Building business resilience

John Irvine, VP of International Marketing at Verizon Business, on using technology to empower business continuity.

CIO surveys consistently put business continuity at the top of the corporate agenda. The ability to safeguard the continued operation of business activities, no matter what fate may bring, is about much more than protecting the bottom line. Business interruption can impact productivity or sales – but it can also have a significant impact on the corporate brand, or potentially infringe corporate responsibility or regulatory requirements. It is these less well-recognised impacts that can be most harmful to ongoing business success.

The multinational paradox

The emergence of the truly multinational corporation has changed the face of the business environment. As companies expand internationally in order to take advantage of new markets and become more competitive, they must also maintain contact with local customers in local time zones, requiring them to be operational 24/7.

To support this paradigm, multinationals are moving towards centralising their business critical infrastructure with non-core activities outsourced to third party suppliers. The promise of centralised systems brings greater efficiencies and enhanced control to support business growth in an increasingly competitive climate; however, the challenge is to integrate the centralised infrastructure and applications with all other aspects of business service in a seamless fashion. Offshoring and outsourcing enable organisations to focus on core-competencies and benefit from dedicated expertise from outsourcers on back-office processes and systems. However, they also put a critical back-office system outside the organisation’s own walls.

Herein lie the key paradoxes of the modern business world – maintaining central control across increasingly distributed boundaries while ensuring that those functions outsourced to third parties can be effectively linked back into the core business, all without compromising corporate security or operational effectiveness. The network therefore becomes key – it is the network that provides the foundation on which all aspects of business operations are built, whether they are to be found inside the corporate building, or outsourced to trusted third parties.

The communication spine

Global communication infrastructure is the central nervous system holding modern business operations together. It is the conduit through which instructions, messaging and data must flow to keep business operations in motion. It is not just a channel for data and applications, but an enabler of business practice and process. The failure of that infrastructure would inevitably lead to the critical disruption of any multinational business, but business operations can be impacted far before that point is reached. Even an isolated, limited disruption to the operation of the network is enough to restrict certain operations.

From a global business continuity technology perspective, this means that every multinational needs a secure, simple and scaleable global infrastructure, with high service level agreements, application consistency and availability beyond the network, local support, future-proof IP-based technology and, most importantly, a technology and a service provider they can rely on. A good technology provider can take the individual technology out of the equation so that business continuity planning can focus on the threats, the potential impact and ongoing business resilience.

A new way of thinking

Business resilience is the overall objective of business continuity and encompasses a subtle shift in thinking. It is about moving away from a traditional, IT-centric, data-protection approach to a holistic business view that focuses on handling the upside of risk. In other words, an organisation that has resilience built in will be creating opportunities, not just avoiding threats.

Business continuity planning has become a critical activity, not only in terms of mitigating risk but also in terms of building business resilience into business processes. In this sense business continuity is about much more than disaster recovery. It is about understanding what business processes are most fundamental to the continued operation of any organisation and ensuring safeguards are in place to maintain continuous operation of those processes. By adopting a lifecycle approach to business continuity management, enterprises should be able to maintain operational resiliency as their environment changes.

Multinationals are reliant upon communications infrastructure in order to be efficient, competitive and in many cases to operate at all. Technology is now enabling new methods of working that are becoming embedded into the fabric of an organisation’s behaviour. The key for today’s successful business organisation is to effectively balance technology and business drivers. In doing so, not only will they be able to build a successful business continuity planning process; they will also develop a comprehensive understanding of technology’s role in the operation of their enterprise. Most importantly, they will engender a holistic view of their business on which they can continue to build their future business success.