Business Continuity & Resilience White Paper from IBM

Business Continuity Forum 

Executive summary

How do you know if your organization is proactively prepared for and able to flexibly respond to unplanned events? Does your business possess the resilience it needs to rapidly react to potentially costly man-made or natural disruptive events? If the unthinkable should occur, discover how IBM can help pro- tect your brand and potential revenue by helping you to:

● Assess your risks

● Develop a tailored business resilience strategy

● Safeguard your business-critical information while maintain-ing continuous operations

● Enable a virtually complete recovery should disaster occur

Today’s enterprise must be highly resilient and able to anticipate multiple risks.With supply chain interdependencies, increasing regulatory requirements and geographically dispersed businesses encompassing everything from traditional storefronts to online operations, organizations are facing intense pressure to improve performance, maintain continuous availability and ensure data integrity.

Areas of concern that organizations need to primarily focus on include enterprise and work area risk, availability of critical data and business applications, IT stability, recoverability of IT infrastructure, data backup and disaster recovery. Meeting these demands in a global economy means today’s enterprise must be highly resilient and able to anticipate multiple risks. At the same time, organizations should be prepared to withstand and flexibly adapt to unexpected disruptions of all types while remaining poised to take advantage of new opportunities.

Most disruptions are caused by infrastructure outages or human error, but they can also be the result of random power outages, natural disasters or international events. Clearly, any of these disruptions can be costly and undermine your ability to maintain IT opera- tions. Unplanned outages can also create far-reaching consequences that impact your long-term revenue stream, your brand and ultimately, your organization’s survival.

Forward-thinking leaders are experiencing a wake-up call, recognizing that the probability and types of risk to business continuity are higher than commonly believed, and they are taking steps to improve their resiliency capabilities. In other words, to help ensure a viable future, adopting a smarter, proactive and comprehensive business resiliency strategy is nothing less than imperative. A more interconnected and intelligent approach allows your business to address the increased risk, complexity and cost of downtime. Business continuity and resiliency  can help your organization:

● Manage risk through an enterprise-wide resiliency strategy

● Lower costs through proactive incident response andreduced downtime

● Ensure resilient service delivery in a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week world

● Respond with speed and agility while minimizing riskexposure

Download the White Paper