Business continuity trends
The recession has helped to bring the whole issue of operational risk management and resilience planning to the forefront of the business agenda
According to Keith Tilley, Managing Director UK, SunGard Availability Services, the trends facing business continuity management professionals today include.
The role of outsourcing
During the recession we have seen a dramatic shift in the approach that leading organisations are taking towards resilience planning. Most noticeable is the sea-change in thinking when it comes to ensuring data centre and technology resilience. Whereas the vast majority of organisations previously looked to keep as much of their risk management and resilience provision in-house, believing that to be the most effective and secure approach, many are now more comfortable taking an outsourced approach. In the pursuit of maintaining a lean balance sheet with optimum cash flow, boards are paring back on new capital investments (CapEx), opting wherever possible to fund projects from operating expenditure (OpEx) instead, and acquiring new capabilities as managed services.
As organisations embrace virtualisation technologies and cloud computing to cut costs and enable them to focus on profit-generating activity, managed services providers assist with the transition to these new models of computing, ensuring always on availability and security.
Resilience on the Board agenda
A SunGard poll last year of members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) revealed that resilience planning is now firmly established as a crucial aspect of business. Where, five years ago, business continuity and disaster recovery was very much the preserve of the IT department and specialist BC professionals, the growing necessity for 24/7 information availability has meant that resilience and risk management has expanded across all functions within the organisation. Therefore now resilience needs to be controlled and managed at the very highest levels of the business and most large organisations now have at least one person, if not a team, overseeing all aspects of resilience planning.
A lack of testing
Unfortunately the recession has also bought with it the more negative trend of a decrease, albeit slight, in the number of contingency plan tests being carried out. Whilst this undoubtedly stems from wide-scale cost cutting across the business, it does highlight a worrying belief still present in some quarters that business continuity testing is an option not a necessity. Experience has shown that contingency planning must be embedded into an organisation's culture on a day-to-day basis to be truly resilient.
Moving forward
Clearly, the recession has certainly helped to bring the whole issue of operational risk management and resilience planning to the forefront of the business agenda. Organisations, and individuals at the very highest levels of decision-making within them, have recognised that they simply cannot afford any downtime in such tough economic conditions. What is more, these organisations are now starting to recognise the benefits of understanding the exact nature of the information that flows through them and the competitive advantages and cost savings that can be gained through sound resilience planning.
This recession has taught us many things but surely one of the most worthwhile lessons has been that organisations can no longer afford to neglect operational risk management. The businesses that win in the coming decades will be the ones that understand the digital age we now live in and have the resilience in place to serve their customers, no matter what happens.
