Daisy Corporate Services

A Business Continuity Checklist for Digital Success.

Former Cisco CEO, John ChambersFormer Cisco CEO, John Chambers

40% of companies will be dead in 10 years. The only ones that will survive will turn their companies into digital, techie versions of themselves, and

many of these will fail trying.

Business is changing, the digital agenda is here now and

organisations need to adapt quickly to survive.

82%of companies believe that digital transformation is a competitive opportunity1

52% of executives cite “a lack of familiarity with technology” as a barrier to digital transformation2

1 in 3survey respondents rated “current IT systems” as the third biggest obstacle to achieving digital transformation3

2/3By the end of 2017, two-thirds of the CEOs of Forbes Global 2000 companies will have digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategy4

1. Source: CapGemini 2. Source: Santoku

3. Source: SloanReview4. Source: IDC

As a business continuity professional in the UK, how does your role need to evolve to ensure that old and new considerations are met; your business is resilient and recoverable; and above all, how do you support the business’ ability to adapt to change and enable the digital agenda for your organisation and customers alike?

We’ve taken our experience of driving and developing digitisation for our customers and applied this specifically to business continuity professionals to produce a 10-step guide to enable the value of business continuity management (BCM) in the digital arena.

The foundations of digital business

Daisy is taking the lead in developing availability solutions to meet the pace of change in the digital arena

Source: Progess

85% of enterprise decision makers feel they have a timeframe of two years to make significant inroads on their digital transformation before suffering financially and/or falling behind their competitors.

10-point Checklist for Digital Success

Business continuity professionals need to embrace digital transformation and learn to apply their knowledgeand capabilities in new ways.

1. Understand the digital marketplaceThe linchpin of your effectiveness as a business continuity professional, is your inclusion into your organisation’s digital agenda at the highest level, so you understand the digital expectation of the business, and the customers and stakeholders in your marketplace.

Your organisation’s adoption of digital strategies fundamentally changes the landscape you support; the business impact analysis (BIA) and current BCM programme will need to be rewritten, but more significantly, the transformation of your business to a digital one,needs to be effectively supported by your business continuity practices.

2. Steer the digital strategyOnce you know what your organisation is doing, you can evaluate its ability to adapt to change and help shape the digital agenda of your business to meet those market expectations. By applying business continuity practices to the transition and sharing your findings, you can ensure that your organisation knows what to expect and the steps it needs to take to remain resilient at every stage.

The digital strategy will be in a constant change of flux as the market and customer demands are met. Identifying the changing risk profile, mitigating it, and maintaining the ever-more important resilience of the business will become a priority for business continuity manager. Applying proven risk management thinking to a digital plan will require a degree of flex and agility in order to maintain compliance without restricting the digital performance. BCM needs to be at the heart of the strategy, advising the business accordingly.

Resilience

Cybersecurity

Digital Business

Continuity

Flexible Workplace

Options

Flexible ITDR

BCM Software &

Services

Data Availability & Recovery

Daisy underpins your digital agenda

3. Meet new compliance standardsUnderstand and respect current and emerging compliance for the resilience of the business in a digital world – Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFIDII), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Payment Card Industry compliance (PCI) etc. As digital capabilities are exposing us all to new risks, regulation and legislation will continue to evolve in order to meet the challenges presented.

4. Educate and inform Educate yourself in understanding ‘new risks’, deliverables, customer demands, and the threats they present when operating as a digital business. Use this new knowledge to shape the business into one which is resilient and futureproofed.

5. Identify and mitigate new threatsNew risks from cyber threats are an ever-evolving reality and an ongoing challenge for IT security practitioners to manage. From a business continuity perspective, you need to understand how more traditional and proven business continuity thinking can be applied to these digital threats to guarantee recoverability and minimise downtime. You can deliver a helping hand for IT security, by ensuring resilience is baked into your digital business continuity planning.

6. Protect your organisation’s digital currency – dataThe currency of the digital arena is data. The security and availability of your data is the foundationof your digital business. Ensure your currency is protected, wherever it resides, at all times and understand how it is accessed and used. With increasing pressure to monetise and interrogate live data to gain competitive advantage, cost-effective and resilient data management and availability will be at the heart of any digital strategy.

7. Collaborate with technology and serviceIt has never been more important to align IT and business continuity roadmaps. In order to collaborate, you need to know how best to use of platforms and technologies to integrate the business continuity agenda with the IT strategy. Understand the consumption of private cloud, versus on-premise cloud or public cloud – what does each mean for every workload and application in recovery terms, and how do they combine to deliver an always-on infrastructure? With effective collaboration you can become a significant business enabler.

A cloud-first business will have a different approach to digital than that of a business with legacy systems and a tactically evolved hybrid cloud setup. The interdependencies on systems and platforms will vary massively. Data dependency will not change other than the growth of the data and extracting the business value from it. That dependency needs to be managed and protected as the applications, systems and platforms morph under the advance of digital delivery. Business continuity managers need to align to the data recovery and dependency more than the systems and applications.

8. Maintain digital agility We will see digital advances come at a rate of knots and change will be relentless. The need for your organisation to maintain digital agility will be a significant driver for your need to develop an ever-changing set of recovery and resilience plans. As new systems of engagement transform your business, you need to continually evaluate and quantify your risks to allow continuity of service at anytime, anywhere.

9. Continuously evaluate the digital agendaContinuous evaluation of market demands, competitors and the effectiveness of the evolving digital strategy will be essential to business growth, and you need to make sure you keep a seat at that table. Your experiences will mean that you are able to contribute significantly and proactively to business decisions as your organisation evolves.

10. Drive business continuity into the digital agenda as a value-add

Have a plan to make business continuity an enabler for the digital business. Find out how you can utilise business continuity practices and services to deliver new digital advantages, such as greater security for the customer experience, flexibility, and agility to respond to the rapid demands of new markets or workloads.

We have simplified our availability service offerings so that we can align them to enable business outcomes, support emerging digital strategies and maximise the effectiveness of IT platform consumption.

We understand that people, systems and data ultimately deliver the digital strategy, and that these each need to be protected and managed. Data profiling becomes an essential component for digital agility. And as production data scales exponentially, effective data profiling and management of its production and archiving, turns what was just a ‘backup’ into a business enabler. This allows for cost-effective consumption of critical data platforms and speedier recovery times.

The face of business continuity as a whole is changing. Recovery and availability services need to evolve, and Daisy is taking its end-to-end capability and applying years of recovery expertise to deliver what our customers need in the digital age.

Daisy’s business continuity experience and capability provide the perfect foundation for development of new and integrated solutions across digital, data availability, connectivity and recovery platforms. For us and our customers, that development is massively important. As businesses continue to digitally transform, data growth, data dependency and the accessibility and availability of data will require the converged approach to IT, cloud, communications and business continuity that Daisy is uniquely able to provide.

We are experts. We are there for you.We are Daisy.

Why work with Daisy?

Keeping more than 1,200 Daisy availability services customers always on…

>100 UK business continuity and availability engineers and support staff

We have 30 years’ experience delivering availability services

Our customers have scooped the ‘Most Effective Recovery of the Year’awards year-on-year

We are the UK’s largest provider of availability and business continuity services

Daisy helps customers through disaster several times a week, every week,

successfully managing >240 customer incidents annually

Recognised and positioned by two leading global analysts for data availability,

protection and recovery

Multiple service and innovation awards from recognised business continuity industry bodies

Protecting >6PB of customer data with >100,000 backups every month

Technological convergence is rapidly changing everything.

In order to serve their customers and their investors in the best

possible way, businesses of every kind have to gear up. They have to have sight

of the near future in order to grasp where they have to go, and how quickly.

Businesses – big or small – must understand the demands of the digital world

and, more importantly, use them to deliver a brilliant

experience for them and their customers.

Neil Muller, CEO, Daisy Group

Joining the dots for a converged world.

CONTACT US

Discover more. Contact Daisy Corporate Services today.

Our team wil be glad to help. T 03448 633 000 E enquiry.dcs@daisygroup.com

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