CIOIN

Dhiren Savla, CIO

Kuoni Travel India

Instead of investing in a costly setup, we used local redundancies and a simplified technology landscape

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: Dhiren Salva of Kuoni Travels laid plans for an impeccable DR and business continuity plan. He first consolidated business apps, thereby trimming the number of his servers and standardizing platforms. He then balanced his Mumbai and London datacenters so that in a disaster they could accommodate each other.

Kuoni Travel India is the country's largest travel and tourism company. It offers multiple services and its BPO company VFS Global processes visas (as an outsourced partner) for 29 governments and has operations in 44 countries on five continents. All of these businesses are supported from India.

"Our infrastructure was becoming extremely dependent on two key components: our datacenter in Mumbai and our network," says Dhiren Savla, CIO, Kuoni Travel India.

To reduce risk and IT's overall cost, and improve services, Savla carried out three tightly-integrated initiatives: DR and business continuity plans, consolidation and service management. He first started by consolidating business apps, thereby trimming the number of his servers and standardizing platforms. He then balanced his Mumbai and London datacenters so that in a disaster they could accommodate each other with a 30 percent degradation in service. He also created secondary centers in both cities for smaller failures.  Focusing on India, which forms a significant part of Kuoni's business, Savla wanted to create redundancy in the country's network. "Though we had provisioned backups at each site, if the MPLS cloud of our ISP went down, business would come to a standstill," he says. So he built a parallel MPLS cloud which is used for less critical apps lications on regular days.

"We had to be resourceful," he says. "If we were spending $100 (about Rs 5,000) on the primary network and $25 (about Rs 1,250) on the secondary, then we redesigned and negotiated with the primary network to bring down their costs to $60 (about Rs 3,000) and built the secondary MPLS with the competition at, say, $50 (about Rs 2,500). We had to be clever and creative to achieve these objectives and others within optimal budgets."

He also had to talk to business to get realistic recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.  Apart from this he battled resistance to changing from current delivery model. Today, project guarantees that Kuoni has 99.5 percent infrastructure availability. It's also improved latency for VFS' operations in CIS and African geographies by at least 60 percent. It trimmed IT cost KPIs down from 8.1 to 5.9 percent.