Business Resiliency – Linking IT Risks to Business Risks

CIOs, business continuity managers and IT managers understand the value of forward-thinking business continuity and business resiliency solutions:

1. They know that cloud computing can lower recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. That dramatically improves the availability of data and applications at a time when organizations increasingly depend on the availability of their data and applications.
2. IT leaders understand that they can deploy cloud computing solutions to backup and manage big data. This makes that information available for business analysis, while concurrently accommodating the evolving mandates of Sarbanes-Oxley, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the European Union’s Data Protection Directive, and other governmental and industry regulations worldwide.
3. IT professionals also recognize that secondary data centers and alternate work sites can keep key technologies running, key employees working and critical information continuously available during even the most difficult disruptive events.

But to obtain the support and funding needed to improve business continuity and business resiliency operations, IT leaders need sponsorship from C-suite executives. However, C-suite executives typically focus their attention on overall business goals and bottom-line budget constraints. IT professionals, therefore, find they can generate investment for business resiliency initiatives by linking IT risks to business risk—by revealing the critical connections between IT resilience, business strategy and business processes. This process can help convince business executives that the corporation needs highly resilient IT operations to meet its strategic objectives. The IBM Resiliency Services Framework can help in this effort.

To learn more, feel free to contact us here or download more informational PDFs here.

– Timothy Brand, Ph.D., Level 5 Technology Group, VP of Security and Resiliency