36
You’re strong if you’re flexible
OGY With memories of snow and chaos still fresh in our minds, it’s time to
follow the good old scouting wisdom and ‘Be Prepared’ advises
Bharat Thakrar, Head of Business Continuity, BT Global Services.
TECHNOL
The barriers to success have ‘leaves on the line’, your to disruptive events, large
always been high, and they business can simply cease to and small. The key concept
BC/DR
are getting higher. function. This is transparently here is flexibility. As any
Competition, regulation and bad for your business and it’s wrestler will tell you, if you
other predictable challenges highly frustrating for your tense your muscles and lock
make business tough enough, staff. Fortunately, a recent your joints, you’re much
but at least they affect all study, undertaken in easier to push over than if
companies equally. association with Ragnar you adopt a more flexible
Lofstedt, Professor of Risk posture. It’s the same in
What can really bring an Management at King’s College business.
organisation to its knees are London, has highlighted the
the unpredictable and highly importance of the ‘Bulldog If your business systems
selective ‘acts of God and spirit’ among British require people to be in
man’ – floods, pandemics, employees in promoting specific places to do specific
terrorist attacks and the like – corporate resilience, with 61 things, then they won’t be
that have the potential to per cent of staff saying it able to function when those
cripple a business while was their responsibility to places are unavailable or
leaving its competitors help get things up and inaccessible. The good news
unscathed. running again if a disaster is that, just as information
struck [i]. and communications
The real issue is not simply an technology (ICT) is often
increasingly threatening So what can be done? The credited with the ‘death of
external environment. Rather obvious answer is ‘be distance’, so, properly
it’s the combination of prepared’ – think about what deployed, can it end the
external threats and the can go wrong and how your ‘primacy of place’ – the crucial
potential ‘fragility’ of some business might respond. As impediment to flexible
modern business systems. Gartner has observed, “Every working.
enterprise should have a
Both efficiency and customer minimal plan in place to The toolkit of flexible working
focus – essentials in modern protect business operations in technologies includes three
business – are highly the event of reasonably basic components: secure
dependent on the anticipated threats”. remote access to company
uninterrupted availability of systems, so that staff can
computing and Less obviously, but crucially, continue to work; access to
communications systems. you also need to adopt office phone lines, so that
flexible working practices – staff continue to receive their
If your servers are down not just because employees calls; and conferencing, so
because of flooding, or key IT increasingly expect them, but that people can continue to
and call centre staff can’t get because they make your meet. Let’s look at each of
to work because of strikes or business much more resilient these in turn.
MAR/APR 09 WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK
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