Business Continuity Meets the Cloud: Protecting Your Reputation in the Always-on World

Featured article by Laurence Guihard-Joly, general manager, IBM Business Continuity & Resiliency Services

Not so long ago, a system outage equaled a forced recess for employees while a member of the IT team rebooted a server. There were consequences of course including the loss of data, inconvenienced customers, angry managers and more. But in the end, most outages could be contained and managed with little damage visible from the outside.

Not anymore. Today in the “connected” world, any breakdown in continuity is potential front page news. Customers expect reliability and consistency, whether it’s watching a movie on an iPad, withdrawing money from an ATM (whether at their home branch or halfway across the world) or finding the product that’s been advertised as a retailer’s online “deal of the day.”

So what happens when, for example, you visit an online ticketing site to buy tickets to the upcoming big show and the site is down? First, you miss out in getting tickets. Second, you head to your social networks to share this frustration and once that begins it’s nearly impossible to stop that snow ball from turning into a boulder.

In the social age, when something goes wrong, word spreads like wild fire, not just to your friends and colleagues but to people all over the globe. Whether the disruption is the result of human error, system outage or loss of data, it can have a significant impact on  the business’s reputation and the loyalty of its customers.

Take the airlines as another example. Today airlines offer apps that help reroute passengers who have missed flights. This hit home for me during one of our many snowstorms this past winter. Using one of these apps, I was able to identify a plane that could fly me out of Las Vegas and back to the East Coast. During the entire experience I felt as though I had a friend trying to help me get back to my family. Now what if that service had not been fully available? Most likely the end result would have been far more chilling and one that I would have shared with my friends and colleagues.

This new model of engagement through social media and networking is constantly expanding. Known as the Internet of Things, this connectivity offers tremendous potential to interact with consumers as well as manage production and distribution. It also places an inordinate amount of pressure on teams to prevent any disruption of service.

According to research titled, “The economics of IT risk and reputation: What business continuity and IT security really mean to your organization,” a minor disruption can cost a business more than $20,000. That might not seem like much but what if it happens several times a year? And that’s just a minor disruption. Substantial incidents can reach more than $5 million and if you don’t have a business continuity management plan in place these outages will add up quick, both on the bank accounts as well as in the chat rooms on sites like Facebook.

Now ask yourself the following:

1. If your critical servers go down today, how long will it take to get back online?

2. When an outage occurs, do you have the resources to recover quickly?

Do you have an answer? No? Then you are putting your businesses in a dangerous position. With business continuity and resiliency services, companies can determine their risk factors, build resilience into their business operations and develop an effective business continuity and resiliency strategy.

By marrying BCRS and cloud, companies can replicate entire systems in real-time including files, databases, applications and user data and then, in the event of an outage, recover data in mere minutes without any inconvenience to the customer, which means no one will be heading to their social network to share their frustration.

Businesses can also finely tune the costs and performance by identifying applications and servers that are deemed less critical in a disaster. With this insight they focus resources on assuring that the most critical applications get the attention needed to keep the business running through any disaster.

In the always on world, businesses have no choice but to leave the “open” sign on around the clock. The question you now must ask is whether your business is prepared to throw that “closed” sign in the trash for good.

About the author

Laurence Guihard-Joly is general manager, IBM Business Continuity & Resiliency Services (BCRS). She focuses on strategy, portfolio, sales, consulting, outsourcing and cloud and managed services solutions to help clients around the world manage their risks and achieve their business goals.