Ensuring business continuity amid the Covid-19 crisis: Harnath Babu, CIO, KPMG India

As Covid-19 rattles industries, the need for an efficient Business Continuity Program (BCP) is more important than ever. The responsibility lies on the CIO’s shoulders to ensure that the technologies support remote work – securely. Express Computer recently had a conversation with Harnath Babu, CIO at KPMG in India, to understand how the company is investing in the digital workspace and preparing for long-term resilience.

Committed to the safety of its employees while maintaining high-quality service for clients, KPMG in India has provided all the required set of tools and technologies that help business work remotely and flexibly – without any disruption. “We started by developing Business Continuity Plans (BCP) and taking steps that help ensure operational readiness from IT standpoint. As part of the BCP plans, we have taken several measures, right from scaling our infrastructure to support the staff Pan-India through to providing round-the-clock available IT support,” said Harnath Babu.

He further added, “We combined the infrastructure related initiatives and digital capabilities to provide to the users an efficient remote working experience. We have not only enhanced internet bandwidth as well as provisioned additional VPN licences to cater to the user requirements but also provided audio and video conferencing tools that help them collaborate with colleagues and clients; so physical absence is not felt.”

Security being of utmost importance, Harnath’s team is constantly working on updating the end points with latest security patches to ensure compliance. They have also enabled the IT support team along with the centralised team to work remotely and support users.

“Our team is constantly taking stock of the situation and monitoring the tools deployed on-premise as well as cloud for efficient operations 24×7,  Harnath Babu said. One of the best aspects is that the team already has an agile working environment with the commitment to ensure maximum flexibility and minimum constraints while focusing on performance instead of attendance. “With all the users working remotely, we could quickly scale up our infrastructure and provide all the required services just in time,” Harnath added.

When asked about the key lessons learnt during this crisis, Harnath said that no preparation is enough when crises strike but having business continuity plans does help reduce the impact of the crises. First and foremost, such scenarios require leaders to take stock of the current situation, prioritise and make effective decisions on the go.

“It is important to stay vigilant and keep the best practices handy that ensures IT readiness. Deploying a modern, cloud-centric architecture can become foundational in proactively scaling and managing IT infrastructure. It is equally important to have a metrics system in place that defines the availability of resources along with their defined roles, so support is provided to business round-the-clock,” he added.

He also said, “To have the right resources, tools and technologies along with the IT infrastructure is a must to ensure strong performance as well as productivity of the employees. In addition to this, well-developed monitoring systems can help measure the pulse of the day and provide the required data for effective decision-making. Furthermore, strengthening collaboration with cloud-based software plays a vital role in ensuring effective virtual meetings.”

To help bridge the gap and ensure that employees stay connected to each other as well as their clients, KPMG in India is leveraging cloud-based collaboration tools that provide a virtual space for ongoing communication and collaboration requirements.

We further asked Harnath for his opinion on how the current mandatory use of remote work for business continuity is a signal to all organisations that it’s time to revisit their remote working policies and redesign them for wider application for business as usual.

Sharing his perspective, he said, “Definitely! As we move towards automation, this is one of the best times for organisations to bolster their work-from-home policies and prepare for the future workplace that supports agile working environment. To begin with, companies need to identify the tools required, re-visit their policies as well as create well-defined processes to ensure that the employees are effectively contributing to work, and their productivity is not hampered.”

In his view, while technology is the primary enabler of remote work, companies can focus on virtual meeting platforms to enable employees to stay connected irrespective of their location. For this, cloud-based productivity tools can be leveraged to cater to large-scale remote working requirements and provide feature-rich collaboration tools that make it easier for the staff to work together from wherever they are.

Further emphasizing on information security and data privacy, Harnath said, “It is also critical to strengthen security and ensure that all the confidential data and intellectual property is safe and secure. For this, companies must provide a secure Virtual Private Network to enable employees to access internal resources, deploy firewalls as well as update security patches on a regular basis to limit risk and contain any sign of intrusion within corporate network or endpoints.”

He also shared that equal support is required from HR, leadership as well as business to rethink on the working models and embrace the change. “While proximity gives you comfort, technology can simplify teamwork in several ways – making work less about where we are and more about what we do,” he said.