September 01, 2017
September 01, 2017
Contributor: Kasey Panetta
Top Gartner free research for business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
In the wake of a natural disaster, enterprises in and outside of the affected area will face tough challenges and difficult decisions in the coming days and months.
To help enterprises recently affected by Hurricane Harvey, Gartner has collected and made freely available its most useful research surrounding business continuity and disaster recovery.
With an estimated 70 billion in damages, Hurricane Sandy devastated the east coast in 2013. It is also justification for companies to establish or maintain a business continuity management program.
A structured tiering model can dramatically improve planning and success of an IT disaster recovery management strategy. This research shares a framework that allows IT leaders to manage business expectations in the wake of a disaster. Following these three steps will improve the success of IT recovery planning and execution.
Business continuity management is transforming into a component of operational risk management. Routine planning, coordination, and testing can reduce downtime during disasters and reduce recovery costs.
Selecting a Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service option is a complex decision and it’s easy to pick the wrong solution. Enterprises should be clear about requirements and careful about shortcuts.
The Disaster-Recover-as-a-Service market is estimated at approximately $2.01 billion with an expected growth to $3.7 billion through 2021. This means many vendors offering a wide range of services. This Magic Quadrant sorts vendors into challengers, leaders, niche players, and visionaries.
Effective business continuity management programs require a governance framework to establish oversight. This should be based on individual business needs not blind principles and should be relatively stable.
Relying on external vendors for business-critical programs is increasing, which means businesses needs to have a plan for what happens during an interruption or complete ceasing of operations. Enterprises need to assess supplier risk and develop contingency and exit plans.
A business impact analysis (BIA) identifies critical business functions, critical process components and their dependencies. These BIAs can take up to a year to put in place, but the results are the first step towards business continuity and disaster recovery programs.
Recent crises across the globe have promoted enterprises to create plans that address major supply chain interruptions. Business leaders should focus on five key areas to manage a crisis situation.
Colocations offers businesses the opportunity to expand data center space, reduce on-site expenditures, and interconnect to businesses. They can also offer the ability to have data centers in different geographical areas, which can help reduce outages during natural disasters.
Disaster plans are often neglected, but it’s vital that these plans be refreshed to clearly communicate recovery plans and how they deliver against business needs.
Be brief, talk in business terms, and make it relevant to the business operations. How you approach the board as a BCM professional should be completely different than how you approach other management.
During an emergency situation, mass notification systems allow a secure and reliable way to communicate with all stakeholders.
Enterprises should have one crisis management team, particularly given the scale and sophistication of today’s cyberattacks. It’s key that cyber security and BCM leaders align their response and recovery process.
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