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Security Industry News, “Clients to BCP Vendors: 'Can You Do It All?'”
October 27, 2008 by Shane Kite
Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 made disaster recovery and continuous availability top concerns for Wall Street, business continuity planning (BCP) products and services have been maturing rapidly. And while the demand for such solutions had been slowing, say observers, new cost concerns and an integrated approach to risk are reigniting interest.
While business continuity brings to mind blackouts, earthquakes and hurricanes, the recent market volatility may be the latest factor pushing the need for BCP software. "The two most frequent causes of application failures or slowdowns in anybody's financial system is a coding error that has gone untested or undiscovered, or a capacity issue," says Jim Grogan, VP of consulting and product development at SunGard Availability Services, a division of Wayne, Pa.-based SunGard Data Systems. "Systems are generally not architected to run at more than 70 percent of their capacity before unusual things start to happen."
"We haven't seen anybody declare a disaster due to capacity issues," Grogan adds. "But when systems go down, in-flight transactions are at risk. So your downtime procedures need to accommodate such a business disruption."
In August, SunGard introduced a virtual server replication service it says enables disaster recovery within six hours. Calling it an affordable way to implement a comprehensive second-site recovery program, SunGard--through a partnership with virtualization technology provider VMware--stores a customer's virtualized operating systems, data and applications at a fully managed data center.
Hosted BCP software and disaster recovery services are finding increased success. "More and more companies want to use software as a service, which is particularly good for small companies that are not going to have the infrastructure to handle this or configure it," says Kristen Noakes-Fry, a Ruffin, S.C.-based analyst at Gartner.
Continuity Management
To ensure continuous uptime, firms need both BCP software and off-site failover or recovery capabilities, which has led some vendors to combine them in a single package. Other companies are offering business impact analysis (BIA) consulting as a service for firms that want to jump-start or reengineer their continuity plans. "Firms are integrating very much," says Noakes-Fry, "because there is more and more concern for the entire organization, the processes, the equipment, the people, the supply chain."
Citing that movement toward a holistic view, Noakes-Fry--as do many financial firms and vendors--has taken to using the term business continuity management, or BCM. "There's much more emphasis on looking at the whole picture," she says.
COOP Systems, a Herndon, VA-based enterprise-wide business continuity software provider announced last month that it has signed a resale agreement with IBM Corp., pairing the computing giant's disaster recovery sites with the myCOOP™ software suite. IBM owns and operates hundreds of resiliency centers around the world and employs over 1,300 business continuity consultants. COOP clients include Australia & New Zealand Banking Group, IntercontinentalExchange and the U.S. Justice Department.
In May, SunGard, which offers a 25,000-mile global network backbone and 4 million square feet of operations space, said it had agreed to acquire Strohl Systems, a King of Prussia, Pa.-based BCP software provider that counts all but one of the top 11 securities firms as customers. SunGard already offered a BCP platform--Paragon--that it bought from Comdisco in 2001, and Grogan says the company will continue to support both sets of applications.
Having disaster recovery and BCP solutions housed under the same umbrella is not integral, according to those interviewed for this article. More important, they say, is ensuring that software providers allow for a high degree of integration with site providers. "The recovery sites are a separate business," Noakes-Fry says. "Recovery sites are real estate essentially, and that's a very expensive business to be in. Site providers may have a loose relationship with a company that has planning software, or they may be happy to work with any software."
According to an August report from Gartner, effective BCP software must easily integrate with customer databases, provide in-depth BIA that illuminates the scale and cost of business interruptions, enable granular mapping of operational interdependencies and provide ongoing risk assessments. Newer products should also supply incident handling and notification services for emergency contact systems and logistics during crises, says Noakes-Fry, although that's usually done through partnerships with another software provider. COOP Systems, SunGard, Office-Shadow, RecoveryPlanner.com, Strategic BCP, CPACS, eBRP Solutions, EverGreen Data Continuity, Linus Information Security Solutions and Paradigm Solutions International all meet those requirements to varying degrees.
A top-notch vendor helps a firm complete and analyze elements of its plan, "which will be available online and integrated into a relational database, and able to be updated by staff in various locations all over the world, but administered centrally," asserts Noakes-Fry. "On top of that there will be dashboard features where you can track in real time what's happening and have a record of everything that's completed and ... what happened during a test or an actual incident. This allows for firms to go back and determine what worked and what didn't."
And companies that offer incisive business impact analysis can not only make clients aware of otherwise unseen systemic problems, but also spur them to make changes to processes and procedures that, irrespective of BCP, make their businesses more efficient, she adds.
Legacy Data
BCP software should also be able to take in data residing in legacy systems, so firms can avoid reinventing the wheel. "If somebody spent a few months entering a bunch of information three or four years ago, or if you have full databases of information in the IT department in which they keep all of the lists of their equipment ... that needs to be leveraged," says Noakes-Fry. "Otherwise, business continuity becomes a really unpopular exercise, really fast."
London-based Office-Shadow recently reengineered the back end of its BCP suite to pull data from systems that accept or offer XML queries, says Roland Johnson, president of Office-Shadow North America. While that functionality is typical of BCP software, the platform can also consume more basic input from, say, a human resources database. Vendors in the sector often have to work with older systems in transferring data.
Office-Shadow is also preparing to roll out a feature that sends an alert when a shift in risk is registered by a configuration database or a business process management or modeling system. "Has something increased business volumes through a critical node and therefore made that more risky? Has it reconfigured some systems through a network and therefore made that a higher concentration of risk?" says Johnson. "If something changes, we flag it."
Johnson contends that most companies' organizational structures should be viewed as a matrix rather than a vertical hierarchy, because web-like structures are more true to how firms operate. Office-Shadow builds its solution on a multidimensional online analytical processing database. "You create as many reporting structures on that database as you want," he says. "Otherwise, people are proliferating thousands of nodes into an org structure that doesn't fit the real business."
Firms should also be sure to select solutions that are easy for non-business continuity staff to work with. "An end user doesn't want to crawl his way through a big system to find out where the plan is," says Chris Alvord, CEO of COOP Systems. "Our end users get treated very well. They have one URL that goes immediately to the planning area. If someone knows Word and knows Excel and can find a URL, they can participate in the planning process. We handle everything in the back."
As business continuity moves from static, "in the drawer" planning to more continuous operational risk monitoring, it is increasingly falling under the chief risk officer. But the CRO position is fairly new to the C-suite, notes Alvord.
At the least, says Gartner's Noakes-Fry, someone from outside the technology department should head up business continuity, because IT staff "tend to focus more on keeping the equipment or technical processes going. You need someone who's good at getting things done in a corporate atmosphere and can oversee whole projects."
Alvord says that the risk office was the supervising agency at most of the firms COOP has recently signed up. But, he adds, CROs can still lack the power to sway top management to pursue projects. "Still, having a senior executive with board-level access who can get some serious commitments and investments on a sustained multiyear basis is at least a start," he says.
ABOUT COOP SYSTEMS - - Next-Generation Continuity Planning™
COOP Systems (www.coop-systems.com), headquartered in Herndon, VA, is an exciting provider of myCOOP™, the Business Continuity Management software package provided to a growing list of domestic and international clients. With a reputation for no risk deployments, low costs, and ease-of-use for all types of users, myCOOP™ is the next generation of business continuity software.
COOP Systems
Rodette Harris, Marketing
607 Herndon Parkway, Suite 108
Herndon, VA 20170
Phone: 703.464-.8700
Email: rodetteharris@coop-systems.com
http://www.coop-systems.com
SOURCE: COOP Systems