BizBahrain_December_2016

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Expert Opinion | Information Technology Airline Business Continuity - IT Disaster Recovery Site by Dr. Jassim Haji Business Continuity (BC) is defined as the capability of the organization to continue delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruptive incident. This involves defining critical processes and procedures that are required to continue operating the core business functions during and after a disaster. Business continuity is fast evolving to become a critical and strategic decision for any organisation. The bigger the organisation, the bigger is the requirement for business continuity. Previously the organisations were not providing enough time and effort in planning for the extended disruptions due to misconceptions that either they will never face any disaster or if they ever face any disaster they will be able to recover the damages trough comprehensive insurance covers. The reason why the insurance cover is not adequate is that the insurance is normally covered for the physical (tangible) assets which have a book (dollar) value, while the biggest asset of any organisation is its business processes and frameworks. These business processes are generally developed and tuned over a period of many years and is not something which can be brought off-the-shelve. Transportation in general and airlines in particular is a unique sector with a specialized set of requirements, challenges and opportunities. Business continuity in airline sector is a concept which is generally overlooked by the airline managements. An airline’s business processes are generally segregated in different business units, namely Operations, Sales, Technical, Finance and Administration. These units are then further divided into sub units and further. Based on the business model of the airlines, some of these units can be centralized in central business units or these can be segregated into geographically distant locations. All airlines, based on their business models, market requirements, customer 40 December 2016
Expert Opinion | Information Technology expectations and management’s direction, devise and implement business processes to facilitate their objectives of the decision making, maintaining and consolidating market share, earning better dividends for the stake holders and consolidating customer reputation. These processes are specific to each airline, and the maturity, stability and availability of these processes are directly proportional to the successful working of the airline and achieving its objectives. These processes can either be automated (technology-driven) or manual. These processes controls managed by information technology tools and practices are generally considered to be more fast, secure, accurate, resilient and cost effective. The use of technology to achieve these objectives and opportunities in the airline business also brings around certain risks to its business. These risks include general business risks (like risks related to non-availability of business applications, breach of financial information) as well as airline specific risks (like risks to the aircrafts, nonavailability of navigation information). Impact of some of the risks can be in a smaller scale and in few thousand dollars, while some risks can be on such higher scale that the damages might be in millions of dollars and in some case could not be quantified, like bad reputation for the airline and the country if the airline is a national carrier. A prominent example of how an airline would depend deeply on certain technology even to its detriment is when one of the largest and most respected airlines in the world had an incident during April 2015, when most of the electronic tablets used by their on board pilots stopped working. These electronic tablets are components of their Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) service of the airlines, which provides pilots access to the required information in an automated, secure and cost effective manner. These electronic flight bags are a replacement of the legacy systems where all the required information was printed on papers and the provided to pilots before each flight. The disruption of the electronic flight bag could have resulted in huge risks related to the aircraft navigations and thus the lives of the passengers. Therefore the complete disruption lead to few dozen flights to be grounded and resulted in huge financial losses to the airline. The disruption was blamed on a third party application in the electronic tablets. The airline was able to recover from the disruption by following their backup recovery procedures consisting of moving back to the physical papers to be used during the disruption period. This was an example of a particular critical service going down while the other services and components of the enterprise were working. The lesson that can be learned from this example that a simple service provider on a common device (tablet) have been integrated so deep into the airline process and heavy reliance have been built that a simple malfunction could actually ground aircrafts and cause big financial losses. Such reliance could be detrimental. The airlines business survival totally depends on the automation and airlines spent millions of dollar on implementing solution to ensure business continuity for many different factors. Each minute delay is costing the airlines hundreds of dollar depending on the airline size and the region of their operations. Accumulating such delays can cost airlines million dollars annually and will have negative impact on its financial results. With millions of daily of transactions it is nearly impossible to rely on human intervention, for example the airlines can’t operate effectively if their core infrastureucutre supporting the airports such as the main check-in system or navigation control system are not working. To plan for business continuity, the critical processes within the airline must be identified and their business impact is analysed and documented. The different components within each process (IT systems, data, external parties, equipment) need to be identified in order to be included in the meausres of the business continuity plans with proper alternatives and workarounds. Such business continuity plans in essense will recreate the environment for the business users to operate and perform the critical processes as normal as possible, they should include a full setup to enable the business users to perform those critical processes from all aspects, by providing them a physical space and workstation where the business users can operate, the necessary data and access to the IT solutions required as part of the critical processes.. And as we have seen above, with the age of information technology and automation, the business operations of the airline have been simplified, enhanced, automated and optimized with IT solutions. Now it is unthinkable to live without IT in the daily lives of the airline. These IT solutions have penetrated every aspect of the operations and impacted every process within the airline. And as a result, because of this reliance, any disruption or outage to those IT solutions could have dire consequences, financial loss, major disruption to the operations, including grounding aircrafts, delaying flights and passengers, safety risks and international regulations violations. However, it is important to assess the criticality of each IT solution on operations (depending on the business process and business area in which the IT solution is involved). Accordingly, the proper and relevant business continuity plans has to be put in place for each business process. It is important to realize that business continuity plans will differ widely from process to process, area to area and airline to airline. Some plans will contain going back to manual work and paper-based approaches, while others will depend on services hosted in mirrored locations, possibly geographically distributed. Dr. Jassim Haji Technology Executive & Researcher www.facebook.com/DrJassimHaji bh.linkedin.com/in/dr-jassimhaji-7b5885125 December 2016 41
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