A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.

Adtalem Global Education

Technology and Business Continuity: An Indispensable Partnership

Then I look at the relationship of Business Continuity and Technology I see it from several different angles. One is how invested one is in the other. For systems and services to operate as designed, it is important that there is a balance between the two. The business needs to make a sizeable investment in current technology in order for its operation to function well and be profitable. Similarly, IT needs to recognize that it must operate with the business as its number one priority and take the time to understand what requirements the business has to its stakeholders and what contingencies must be in place if technology fails and recovery is prolonged.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the unique opportunity to manage both on the IT side of the house as well as the business side. The reliance of the business on technology has gone through the roof in the last 10-15 years. I am dating myself, but I remember a time when business continuity was primarily referred to as disaster recovery and our number one priority was restoring data from servers, tape backup or even ensuring AS400s and mainframe computers were back up and running after downtime.

My old standby for continuity used to be, well if technology fails we can go back to workarounds using paper-based applications and spreadsheets. In this age of instant everything that does not work anymore. People have too many choices and if you are down, closed or unavailable, they move on and quickly. Once you lose a customer, it is very hard to get them back.

During my days as a developer, , I had always viewed the demands from the business like a nagging spouse – “give me this, I want this now, what do you mean I have to wait, that’s not what I asked for” and so on . I was taught however that the business is always right, they are our client, so we —IT)— have to make sure we fix whatever is wrong and immediately. However, when I came over to the business side of the house hen I look at the relationship of Business Continuity and Technology I see it from several different angles. One is how invested one is in the other. For systems and services to operate as designed, it is important that there is a balance between the two. The business needs to make a sizeable investment in current technology in order for its operation to function well and be profitable. Similarly, IT needs to recognize that it must operate with the business as its number one priority and take the time to understand what requirements the business has to its stakeholders and what contingencies must be in place if technology fails and recovery is prolonged.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the unique opportunity to manage both on the IT side of the house as well as the business side. The reliance of the business on technology has gone through the roof in the last 10-15 years. I am dating myself, but I remember a time when business continuity was primarily referred to as disaster recovery and our number one priority was restoring data from servers, tape backup or even ensuring AS400s and mainframe computers were back up and running after downtime. My old standby for continuity used to be, well if technology fails we can go back to workarounds using paper-based applications and spreadsheets. In this age of instant everything that does not work anymore. People have too many choices and if you are down, closed or unavailable, they move on and quickly. Once you lose a customer, it is very hard to get them back.

During my days as a developer, , I had always viewed the demands from the business like a nagging spouse – “give me this, I want this now, what do you mean I have to wait, that’s not what I asked for” and so on . I was taught however that the business is always right, they are our client, so we —IT)— have to make sure we fix whatever is wrong and immediately. However, when I came over to the business side of the house

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