stage by every stakeholder at every point of time. technology story of data 28. the other facet of data management relates to the technology aspect, which is generally taken for granted. it is here that i want to highlight a few issues which are of prime importance to business continuity of applications. i am sure you all must be aware of the principles of financial market infrastructure ( pmfi ). principle 17 states that business continuity management should aim for timely recovery of operations and fulfillment of the fmi ’ s obligations, including in the event of a wide - scale or major disruption. it speaks of having in place a robust bcp, ensure good crisis management and communication, have an adequate secondary site as also review and testing of business continuity arrangements. therefore what is required is a plan that ensures continuity of application and the associated database. a golden copy perhaps! 29. here i would like to quote a recent incident regarding an internal application of an organisation well known to me. all applications in that organisation are housed at the data centres with complete data backup at the dr sites ; the timing of the backup depending on bis central bankers ’ speeches the criticality of the application. in the instant case, due to an unexpected error ( from the outsourced vendor personnel ), the entire data from the primary site was deleted during a routine housekeeping operation. however all efforts to ensure restoration from the dr site were not successful as there was a flaw in the replication rules. this meant downtime of an entire application for almost a week and redoing the data entry. thus even keeping a golden copy was not of use. what i want to highlight is that the presence of a “ golden copy ” which implies a record that epitomises the highest quality information, on the application could not prevent the downtime of the application. 30. there is work underway in the payment space ( by the cpss ) on “ cyber security in fmis ” relating to how cyber attacks can bypass well designed preventive and detective measures by exploiting a large surface of it vulnerabilities, and the weakest link, the human factor, by social engineering. these attacks have the potential to seriously disrupt the operations of a fmi and can present unique challenges to its operational risk management and business continuity plans, with implications that may threaten financial stability. principle 17 also requires that fmis should resume operations within two hours following disruptive events ; in extreme cases an fmi should complete settlement by the end of the day

the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account. but, if innovation is not used with technology based analytics, then the vast amount of collected data becomes a digital heap, a sheer information overload. 8. you would all appreciate that banking is a data - driven business, and banks are the trusted custodian of a plethora of customer and corporate data. in a marketplace that is highly competitive, commoditized, heavily regulated, and facing continued economic challenges, success to banks comes from differentiation enabled by the ability to do better analysis and conversion of data to error - free information in a time - bound manner. modern banking cannot be run without storing all banking sensitive transactional data in standard a special report on managing information – february 27, 2010 edition in “ the economist. ” bis central bankers ’ speeches error free formats, deploying strategically designed analytics, and extracting decision supporting inferences through technology tools. such an approach alone would differentiate a true market leader from the rest of the pack. 9. understanding the importance of data, i am reminded of arthur conan doyle ’ s sherlock holmes when he says “ it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data ”. 10. in my address today, i would like to draw your attention to two facets of data management – one related to information and the other that is often taken for granted i. e. related to technology. i would attempt to give an overview of these aspects and their significance in the present day context. while covering these topics, i would touch upon the initiatives taken by the rbi in this regard, the future road map for banks and conclude posing a few questions that may be deliberated further. 11. one issue that banks face is the single - version of the truth – a single representation of critical data such as customers, products, assets, that is unique, complete, and consistent, which becomes the most reliable and authoritative information for the entire bank. with data that is duplicated, inconsistent, incomplete, and spread in silos across disparate systems, special techniques are required to recognize ( disparate data ), resolve ( into a single version of the truth ), and relate ( them to derive some meaning ) the data. in addition to this, you would also need to persist with a single version of the truth, store the complete history of all changes, and lineage of how duplicate data has been merged.