Traditional disaster recovery has undergone a fundamental shift as simple backup strategies are replaced by technologies that create resilient businesses.
“Traditional disaster recovery, whether it’s a server or a data centre, relies on having a back-up somewhere, and while this works, it doesn’t provide the timeliness modern business demands,” said Christopher Connelly, subject expert at IBM’s A/NZ Risk and Resilience Centre of Excellence.
Connelly spoke yesterday at the Institute of Actuaries Enterprise Risk Management Seminar in Sydney. The key to building a resilient business, said Connelly, is to establish good governance in terms of disaster recovery, measuring, reporting, and in particular, testing.
“Many organisations fall down in terms of governance,” he said. “Many organisations also fail to do proper testing, which has the potential to identify problems before the product is rolled out.”
In order to create a resilient business, said Connelly, an integrated approach is critical. This involves appointing a single person who is responsible for business resilience, as well seeking input from throughout the entire enterprise.
“I am always surprised when we go into an organisation and there’s not a single person responsible for risk,” he commented. Connelly added that business resilience can be leveraged by an enterprise as it seizes business opportunities missed by competitors which lack sound resilience structures.
Joshua Gliddon is a journalist at Filtered Media.
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