Disaster Recovery and Security Issues in Outsourcing

by Brian J. Dooley

As outsourcing of complete business processes becomes more commonplace, with many operations going offshore to less well-developed and Third World countries, questions of security and disaster recovery inevitably arise. For data processing operations, the savings from outsourcing overseas can be extraordinarily high due to the easy transportability of the basic commodity -- digital data. It is this very factor, however, that makes the exercise more vulnerable to problems of security, reliability, and recovery. The countries to which data processing operations are often outsourced may face a variety of threats that are not always evident. For example, the security issue has recently been brought to the fore with rising nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan and again with India's outsourcing industry being specifically targeted by terrorists. The assurances that are taken for granted in one country may not be present in another.