Buyer Conversations: Cairn India Works with Tech Mahindra to Enable Geotech IT Business Continuity

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1 BUYER CASE STUDY Buyer Conversations: Cairn India Works with Tech Mahindra to Enable Geotech IT Business Continuity Rajkumar P Mayur Sahni IDC OPINION Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) is top of mind, along with security, for CIOs who have a strong level of focus for driving operational excellence. Although the adoption of BCDR has been present for some time in the industry, the change that is taking place has an emphasis on enabling an enterprisewide business continuity plan (BCP) as opposed to siloed processes. This is largely because businesses have never been as connected with their customers, suppliers, and partners, and across different operations of the company. Simultaneously, with competitive forces increasing, businesses are asking their CIOs to build their strategy for BCP in the context of traditional IT, as well as for the adoption of cloud and mobility, in order to enable high touch across their ecosystems and enable their business operations to be more agile, flexible, and productive. While doing all this, CIOs need to look at resiliency, performance, and risk mitigation. For most IT departments, this is largely addressed by adding more hardware or software for "better" performance and management. However, pure investments in technology are not the answer and undertaking such an approach will only lead to an increase in IT budgets and potentially suboptimal performance. In addition, it is noted that it is mostly the IT department's responsibility to ensure corporate BCP is functional, optimal, and compliant with industry standards. All this with limited involvement from the C- suite, the stance being, "As long as nothing fails, do not change it." However, this sentiment is changing. The change taking place in the industry today is the need to have BCDR, security and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) on a common platform of understanding under a corporatewide BCP. The impact of this change is highlighted in companies' approach to BCDR, including: 1. Increased involvement from the C-suite in determining the company's operational architecture 2. Stronger alliances between the line of business (LOB) and the CIO's office to enable better operational effectiveness 3. Restructuring of IT governance models to ensure the security and risk measures are properly addressed and mapped intrinsically to the BCDR framework These three trends were observed in discussions IDC had with Cairn India and Tech Mahindra. Through discussions and upon analysis, IDC found it encouraging to note the level of C-suite sponsorship toward the project, the involvement of LOB in project management, and the approach undertaken by both companies in restructuring the BCP framework to meet the demands for resilient operations. March 2014, IDC #AP V

2 IN THIS BUYER CASE STUDY This IDC Buyer Case Study is based on IDC's interview and discussions with the Cairn India IT team on how the company transformed its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy and the benefits it observed. Discussions were also held with Tech Mahindra on their approach to the project, solution design, operational support, and intellectual property (IP) used for this engagement. SITUATION OVERVIEW Organization Overview Cairn India operates the largest producing oil field in the private sector in India and is known to have pioneered the use of leading technology tools for extended production life. Today, with a significant resource base and global interests, the company recorded revenues of US$3.2 billion in FY13, with an average daily gross operated production (barrels of oil equivalent per day, or BOEPD) of 205,323. With an expanding business, the challenge to Cairn India was to enable the daily activities of geoscientists and engineers across multiple departments exploration, reservoir development, drilling, and petroleum engineering by ensuring the infrastructure and applications are available 24 x 7. As a result, the initiative undertaken was to build a disaster recovery (DR) solution from the bottom up that will be critical to Cairn's geotech business continuity plans. However, addressing this has been a challenge because Cairn runs over 50 geotech applications and across multiple platforms in a heterogeneous environment. Termed "Project Infinity," Cairn's geotech BCP plan was to ensure the high availability of applications to its operations and decision-making teams across the company. The project was envisaged to work with two sets of partners, a hosting company and a systems integrator (SI). The hosting company was to provide the hosting facility with 50 seats for geoscientists and IT engineers and the bandwidth as well. The SI partner was tasked to implement the entire solution across compute, storage, and data replication, and manage the infrastructure as well. Key activities outlined for the SI partner included: Automation of application and data availability Modernization/upgrade of existing facilities Operational support for DR drills These three objectives were to be carried out to meet desired recovery time and recovery point objective (RTO/RPO) metrics. Here it was noted that Cairn had over 40TB of storage across multiple OEMs (EMC, Netapp, Dell) and had a compute environment that included Dell and HP. Hence, not only was it important to manage and design the compute environment, it was also important to structure the data replication, deduplication, and resilience IDC #AP V 2

3 Challenges and Solution The CIO's office at Cairn termed this engagement as "Project Infinity" and, given the complex nature of the engagement, split it across four phases 1) Plan and Design, 2) DR Implementation and Commissioning, 3) Storage Consolidation and Data Migration, and 4) DR Operations and Support. The first phase of the project required Tech Mahindra to engage with IT and LOB departments to evaluate and recommend to Cairn whether the initial architecture and approach Cairn had developed was viable and could be implemented to achieve the desired goals. As part of this, Tech Mahindra had to not only work with different hosting partners that Cairn would recommend but also with EMC, whose solutions were to be implemented, and other OEMs including HP. Crucial to this was to conduct an internal workshop with Cairn's IT department as well as different LOBs to establish a clear understanding of the existing IT environment and business processes, and map the same toward desired objectives from the project. From this, Tech Mahindra prepared the DR strategy, migration plan, DR processes, test scenarios, risk mitigation plans, and established a governance council. The governance council included representatives from both Cairn and Tech Mahindra with the systems integrator committing involvement from its senior management to the engagement. In phase 2, Tech Mahindra conducted successful pilot tests and proceeded with the installation and commissioning of the DR facility. Key components of implementation included the installation of data domain, including storage area network/network attached storage (SAN/NAS) testing, Avamar implementation (configuration and performance testing), server workstation and DR automation, backup and de-duplication using Networker, EMC Data Domain, and EMC Avamar Solution. A key component of phase 2 was to ensure the expected level of performance from automation for which Tech Mahindra carried out multiple test processes in coordination with the Cairn team. In phase 3 the main focus was storage consolidation and data migration. In this phase, Tech Mahindra designed and implemented unified storage architecture and data migration policies. This included storage consolidation using EMC VNX storage array, existing data migration, and data replication using EMC RecoverPoint Appliance. In addition, Tech Mahindra conducted DR drills to ensure resilience of the solution to meet expected performance metrics. In phase 4 (i.e., post go-live), Tech Mahindra has been responsible for conducing DR drills on a quarterly basis, which also includes complete shutdown test cases for primary, backup to secondary, live operations on secondary, and transition back to the primary datacenter (DC). As part of this, Tech Mahindra provided implementation support for geoapplications as well. In this phase, Tech Mahindra helped Cairn by keeping the DR run book updated, documenting change management according to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes, and conducting training and knowledge transfer to Cairn's IT department. From an operational support perspective, Tech Mahindra is responsible for operational support for a year to manage DR sites and align DR with the overall BCP plan for Cairn India. This involves, 24 x 7 x 365 onsite manpower for one year at both DC and DR after the DR site rollout. Challenges The key challenge as part of Project Infinity is to ensure appropriate project governance, because as the implementation of DR, trials, and pilots are being carried out, there has to be no disruption in the business' daily operations IDC #AP V 3

4 Addressing this head-on, a steering committee for the project was formed that involved senior executives from Tech Mahindra and Cairn India. This was tiered with an ongoing project team that reported to the steering committee. Details on project progress, issues faced, and resolution road maps were transparently highlighted to all stakeholders. With such complex projects there is always the risk of certain elements deviating from project guidelines. At any such instance Tech Mahindra followed a response and escalation mechanism to ensure throughout the project period all timelines of implementation and details of progress were kept tightly aligned with the final goals. A key component of this included vendor management with HP, EMC, and other third parties. This was a critical aspect of the project because Tech Mahindra had to jointly work with the OEMs and other partners to ensure the solution set being deployed was restructured appropriately to meet Cairn's expectations. Results As a result, Cairn was able to set up its DR facility, ensure compliant operations of its corporate BCP, and achieve all goals outlined for the project. Upon completion, Tech Mahindra was able to successfully implement the DR infrastructure and implement processes in line with the corporate BCP to meet the defined service-level agreements (SLAs) for different applications of hours for RPO and RTO. Cairn India was able to achieve the data migration objectives from its existing storage array to a consolidated array based on EMC VNX and both primary and backup sites. Simultaneously, the refresh of server and workstations that were running business-critical geoapplications was carried out. Working within the time frame, Tech Mahindra was able to ensure that Cairn achieved its requirements for data replication and backup to ensure that the company has a resilient geotech BCP. Benefits Through Project Infinity, Cairn India was able to achieve a robust geotech DR facility that is operationally designed on best-of-breed technology and layered with industry-compliant processes. All this led to the creation of a BCP framework that is dynamic in nature to incorporate changing business and compliance requirements. According to a senior member of Cairn India's IT team, "Our decision to collaborate with Tech Mahindra was completely based on the vision to align with our business objectives. The implementation of the DR site with the essential infrastructure and computing facilities was key and critical to the business continuity plan (BCP) for the core geosciences group / community. Our engagement with Tech Mahindra provided us with the right fit for a DR solution, project governance, single point of ownership, and post-implementation operational support, and helped scale our effectiveness in multitudes." 2014 IDC #AP V 4

5 ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE For Cairn India, Tech Mahindra contributed in creating a state-of-the-art geotech DR site in Pune (India) to provide a corporate business continuity plan (BCP). With an upgraded infrastructure that may be termed as "best-in-class," the new DR site hosts technology infrastructure from EMC and HP to provide the required DR for Cairn's critical geoapplications. The following are a few highlights from the project, which CIOs can learn from or adopt to enhance their BCP: CIOs must have their BCP plans restructured in order to address multiple aspects of business operations, and in order to be comprehensive, it must include security along with BCDR and GRC. This is important because addressing any of these aspects in silos will not result in a comprehensive BCP strategy. More important than technology is the process for change management and operational resilience, which has to be designed. Otherwise, businesses are at risk of having a state-ofthe-art "technology facility" that does not meet the desired business objectives. C-suite and LOB involvement is essential for an effective BCP plan. BCP is not the responsibility of IT alone; it is as much a responsibility of the C-Suite as it is of different lines of business. Therefore, it is important that BCP policies and performance are reviewed quarterly to protect operations. Working with a single point of contact for BCP has its advantages, yet it must be with a partner that not only has technology expertise but also the required industry depth and skin in the game to commit to business outcomes. In summary, disaster recovery planning is much more than just back-up, and business continuity plans need to focus on critical business processes. Downtime does not only affect internal operations but also affect brand perception in the market and has direct financial implications on the business. IDC believes that undertaking a holistic approach to BCDR is extremely important and while there are still few companies that have gotten it right, the trend going forward will see more success cases. This will be largely led by C-suite sponsorship and increased collaboration between IT and LOB departments. LEARN MORE Related Research Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) IT Infrastructure Support Services Forecast and Analysis (IDC #AP V, April 2013) Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Consulting and Integration Services Forecast and Analysis (IDC #AP V, April 2013) 2014 IDC #AP V 5

6 About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For more than 48 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. IDC Asia/Pacific Headquarters (Singapore) 80 Anson Road, #38-00 Singapore idc-insights-community.com Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit Please contact the IDC Hotline at , ext (or ) or [email protected] for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2014 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.