IBM White Paper - Helping Business stay in business

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 business continuity management and 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 protect your brand and potential revenue by helping you to:
 
● Assess your risks 
● Develop a tailored business continuity and resilience strategy 
● Safeguard your business-critical information while maintaining continuous operations 
● Enable a virtually complete recovery should disaster occur
 
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.