Managing Risks With Business Continuity Planning

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Every business enterprise is created with the sole aim of gaining profits from the business. However, this legal entity is a risky affair and is prone to disruptions. Business disruptions can come in from various sources including natural ones. In the technology driven world today with radical environmental changes, the risk to the continuity of business is even more. The unplanned events may leave lasting impressions on both small and medium enterprises as well as global organizations. The brave heart entrepreneur and business enterprise thus needs to be always prepared to face the disruptions and keeps options ready to ensure business continuity come what may.

Today, as part of smart business operations, enterprises opt to have in place strategies for business continuity as part of operations management. The business continuity planning (BCP) is meant to identify an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and prepare the assets to provide effective prevention and recovery mechanism for the organization, while ...
... maintaining a competitive advantage. Wikipedia defines the business continuity plan as a road map for continuing operations under adverse conditions irrespective of this being natural or man-made.

For enterprise that are totally technology dependent any small system errors and bug in the complex programs can bring their entire business to a standstill. Thus the business continuity strategy works to provide a framework for resilience building and tends to protect the interest of key stakeholders. Traditionally what the business continuity plans looked at is methods to protect the business in face of physical damages to equipment, products and disruption of services. However, with the globalized business world so driven by technology, even the absence of the key staff can cause equivalent effects on the business.

Today the business continuity planning strategies should be one that would help global enterprises face emergency situations without loss of productivity and profit. The technological innovations have paved way for new age enterprises to provide remote desktop access to their distantly located employees and key personnel. Such remote access solution is best if it can facilitate enterprises with:

• Anytime, anywhere access for employees to familiar workstation and business critical resources
• Real-time and secure access gateways to the corporate network and critical data for the partners and vendors
• Performance consistency for the entire workforce
• Automated VPN provisioning
• Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

Enterprises make use of remote access and BYOD solutions to increases the mobility of the workforce and ensure business continuity. But along with the increased mobility they also need to cater for cost-efficient performance of the corporate network infrastructure. Load balancers play a major role in disseminating process requests of the workforce across the wide networks irrespective of the device and location. The modern day innovative load balancers help enterprises to leverage on the multi-core processing and ensure a scalable business continuity planning through cost-efficient performance.