Rolling Meadows, IL, USA: Natural disasters and other catastrophic events are increasingly disrupting business around the world. The hurricanes, fires and superstorms of 2012 illustrate the importance of including robust business continuity management (BCM) with strategic planning. To help enterprises identify impacts that emerging technology trends can have on BCM, global IT association ISACA released a new white paper titled “Business Continuity: Emerging Trends.”
The complimentary white paper provides an overview of the impacts, benefits and opportunities of four emerging technologies as they relate to BCM: virtualization, cloud computing, mobile devices and social networks. It identifies challenges, and governance, assurance and risk management practices.
“ISACA’s annual IT Risk/Reward Barometer survey demonstrate that enterprises are still wary of mobile computing issues, such as BYOD, and of hybrid and public cloud,” said Salomon Rico, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, Deloitte Mexico Information & Technology Risk Services partner and chair of the white paper’s development team. “The findings indicate that enterprises are cautiously accepting the technologies in order to reap the benefits they present, and underscore the need for enterprises to be diligent and plan for them in their BCM strategies.”
Recognizing factors that impact business continuity can help enterprises build resilient infrastructures, design sustainable supply chains, and define communication and contingency procedures to restore critical business operations within acceptable recovery times. BCM should evolve as business practices and emerging technologies continue to shape the business landscape, and should address:
Greater customer expectations
Increased regulatory and legal requirements
The enterprise’s strategic planning to ensure proper alignment
Continuous improvement through regular reviews, testing and updates
“ISACA’s new BCM guide does the legwork of identifying the trends that will impact enterprises’ risk profiles,” said Rico. “Managing these risks enables senior management to make better decisions for aligning BCM with business and IT strategies to meet shareholder, customer and regulatory expectations, and improve resilience and recovery capabilities.”