Bring your own device or BYOD exists practically everywhere, whether your enterprise has a policy for it or not. Any employee with a personal smartphone can and frequently does store some business-related data on it. The ideas behind deliberately encouraging BYOD are often cost reduction (employees fund their devices, rather than looking to the enterprise) and increased flexibility for employees in the way they work. Read more
For IT managers responsible for recovery after an IT incident, DR is often anything but a game. After all, with so many businesses critically dependent on their IT, any attempt to make RTO and RPO “fun” might seem seriously out of place. Yet gamification might be a smart move for organisations in which IT is being devolved to individual business units and employees. When users start to store business data on their personal mobile computing devices, they don’t always respond to stern injunctions to perform backups. On the other hand, making DR routines amusing or giving them a sense of achievement could appeal. Read more
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Although you may have planned for individual components of data recovery after an incident, the overall impact must also be assessed. An example is the need to recover operations that have been successfully transferred to a disaster recovery backup site, in order to have them running once again on the primary site. In some cases, this final step can be even more complicated than the initial move out to the secondary site. Or you may have forgotten to include computing systems that live outside the perimeter of ‘official’ enterprise backup. A combined top-down and bottom-up approach can help to cover all the bases. Read more
Business continuity does not operate in a vacuum. Far from it, BC must interwork with the trends and developments in organisations, in particular in their IT operations. Whether from a standpoint of people, business objectives or technology, business continuity managers must remain in tune with the undercurrents of change at work in their enterprises. Often these are interlinked. To meet goals, departments acquire new IT technology independently of the established IT department, which leads to changes in business continuity roles and responsibilities. Examples are sales forces increasingly equipped with mobile solutions, and marketing teams building their own systems to manage market and customer information. Read more