When disaster strikes, it pays to be able to recover.

Indeed, in business, it’s now crucial to prove that the ability to do so exists even before the worst happens.

For more and more organisations, regulatory compliance depends upon it.

And, even for those that are not regulated, having a business continuity plan in place is the kind of best practice that can simultaneously protect against catastrophe and set you apart from your competitors.

In either case, providers of communication technology are particularly exposed to the risk of their customers’ suffering from the impact of a criminal or accidental breach in data security, or a devastating outage. Routine backing-up of data is no longer a guarantee of being able to fully recover. Instead, in order to offer comprehensive disaster mitigation, providers must invest in a professional approach.

Outsourcing to experts ensures every eventuality is covered.

“Businesses and their suppliers are having to step up their business continuity capabilities to cope both with enhanced regulation and commercial expectation – investing in proper planning is the only credible way of doing so,” says Ken McGuinness, Head of Business Continuity at leading professional services firm Allendevaux & Co which specialises in providing the technology channel with the right solutions and resources.

“New data protection standards such as ISO 27001 and 27002, means communication technology suppliers are being asked about their levels of resilience even before they are invited to bid for contracts.

Questions like: Have you ever had a cyber attack? What business continuity plans have you got in place? How would you recover from a serious disruptive event? Unfortunately, it’s no longer good enough to simply say that everything is backed-up to the cloud.”

With Allendevaux, it all starts with a preparedness assessment. What level of security does an organisation have? What do its data privacy policies look like? What is its capacity to recover any data that might be lost during a disruptive event? Crucially, could it continue to provide  its products and services if the worst happened?

Next, it carries out a business impact analysis. If disaster struck, at what point in time would an organisation become unsustainable in four key areas: legal compliance, operational, financial and reputational.

Once any gaps have been identified, a business continuity plan is designed to plug them.

“The plan asks and answers all the key questions,” says McGuinness.

“What has occurred to cause the disruption? How are we going to recover from it? What is going on in the outside world that might influence next steps? Who does the organisation need to be communicating with? Does it need to be speaking to insurers, lawyers, regulators? Is everybody contacting different people at different levels? Is there a consistent message being shared?

“It’s about increasing people’s knowledge and awareness around their roles and responsibilities in the event of the plan having to be activated. It’s important because those roles may be very different from what those people do day-to-day.”

Alongside the business continuity plan sits an integral ICT disaster recovery plan.

“That is focused on the technical aspects of recovering systems that may have gone down or data that may have been temporarily lost,” says McGuinness.

“We work closely with the IT department to understand their capabilities and support them in ensuring the best possible outcomes.”

Once a plan has been designed and put in place, Allendevaux works regularly with its customers to practice its activation, test its effectiveness and train new employees.

“It’s about developing muscle memory for an organisation’s managers,” says McGuinness. “They get to know what their role would be in a disruptive event and they also get to regularly review the plan for usability and completeness. We understand how to go through the process; how to pull the right individuals in within those organisations so they can reflect and understand the consequences of an event and how their business is able to respond.”

With the sophistication of today’s security threats constantly increasing, it’s certainly the case that an effective business continuity plan is an essential component of any communication technology provider offer.

And, with Artificial Intelligence expected to continue to reimagine the way technology supports business processes, any investment in business continuity – either on a basic or advanced level – is sure to deliver a return.

After all, you just never know what is around the corner…

To learn more about how Allendevaux & Company can help your and your customers’ businesses survive a disruptive event, visit the website.



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