Business continuity

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / IT Leadership / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off on InformationWeek – CIO Survey Shows Shifts in IT Leadership Role
13
Mar 19

InformationWeek – CIO Survey Shows Shifts in IT Leadership Role

CIOs have made headway towards a more strategic position in the organization, but challenges remain on the road to digital.
It wasn’t too long ago when many IT organizations were still considered to be just keep-the-lights-on cost centers within the enterprise. But thanks to a lot of effort on the part of technology leadership inside enterprise organizations, that seems to be changing. These days CIOs and IT organizations have shifted to contributing strategic value to the technology within the company, even if the business itself is sometimes still slow to recognize it.

That shift is evident in a new CIO survey and report from Grant Thornton, a tax, audit, and advisory services firm. National managing principal for Enterprise Technology Strategy and Innovation at Grant Thornton, LaVerne H. Council, told InformationWeek in an interview that IT has been working to become more than just a cost center. IT needs to move into a critical new role in the age of digital — from cost center to trust center.

More of the InformationWeek article from Jessica Davis

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off on Continuity Central – 2018’s outages: what are the lessons for 2019?
28
Feb 19

Continuity Central – 2018’s outages: what are the lessons for 2019?

Doron Pinhas looks at the common factors behind various high-profile technology outages in 2018 and proposes a practical approach which will help organizations reduce unplanned downtime in 2019.

Flying these days is almost never a pleasure, but in 2018, it was a downright nightmare with dozens of glitches and outages that kept planes grounded. 2018 wasn’t such a great year for other industry sectors as well. Financial service customers also had a rough year accessing their funds and performing urgent financial transactions. In the UK, for example, banks experienced outage after outage. Three of Britain’s biggest banks – HSBC, Barclays and TSB – all experienced outages on a single day, making online banking impossible, and there were dozens of other incidents peppered throughout the year.

And if your business lives on cloud platforms and SaaS, you might have found yourself running ragged at times trying to access your IT with all of the major cloud platforms suffering from outages throughout the year as well.

It may be 2019 now, but the fundamental gaps that led to those service disruptions haven’t been resolved, so we can expect more such outages this year, and probably every year until companies figure it out – which, if you’re a business continuity or IT professional, raises the question: what should I do to avoid outages?

More of the Continuity Central post from Doran Pinhas

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Gartner highlights ‘digital twins’ as an emerging organizational resilience tool
08
Jan 19

Continuity Central – Gartner highlights ‘digital twins’ as an emerging organizational resilience tool

In its latest ‘Hype Cycle for IT in GCC’ Gartner identifies various technologies that will reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years. Of these one in particular – ‘digital twins’ – has strong potential for assisting organizations improve their organizational resilience.

Gartner says that a digital twin is a virtual representation of a real object that is designed to optimize the operation of assets. The primary short-term use is to lower maintenance costs and increase asset uptime.

Digital twins use artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside other techniques to create digital avatars that change and develop alongside the physical aspect being modelled. They can be used to harden existing systems and design new, more resilient, ones; they can also be used to identify hidden vulnerabilities.

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Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Business continuity trends and challenges 2019: interim survey results
01
Jan 19

Continuity Central – Business continuity trends and challenges 2019: interim survey results

For the past five years Continuity Central has conducted an online survey asking business continuity professionals about their expectations for the year ahead. We are repeating the survey again this year and the interim results are now available. They are as follows…

Initial demographics
So far, the majority of respondents (76.5 percent) are from business continuity professionals operating in large organizations. 9.5 percent are from medium sized and 14 percent are from small sized organizations. The top responding country so far is the United States, where 39 percent of respondents are located; followed by the UK (22.5 percent) and Australia (6 percent).

Interim results
The interim results from each question are as follows:

What level of changes do you expect to see in the way your organization manages business continuity during 2019?

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Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Leadership — Comments Off on Continuity Central – The effects of stress on incident teams and how to counteract them
05
Nov 18

Continuity Central – The effects of stress on incident teams and how to counteract them

You know the feeling, you are told the incident you never wanted to happen has just occurred, which sets off the sinking feeling in your stomach, the clammy hands and the trickle of sweat down your back. Then the adrenaline kicks in and you are ready to respond. For some, this is their moment (think Mayor Giuliani after 9/11) and they thrive on high adrenaline incidents. All the mundane planning is over and this is their moment to respond and to lead or support their organization to survival, victory or even opportunity! Others run around in circles in panic not knowing where to start, or are paralysed ‘rabbits in the headlights’ doing nothing, knowing that all eyes are on them and the team are looking for leadership, the response plan to be activated and the fight back to begin.

In their classic paper ‘Designs for Crisis Decision Units’, Carolyne Smart and Ilan Vertinsky outline the characteristics of an incident, which are:

High level of emotional and physical stress;
Limited amount of time for response – leading to further pressure and stress;
Threat to high priority goals – which again leads to stress.

More of the Continuity Central post fro Charlie Maclean Bristol

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery / IaaS / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off on Continuity Central – For disaster recovery, there are better options than secondary data centers.
26
Oct 18

Continuity Central – For disaster recovery, there are better options than secondary data centers.

Disaster recovery is a headache that every IT department has suffered and in this arena, as in so many others, the cloud offers a better choice, says Laz Vekiarides. In fact, not only is a secondary data center for DR no longer needed, it’s actually no longer a sustainable option…

The days of the secondary data center / centre are numbered, and that is a good thing for the enterprises that have struggled to build them, fund them and maintain them solely for disaster recovery purposes. When on-premises disaster recovery was the only option, IT teams had no choice but to grit their teeth and take on the cost and resource burdens of physical secondary data centers. Today, though, the growing cloud adoption rate and availability of cloud-forward co-location providers have transformed the data center world. One result: the industry has more efficient and cost-effective choices, including hybrid cloud DR.

Key questions to ask before moving DR to the cloud
Nothing is easy in IT, and no data center leader should believe promises about quick or simple transformations from on-prem secondary data centers to cloud or hybrid models.

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Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Disaster Recovery / IT Strategy / Risk Management / Technical Debt — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Why disaster recovery should become a thing of the past
24
Oct 18

Continuity Central – Why disaster recovery should become a thing of the past

For businesses today, regardless of industry, the outage of a key IT system ranks among the most serious technology challenges they can face. In fact, the Business Continuity Institute’s 2018 Horizon Scan Report estimates that unplanned outages are the third biggest risk to businesses globally. Beyond the financial ramifications of downtime, the long-term reputational consequences are significant as customer confidence is dented. Rebuilding trust after a major IT failure can be a multi-year process.

In the 1970s when data center / centre managers first came into being, they began to understand how dependent on computers their organizations would soon become. With that in mind they instigated the notion of disaster recovery – an insurance should one or more applications, storage components, databases or network elements go offline.

More of the Continuity Central post from Patrick Smith

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Security / Risk Management — Comments Off on Information Week – Why IT Should Care About Legal Holds
22
Oct 18

Information Week – Why IT Should Care About Legal Holds

When it’s time to preserve company data and communications relating to pending legal matters, the IT and legal groups have to work together.
When litigation looms, a corporation has a duty to identify and preserve relevant documents and other data that may be important to the legal matter. The goal is to avoid the intentional or inadvertent destruction of relevant evidence that might be used at trial. This process is called a “legal hold.”

While a legal hold sounds like it falls squarely into the realm of the legal department, lawyers rely heavily on IT to execute many of the activities associated with a legal hold. This puts a burden on IT and can put legal, IT or the organization at risk if legal obligations aren’t met

More of the Information Week article from John Tredennick

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Security — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Five core questions to help boards understand their cyber risk
03
Oct 18

Continuity Central – Five core questions to help boards understand their cyber risk

The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says that Board members ‘need to get a little bit technical if they are to understand and manage the risks they face’ and has published a five-question checklist to assist.

NCSC also emphasises that boards cannot outsource their cyber security risks and need to understand what their technical staff are doing if they are to ‘prosper securely in the digital age’.

When launching the checklist, Ciaran Martin, chief executive of the NCSC, said:

“Cyber security is now a mainstream business risk. So corporate leaders need to understand what threats are out there, and what the most effective ways are of managing the risks.

“But to have the plain English, business focussed discussions at board level, board members need to get a little bit technical. They need to understand cyber risk in the same way they understand financial risk, or health and safety risk.

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Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on On stones, clay and rubber balls: why business continuity is not a risk management discipline
05
Jun 18

On stones, clay and rubber balls: why business continuity is not a risk management discipline

Mark Armour explains why he believes that we need to agree on our definitions and change our thinking around risk management, business continuity and resilience.

First, this is not about where the responsibility for business continuity should reside within an organization. It is about the responsibilities of the business continuity profession and its practitioners. Lately, I’ve witnessed the practice of risk management begin to take over that of business continuity. Many practitioners promote this alignment and foster the perception that business continuity is simply a part of the practice of risk management. I say this is bad for both disciplines and the organizations they serve.

For the sake of clarity, let’s start with some simple definitions:

The Institute of Risk Management states ‘Risk management involves understanding, analysing and addressing risk to make sure organisations achieve their objectives.’ The International Risk Management Institute describes its work as ‘The practice of identifying and analyzing loss exposures and taking steps to minimize the financial impact of the risks they impose.’

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