press releases

Business Continuity Forum satellite broadband communications and Business Continuity

Avanti (AIM: AVN), the broadband satellite operator, is pleased to announce that it has signed a three year contract with Computerlinks which becomes a major distributor for Avanti’s Business Continuity products including its patented Business Internet Continuity (BIC) service.

Computerlinks will enable its channel partners, of whom there are over 5,000, to address the rapidly growing market demand for disaster recovery telecoms services. They will now be able to provide true Business Internet Continuity to their installed and new customers who are becoming increasingly wary of reliance on single circuits to connect them to the “Cloud” or to their own application and data servers.

Avanti has secured international patent protection for its Business Internet Continuity product, which is capable of instantly restoring, by satellite, not only connectivity but also IP addressing in the event of a failure of customers’ primary telecoms circuit. The contract is worth up to £4.5 million.

Commenting, David Williams, Avanti Chief Executive, said:

“This contract brings an important new revenue stream to Avanti and our first major sale of our patented Business Internet Continuity product to a large and highly expert customer. With the increasing importance of cloud computing in the Enterprise market, simple, cost effective and scalable Business Continuity solutions will be in demand across the World. Avanti’s patented Business Internet Continuity product has potential application for almost every connected business in the World and takes satellite broadband beyond core rural and enterprise markets. With the global reach of Computerlinks working together with the coverage offered by the HYLAS fleet of three satellites, the possibilities are very exciting.”

For more on Avanti click here

August 16th 09:00

The Continuity Forum is pleased to invite contributions to the public consultation for the New National Occupational Standard for Business Continuity developed by the Council for Administration and supported by the Continuity Forum and a variety of stakeholders interested in developing access and skills across organisations of all types and sizes across the UK. 

The Consultation phase is marks the result of 12 months effort distilling the complexities of BCM into a format more easily accessible to personnel outside of the professional sector. 

For more details on the project please visit the main announcement page HERE!

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and ActiveHealth Management, an Aetna (NYSE: AET) subsidiary, today unveiled a new cloud computing and clinical decision support solution that will enable medical practices, hospitals and states to change the way they deliver healthcare, providing better quality care at a lower cost.

IBM and ActiveHealth Management worked together to create the Collaborative Care Solution that gives physicians and patients access to the information they need to improve the overall quality of care, without the need to invest in new infrastructure.

Business Continuity Forum 

Executive summary

How do you know if your organization is proactively prepared for and able to flexibly respond to unplanned events? Does your business possess the resilience it needs to rapidly react to potentially costly man-made or natural disruptive events? If the unthinkable should occur, discover how IBM can help pro- tect your brand and potential revenue by helping you to:

● Assess your risks

● Develop a tailored business resilience strategy

● Safeguard your business-critical information while maintain-ing continuous operations

● Enable a virtually complete recovery should disaster occur

Business Continuity Forum, Advice, Support, press releases, Software 
STG addresses increasing Business Continuity needs with new integrated software functionality

Strategic Thought Group (STG) has made available significant new capabilities for the management of business continuity within major organizations via new functionality built into its widely deployed Active Risk Manager software. Active Risk Manager Business Continuity Management (ARM BCM) addresses the need for assured business continuity and recovery in the event of major incidents, whether through catastrophic accidents, supply chain failures, pandemic illness, loss of IT systems, or any other major disruption to business processes.

ARM BCM facilitates the identification of business continuity threats, the assessment of the potential impact on the organization and provides control and monitoring software for the development and maintenance of the plans necessary to protect the business, if such events occur. It also provides detailed evaluations of these plans to ensure their continued effectiveness. This enables senior management to be aware and alert to the enterprise-wide status of these plans at any point in time. Such information is increasingly vital to be able to demonstrate a robust response to any major incident to safeguard business reputation and the company share price.

The different components of business continuity, crisis management and recovery have typically been handled through stand-alone processes and systems. ARM BCM ensures that these elements can all be managed within a single enterprise-wide, top-down economic context with a focus on critical business performance and corporate governance drivers.

Mark Brown, strategy director at Strategic Thought Group commented, “ARM integrates business continuity into the wider enterprise risk management (ERM) framework, bringing together related disciplines that have, up until now, been kept separate. ARM Business Continuity Management will increase confidence and transparency at all levels from the board down.”

ARM BCM presents management teams and governance boards with a single real-time dashboard of the status of all business continuity plans across the organization. This presents how the continuity and recovery plans link to the most important business continuity threats and key business processes thereby aiding the assessment of what the impact to the business could be if a disaster event occurred.

Brown added, “Business continuity is a critical part of corporate governance however most organizations never ask the basic questions about the enterprise-wide status of their BC plans and the links to the related corporate risks, controls and policy framework especially within the supply chain and with business partners. With ARM, business continuity threats are presented within an economic framework highlighting the financial options to decision makers. Senior management can apply direct investments to the most appropriate areas based on the latest company-wide information.”

ARM ensures that the case for each business continuity plan is evaluated in a risk-reward context against other investment business cases and prioritized accordingly. In addition the relationship between business continuity and related risks, including supply chain, IT and security risks, can be investigated. This will ensure potential benefits from areas such as insurance policy consolidation and premium reductions are not lost.

ARM BCM has been designed to support a range of international business continuity standards including the UK BS 25999, the US NFPA 1600, the Australian HB 221, the Singapore SS 540 and the international ISO 27001 standard.

ARM BCM is available to all Active Risk Manager customers.

Active Risk Manager from Strategic Thought Group plc
Strategic Thought Group plc (AIM:STR) addresses enterprise-wide risk management (ERM) requirements with advanced software and services that can be implemented across organizations in all industry sectors. 
Active Risk Manager (ARM), is the world’s most widely deployed and the only truly comprehensive web-based ERM solution available today. ARM enables the identification, communication, analysis and mitigation of risks and opportunities available in both quantitative and qualitative formats. It covers project and portfolio risk, supply chain risk management, business continuity, reputational risk, health and safety, incident management, governance, compliance risks and more. 

ARM is used by major organizations around the globe including USAF, EADS, British Nuclear Group, Rio Tinto, Lockheed Martin, Nestle, NASA, London Underground, Raytheon and SABIC. Strategic Thought Group, founded in 1987, is headquartered in the UK and its US operation, Strategic Thought Inc is based in Washington DC. 

For further information and a detailed view of Strategic Thought's products and services visit www.strategicthought.com or call +44 (0)1628 582500 (EMEA) or +1 703 673 9580 (Americas).
 

Business Continuity Forum 

Many businesses contemplate putting business continuity practices in place in case of an emergency, especially in IT where data systems and information can easily be backed up by a secondary server that mirrors a primary device.

However, it can often be difficult for companies to see the immediate benefits of such recovery plans, as one hopes disaster never strikes their enterprise.

On the other hand, international law firm Bird & Bird, whose infrastructure manager Jon Spencer recently has experienced first-hand the benefits of maintaining a comprehensive business continuity strategy.

"Businesses may not appreciate the value of business continuity systems, but they really do when systems fail," Spencer said.

As the company utilises many mobiles, it had backed up a server for its Blackberry users. And when that primary server failed, nothing skipped a beat due to its back-up planning.

"None of the firm's 240 Blackberry users experienced any interruptions in their messaging services in the two days the primary server was down," he explained.

Two days without mobile communication between colleagues at the company - not to mention contact with clients - could have proven disastrous for the business. Taking a cue from this incident, the company recently decided to more effectively back-up other servers as well, including its document management system (DMS).

"Protecting the DMS with clustering provided some level of redundancy, but we needed something to protect us if the shared storage failed or the primary data centre was unavailable," Spencer said.

Jason Morton

Although there is a growing awareness of the many benefits of cloud computing -- including on-demand provisioning that enables businesses to increase efficiency and control IT costs -- concerns about security are often cited as the No. 1 barrier to widespread adoption of cloud solutions.  

Business Continuity Forum

IBM Receives Highest Scores in "Strategy" and "Current Offering" by independent research firm

ARMONK, N.Y., - 10 Jun 2010: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it was ranked as a leader in "The Forrester Wave ™: Disaster Recovery Service Providers, Q2 2010" report published in June 2010, receiving the highest scores among all vendors in the categories of "strategy" and "current offering."  

The Forrester Wave ™: Disaster Recovery Service Providers report included six service providers in the assessment. Forrester thoroughly evaluated these vendors across 64 criteria, broken down into three main areas: current offering, strategy, and market presence.  

HERNDON, Va.- COOP Systems today announced a new reseller agreement with MIR3, Inc., the innovator of real-time universal notification and response technology for the enterprise, to integrate MIR3’s inEnterprise™ Intelligent Notification and Response platform into COOP Systems’ myCOOP Business Continuity system.

LONDON, UK – 2nd June, 2010:  SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability and business continuity services, today released its annual analysis of major causes of business disruption in the UK.  The analysis of SunGard’s 2009 invocations* log has found that, for the first time ever, more business interruptions are being caused as a result of workplace disruptions rather than by technology. In a year when the total number of invocations rose by 42% on the previous year, workplace disruption accounted for 56% of all business interruptions – the first time since SunGard’s records began that they have outnumbered technology issues. The number of workplace invocations rose by 150% year on year, whilst the number of technology invocations fell by 8%.