Rethinking traditional continuity measures

From small events such as a lost e-mail or corrupted files through to large-scale problems caused by fire or flooding, the cost of downtime can be huge, states The Data Center Journal.

Investing in business continuity has traditionally been an insurance policy: having a continuity strategy in place aims to prevent problems affecting the business in the first place, and then helps the organisation to recover quickly in the event of something going wrong.

This approach is changing: the evolution of IT and using technologies such as virtualisation, data replication and Internet-based applications has meant this traditional approach has also had to adapt. Secondly, the impact of the current economic crisis has led to customers re-examining their spending, and looking at what opportunities there are to get more value from their investment.

As with business continuity management in general, risk management is much more effective if a top down, bottom up approach is adopted, reports ITProPortal.

It's all very well for executive management to make statements in the annual report about how wonderful the risk management system is, but that in itself doesn't make the organisation more resilient.

If it isn't backed up by action it's not worth the paper it is written on. A successful risk management approach requires a two-pronged attack, which includes buy-in from both the executive and business managers.

TeleTech, a global business process outsourcing company, has experienced only minimal business disruption for its clients in the Philippines due to Typhoon Ondoy, according to TMCnet.

All the facilities of TeleTech remained open and fully operational, according to the company.

Business continuity for TeleTech's clients was ensured through the fault tolerance of its cloud-based global delivery network along with the management's swift action to implement TeleTech's disaster recovery plan.