Don't Get 'Rat'tled

For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost. For want of a ratkiller, the work at a large media organization came to a standstill. Important packing schedules went haywire, there were delays in international delivery, important mails got lost. Last heard, the internal auditors were busy counting the losses for the 'rat'tled organization.

So how did this happen? Lord Ganesha's vahana, the rat decided to play a dirty 'mouse' trick in the power room of the media house. The irksome rodent came in contact with a live wire at the UPS supplying power to the internal server room. Not only was it electrocuted, its 'inglorious' death resulted in billowing smoke, leading to the engineers switching off power in the entire server room. 'Rat effect': not only was the server room submerged in darkness, Internet connection, mail connection and even the intranet server stopped working.



A similar thing has happened with another MNC media organization a few months back, which led to a standstill for three days. Whether these incidents indicate the growing 'mouse' power of India is a matter of another debate, but on a serious note, what this indicates, is the total unpreparedness of many of our enterprises in the face of small IT outages. And these could be caused by pretty trivial matters. (Whether Ganesha's followers would like a rat to be categorized as trivial is another question).

What our channel partners could gain from these episodes is the role they can play as solution providers, particularly to the mid-sized organizations. In times, when almost every one of them admit that just box pushing will not give them margins any more, solution offerings for SMBs and even larger enterprises, not conversant on IT, could provide them the proverbial silver lining in their business cloud.

An automated power management solution with a right backup provisioning, besides a bit of DR provisioning of the server room infrastructure would have helped in these cases. And lest you think BCP/DR solutions are not affordable for most mid-sized organizations, you are living under a delusion. There are fairly cheap solutions, and many of our partners are now having resources and capability to manage and handle such solutions. Smart CIOs/IT managers are increasingly looking at these solution partners, so that they are not stumped by such 'mouse tricks' in the future.

The martyred rats in the power rooms may or may not go to heaven, but surely they can open up these new revenue opportunities for solution partners, to come up with relevant business continuity offerings. I hope our partners are ready to plunge into this domain, without getting 'rat'tled.

(rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in)