Driving availability in the times of demonetisation

By Ashok Acharya Cash is king in India. However, the Indian government’s recent ban on the Rs.500 and Rs.1000 currency notes is a major step towards rapidly embracing a digital (cashless) economy. While the objective is to also curb black money & counterfeit currency, the overnight ban has caught the cash-dependent Indian citizens off guard. As a result, consumers are forced to adopt online payments system and cash withdrawals for new currency. Like any other unplanned event, e-payment services and banks too are suddenly witnessing massive peak traffic loads on their websites and apps. However, the most important question for these players is whether they are prepared to manage such sharp increases in online transactions and make their business available for citizens? To highlight the magnitude of this historic decision, as per the 2016 annual report of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 accounts for 86 percent of total cash in India. With citizens virtually left cashless, mobile commerce and e-payments firms are witnessing traffic surge of up to 400 percent since the ban. With the new currency expected to take another 2-3 months for a smoother rollout, I anticipate that online payment systems will continue to witness 4-5x traffic loads and hence these businesses are in dire need for continuous availability. Though at an inception stage, digital payments have seen an exponential rise in the past year. For example, according to the ‘Digital Payments 2020’ report by Google and Boston Consulting Group, Digital payments market size in the country is expected to touch USD 500 billion by 2020. Additionally, along with government’s flagship digital initiatives for financial inclusion coupled with high speed 4G internet connectivity and increased smartphone usage will only act as catalyst. However, for a digital economy to succeed, a transition of such magnitude needs to be backed with seamless experience to consumers. Any breakdown in managing the additional load of online transactions will impact consumer confidence in the reliability of the systems and jepoardise the brand reputation of the brand. Any failure to deliver consumer demand for 24/7/365 access to data/application will have negative impact on overall customer experience and impact brand integrity adversely. This is simply because consumers will expect high performance and speed from a website or an app. While it may sound the most obvious thing to expect from a business, financial services firms need to mitigate any risk regarding downtime or delays to provide seamless experience to consumers. Given the importance and magnitude, there is no tolerance for any downtime or deliver average performance as it may result in total loss of consumer confidence and business progress. To ensure that the financial transaction websites/app stay prepared for this change, it is necessary to consider some key factors. Though most businesses think they have everything covered, it is always good to keep a check and be prepared for the unforeseen events. Capacity Planning: Don’t know where to start planning? Just look into peak load patterns on servers during the recently concluded festive season. Based on the insights, peak traffic loads beyond average levels can be anticipated and plan for higher magnitudes. This will help scaling up availability solutions through elastic models. Real-Time Monitoring: Is periodic monitoring enough to avoid downtime? Well, in addition to planning for peak load traffic on website/app, setting up alerts on issues in backup and virtual environment can save potential downtime. During peak loads of unexpected magnitudes, businesses should be confident that they not only meet the Service Level Agreement (SLA) but also understand root cause and troubleshooting issues. IT team can greatly benefit from prior intimation to manage server loads effectively before it poses risk to business. Keep Testing: Financial services applications are among the most complex to manage. Hence just scheduling regular backups is not sufficient, it is equally critical for the IT team to ask questions like, does the system recover specific file or entire system? How long does it take to recover? For example – many organizations still rely on legacy backup solutions that takes hours to recover and in many cases more than 16 percent of their backups fail to even recover. This leads to lack of adequate visibility resulting in operational impact. Going by the unpredictable patterns of economic cycles, uncertainty is the only common factor that organizations need to be prepared for avoiding business disruption. Demonetization of currency in India is a prime example where financial services players can expect system outage due to exponential surge in online traffic. With the government extending the currency exchange scheme till December 30th, I expect a consistent 3-5x growth in online transactions and there will be dire need to scale up the technology infrastructure. Any downtime of more than 15 minutes requires serious evaluation of the system and needs enhanced availability planning for website or app. As India takes its first initial steps towards the digital India campaign, trust and transparency in the financial services segment will be critical.  And any unaddressed Availability Gap can lead to loss of data, lost business opportunity and more importantly retain reputational damage. Though cash maybe the king today, customer will drive the cashless economy. The author is the Regional Director for India and SAARC region, Veeam.