| Strong measures, stronger relationships | |
| “Applying an effective BC/DR solution across the entire supply chain ensures faster response and recovery times for all parties, ultimately strengthening business relationships” | 
Datapac Karen O’Connor |
| Irish organisations often focus on ensuring their own business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) solutions are working efficiently, ignoring the threats posed by the supply chain. It’s important to analyse your supply chain’s risk to your own business. A failure to do so can have a negative impact on revenue, operations and reputation.As a matter of process, operations and data will be transferred to third parties connected to your business, possibly in other jurisdictions. It’s vital to ensure this is being looked after appropriately.
Firstly, you need to map your supply chain and be aware of all organisations within it. Focus on the areas that are critical to your business and will cause the most damage if down for a prolonged period of time. Find out from members of your supply chain if they have a BC/DR plan in place. If they do, it’s likely to focus on their own operations, so ensure that they also cater to minimise disruption to your business. Make sure the scope of their plan is appropriate. Testing is very important – a recent survey commissioned by Datapac highlighted that more than 25% of businesses in Ireland never test their BC/DR solutions. Ensure organisations within your supply chain test their solutions regularly. Applying an effective BC/DR solution across the entire supply chain ensures faster response and recovery times for all parties, ultimately strengthening business relationships. Your business is only as strong as the weakest link in your supply chain. At Datapac, we can offer trusted and tailored BC/DR solutions, and work with you to ensure these services are met by your supply chain.
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| Resilience, recovery and contingency | |
| “Having a supply chain that is flexible, reactive and adaptive will help in the preparation for but also in the managing of a disaster event” | 
Asystec Ryan O’Donnell |
| The ‘big book of Wikipedia’ describes business continuity as ‘planning, preparation and related activities which are intended to ensure that an organisation’s critical business functions will either continue to operate despite serious incidents or disasters’. In short it’s a ‘what if’ plan. For example, what if your server goes offline; what if you lose connectivity to your data centre; or what if your network engineer gets sick?Business continuity is about being prepared if events happen to your infrastructure, services or resources. With this we move focus away from just technology failure (disaster recovery) but also include services and people failure. The focus then shifts to include resilience, recovery and contingency.
There are numerous slogans regarding preparation – fail to prepare/prepare to fail etc – that describe impact for business continuity. Companies work extremely hard every day to build their brand, build their name as a market leader and invest lots of money in doing so but what would happen if a disaster event occurred? What preparation has been completed to understand the impact of service degradation or service loss? What measures have been put in place to mitigate the risk and ensure that your business will remain accessible should a catastrophe occur? Answering these questions and collecting design documents, building relationships with suppliers and partners will all form part a business continuity plan (BCP), that reflects the answers to your ‘what if’ questions and will help you plan mitigation activities to risks identified and enable preparation to lessen the impact to your business if a situation arises. Partnership is a key consideration for business continuity. Having a supply chain that is flexible, reactive and adaptive will help in the preparation for but also in the managing of a disaster event. Asystec employs this approach. Having expertise across numerous technology verticals, we have a raft of experience in preparing customers for resilient and robust solutions both from a physical resilience and security/logical perspective. We also work with customers from a risk identification and mitigation approach. The emergence of DR-as-a-Service solutions from VMware and managed cloud hosting from Virtustream are key components we deliver for our customers. With orchestration and automation we can remove many of the headaches associated with standing up services in alternate locations or on new equipment. Having a dedicated data governance and backup team allows us to be pro-active in the initial design stages of solution to build in processes for BC and DR exercises. We have the ability to step in and work with our partners to address losses in key personnel should this be an issue and be reactive in the challenging circumstances of a disaster event. Being prepared is key, business continuity plans are key for your teams but should absolutely include your partners, so everyone understands and can react immediately in a what if moment.
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| The service model | |
| “Solutions where our customers buy ‘seats’ in a recovery site have either been greatly reduced… as the majority of our end users can operate successfully and securely from any location” | 
Triangle Computer Services Brendan Healy |
| In general, customers can struggle with continuity systems where vendor and product diversity greatly increases the complexity of IT systems. This complexity is usually historical or can be driven by shadow IT. In addition continuity has to be driven by the business as IT continuity alone is not sufficient to recover a business, and can sometimes be regarded as a tick in the box.Where Triangle is seeing customers gain competitive advantages from their supply chains is in the context of defining their IT delivery in terms of services. This enables organisations to clearly identify dependencies, integration points and associated SLA’s while ensuring clear lines of communication to the business.
Once IT is redefined as services aligned with business services, the focus of continuity becomes centric on the business service. The clarity of integration points and dependencies enables the business to streamline their supply chain, remove complexity and associated risks to continuity, then go to market for appropriate solutions. Another significant enabler of business continuity that Triangle has delivered to a number of our customers is the capability for end users to access business data and processes from any device at any location. Solutions where our customers buy ‘seats’ in a recovery site have either been greatly reduced or removed as the majority of our end users can operate successfully and securely from any location.
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