 24,7479 crore eMPlOyeeS: 35,000 IT STAff: 227 PrOjeCT: Business Continuity
transfers needed to be done with minimum loss. He would have to set up WAN communications for 682 locations at the disaster recovery site and plan for a DR mock drill. But business could not stop. Any mistakes could put the company’s image at stake. There was a threat of losing mission critical data and thus increasing the possibility of sizeable revenue loss. He also had to ensure that the faith of all the stakeholders in the company was not destroyed. CIO
gO-lIve DATe: January 2007 (Jaipur)
S.S. Soni Indian Oil
Executive Director(IS)
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