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Business continuity
It is vital that forward-looking enterprises have a business continuity strategy in place. And service providers have a key role in its successful deployment, says Ray McKeown
The impact of an incident to befall companies without a business continuity plan in place is well documented and unequivocal. Recent global events and an increased boardroom focus on the topic means that now, more than ever before, enterprises are reconsidering their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies.
With such a variety of challenges and disruptive forces facing the market, businesses are clearly starting to pay attention. This article looks at how enterprises need to implement business continuity as a core part of their strategy and, in turn, how this can benefit their customers.
What is business continuity?
“An holistic management process that identifies potential impacts that threaten an organisation, and provides a framework for building resilience and the capability for an effective response which safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities.” (The Business Continuity Institute)
Gone are the days when business continuity and disaster recovery were only considered after the fact or when a big news story brought this previously sidelined issue into the mainstream. Business continuity is not a tangible commodity so it is not easy for many people to understand the full benefits of the concept. When it comes to enterprise, it is seen as a necessary undertaking to ensure that a company is not too adversely affected by unforeseen circumstances. Preparation and preservation are key words and mindsets in this area.
Good business continuity means understanding your business, looking at potential strategies and, in turn, developing the most appropriate responses for your company. This approach should then spill out and no longer be the remit of the back-office, but be embraced as part of the general company culture. Once this is all in place, the system and processes need to be maintained and tested to make sure that any necessary updates that need to be made are implemented and risk kept to a minimum. Impending system downtime and potential loss of data, not forgetting regulatory factors, are reasons enough to take business continuity seriously, before considering the impact of any shortfall or disruption on the customer base.
A changing global marketplace
Any significant event can have a huge affect on a company's reputation and profitability. Indeed, the ability to weather an incident with minimal downtime is crucial to maintaining customer confidence and market share. During the last few decades, BT has had business continuity plans in place both internally and for its customers and, like many other companies, had traditionally planned this from an insular and 'bottom up' approach. The responsibility for addressing risk was managed independently from this and was distributed across the entire organisation – with the focus on protecting individual assets and equipment. In other words, this looked at the immediate result of an incident by channelling resources to mission critical parts of the business.
The impact of September 11th had an untold effect on business continuity and disaster recovery – no company had ever planned for an event on this scale and the incident changed the way organisations approached business continuity forever. It was because of this that many companies, including BT, took a long hard look at the plans they had in place and revamped their whole business continuity approach.
As a result of this changing landscape, BT initiated a company-wide review of emergency planning and business continuity, and devised a new strategy that took a fresh approach. It introduced an end-to-end security and resilience plan designed to secure the enterprise as a whole. The focus is on identifying risks and vulnerability based around restoring customer service rather than the previous approach of protecting individual products and services, assets or organisation's units.
Going out of business
It is a widely quoted fact that a substantial proportion of enterprises without a business continuity plan go out of business shortly after suffering a major disruption. However, the majority of companies do not always take telecommunications issues sufficiently seriously, despite recognising the enormous impact that a telecoms failure would have on the business's ability to function.
Operational risks will always be present but customers can apply a range of measures to prevent, detect and respond to incidents and to reduce the risk of failure.
One such example would be to introduce an end-to-end business continuity plan focusing on the entire organisation. This looks at how the customer is affected by any outage or disruption, rather than trying to protect individual elements of the business.
As well as the integration of voice and data, convergence applies a new generation of application technology over ubiquitous, secure, high-performance IP networks. Convergence will fundamentally change the way enterprises work, and in turn will increasingly play an integral role in improving business continuity. With convergence technologies, enterprises can start to centralise resources such as data or applications – helping to improve availability, cost, and regulatory compliance, and allowing companies to focus more easily on resilience and replication processes. Developing this kind of agile business culture is the only way to maximise a company's ability to maintain business as usual when disaster strikes.
Continuity for the future
All businesses have a fundamental and growing reliance upon their communications infrastructure and significant failure could cost them their business. This is particularly relevant for telecommunications providers like BT. To reduce this potential risk, telcos need to continually invest in their own technology, people and planning, and work with other organisations to provide a robust infrastructure.
Even the strongest business continuity plan will not be worth the paper it is written on if the underlying telecommunications network is not up to scratch. The delivery of business continuity does not lie with enterprises alone; there is also an essential role for communications providers to ensure their corporate customers can assemble the highest quality 'raw materials' or components to underpin their continuity plans.
Indeed, businesses must accept that they have two choices: not to take the necessary measures to ensure a reliable network and miss out on the competitive advantages and customer retention it brings: or face the fact that global business requires a consistent and well-ordered approach to information security. All organisations need to accept that business continuity and disaster recovery planning is now a necessity, and that fundamental to this is the provision of a secure and resilient network. Indeed, as a network infrastructure underpins almost every business in the country it is clear that no company can afford to be reactive or ad-hoc in their approach to protecting business critical systems.
Ray McKeown is Director, Security, Resilience & Business Continuity, BT Wholesale
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