IT and Business Resilience: When Sandy Came to Town

One good thing to come from “Frankenstorm” Sandy has been that lessons of resilience and business continuity highlighted the growing importance of IT, the strength of the BfE, and the flexibility that can be found in the Cloud for businesses of all types and sizes.

Resilience brings together risk management and agility, and it is ideally suited to the developing BFE. The linkages between risk analysis, planning, and agile response are strengthened by agile management, and local empowerment—both of which draw additional strength from mobility and social media. This is an approach that works, as has been demonstrated from Katrina, through the New Zealand and Japanese quakes, and on up to Sandy.

Resilience is about rapid response to changing conditions, whether that change is positive or negative, immediate or long term. As the response time for events becomes smaller and smaller, it is essential that enterprises adopt a culture that is capable of rapid change, processes that support it and inform the directions that must be taken, and technologies that make adaptive change possible.

The threat environment continues to grow more perilous, and information technology has become embedded in every business activity. The technologies that have evolved to manage the various strands of risk, compliance, and management are being brought together to create unified solutions. Failure to understand this will result in serious disadvantage.

Companies that are unable to keep up with the business environment and cannot react to advantages and threats in real time will fall by the wayside. There are changes afoot that require important changes in orientation, and Hurricane Sandy is little more than a bow shot. As the current changes in data center infrastructure and management progress, the future is likely to be very different, indeed.

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Brian Dooley

Brian J. Dooley is a Strategy Consultant and Associate Research Analyst with Saugatuck Technology. Originally from the US, Mr. Dooley now resides in New Zealand – providing global and regional insight and market analysis on a wide range of technologies, including business intelligence, collaboration, cloud computing, agile software development, as well as international telecommunications.

Mr. Dooley is an author, analyst, and journalist with more than 30 years' experience in analyzing and writing about trends in IT. He has written six books, numerous user manuals, hundreds of reports, and more than 1,000 magazine features. Previously, he was a Senior Analyst for Datapro (Gartner), and a Senior Product Information Specialist for Unisys Corp. As an independent analyst, he has worked with many of the top firms in the research and analysis industry, as well as for industry clients around the globe.

Mr. Dooley is a graduate of McGill University, with graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School in Cybernetics, Information Theory, Statistics and Communications. He initiated and is on the board for the Graduate Diploma of Technical Communication program at Christchurch Institute of Technology, and he was on the editorial advisory board for Faulkner Technical Reports.

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