Business continuity and disaster recovery need to become "Facebook easy".
So says Steve Kokol, VP of international sales at SunGard Availability Services. "You never had to go to a class or a three-day course to learn how to use Facebook," says Kokol, adding that businesses need to incorporate this usability into their continuity and disaster recovery strategies.
In an interview with ITWeb, Kokol noted that making the recovery planning process simple is becoming more and more important as business continuity and disaster recovery are extended, encompassing more individuals in an organisation. "What this is highlighting is that business is acknowledging that, at the end of the day, it is the people who sit at the coalface who need to be in charge of business continuity and disaster recovery. In short, the people who are responsible for building these plans need to be in the field themselves."
As such, he calls on businesses to not think of continuity and disaster recovery as pure IT functions, but rather view these processes more holistically.
According to Kokol, this is not just a concern for large companies, but is also something medium-sized and small organisations need to focus on, which is getting simpler as technology becomes easier to use and deploy. In SA, it is still the biggest of the big that are focused on deployment, he says, adding that he is starting to see a shift in this thinking.
Speaking to the mobile trend, Kokol says it is important for employees to be able to access systems at all times and they should not be restricted by limited organisational infrastructure. "BYOD [bring your own device] is a very real trend in this arena and we need to accommodate it," he says, adding that companies must build more resilient systems because customers living in this instantaneous world want things to work straight away.
This opens up businesses to security risks, which, coupled with the pressure of big data, means businesses should have sound plans in place and must focus on areas that are most critical within an organisation, Kokol says.
"Today, if a system falls over and it affects the customer's experience with your business, you have minutes and seconds to repair it, not hours."
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