Brave For Free

Disaster Recovery has been on the minds of companies ever since the early days of commercially available computing. Today's world of DR revolves around four acronyms - BIA (business impact analysis), RPO (recovery point objective), RTO (recovery time objective) and BCP (business continuity plan). The acronyms appear in a disaster recovery plan in roughly in that order, the thinking being that you first analyse the impact to business of systems being down, then figure out how far back in the past are you willing to turn the dial back to recover from (last day, last hour, last millisecond). Next focus on how long you can afford to be down. Finally - buy a boatload of hardware, software and services to convert all this into action. Setting up a DR is a hugely expensive affair that takes a significant amount planning and effort, not to mention all those drills and tests every now and then. CTOs have followed this prescription since the late seventies (apparently the first hot site wa...

In June 2018, DoT announced with some fanfare that VoIP calls would now be “untethered”. Is this time for a celebration? The truth is, VoIP calling became mainstream a long time ago. The original restrictions were designed to make life difficult in a world where phones were dumb and PCs smart; the world moved on and the restriction that both sides needed the same app installed became a fairly insignificant one. To add ketchup to the fries, smartphones smartly built deep integration to the point where the VoIP applications themselves did not need to be fiddled about with. Calls could be initiated from phonebooks directly and missed or received calls showed up along with “regular” phonecalls. And Indians caught on quickly — indeed, even while the ban was operational in full in 2017, (according to data from Warp Speed Reads, a telecom and technology research firm) some 28% of all voice calls in India were VoIP calls made through WhatsApp and Skype and the like. That’s over 80 billion ca...