Haydn Pinnell, MD of Gallium (an EOH company), says while the Internet has brought a new way of doing business, it has also introduced many new challenges. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the expectation, or even requirement, that a business is available to customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In today's highly complex and competitive global marketplace, businesses are looking to become more resilient and more agile. Resilience is an ability to keep mission-critical activities going, and agility is the capability to respond quickly when addressing a change in business requirements or direction. CIOs are challenged with how they can get to grips with the complexity, cost, service availability and the management of their environments.
“The difficulty they are faced with in this new agile world is that the business will continue to evolve and so will the requirements of the IT applications that support the business's changing mission-critical activities. This evolution will continue throughout an IT application's lifecycle and, what may need high performance, high availability or high protection today may not need it tomorrow and vice versa. It is impossible to predict and poses its own set of problems for the business continuity managers and supportive team members,” Pinnell says.
A robust business continuity strategy supported by a business aligned, supportive IT infrastructure, provides the foundation for agility and positions the business well to compete through an added capability of flexibility, resilience, performance, reduced risk exposure and costs.
The importance of applications cannot be over emphasised, but what often gets overlooked is the fact that an application needs data to be able to deliver to the business and it is the availability and performance of that data that will determine application service level capabilities. In a global, competitive marketplace the need to keep primary supportive IT systems running is now becoming the highest objective of business continuity strategies.
Pinnell says by employing the best practices of business continuity management and being very selective about which mission-critical activities are protected and how, the savings made can be invested where it is needed, in more resilient, agile primary infrastructures and IT systems.
“Business data is growing at an extraordinary rate and this is leading to a paradoxical situation: the more data a business has then the better it is positioned to compete, but the more data you have then the more you have to manage and this can lead to increased business vulnerabilities and risk exposures. There are growing demands imposed by various compliance drivers that are compelling businesses to keep more of their data instantly accessible. These demands can also mean that any archived data is retrievable within a specified time frame. The optimum resilience strategy to the business should be the aim of business continuity management.”
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