Six Steps to Evolving from a BDR Provider to a Business Continuity Provider XaaSjournal.com December 3rd 2019 Too often, solution providers sell backups as disaster recovery, or worse yet, business continuity. The William Travis Group, Inc. The William Travis Group delivers Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity and All-Risk Incident Management methodologies [...]
How to Build the Best Business Continuity Offering XaaSjournal.com April 29th 2019 Planning, building your expertise, testing your solutions, and adapting them to change are vital to effective business continuity. The William Travis Group, Inc. The William Travis Group delivers Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity and All-Risk Incident Management methodologies and solutions. [...]
5 Things to Remember When You’re Selling Business Continuity Solutions XaaSjournal.com December 3rd 2019 Learn all you can about your prospect and their needs, take a consultative approach, and then deliver what you promise. The William Travis Group, Inc. The William Travis Group delivers Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity and All-Risk [...]
There are four aspects to WTG that, in our view, differentiate us and the continuity solutions we construct for our clients. First, WTG profiles our client’s continuity requirements based on their business and relevant business processes. We have innovated an Iterative Business Process Decomposition (IBPD) approach that, unlike a traditional Business Impact Analysis [...]
Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity has changed dramatically in the last 18 to 24 months as new technologies have become available in response to real-time demands on internal processes and systems--demands for 24/7/365 continuous availability, irrespective of outright disasters. Application of these technologies to the arena of business continuity offers powerful new options to businesses. Interestingly [...]
Global business practices, multi-site shared processing, e-commerce, new storage architectures and specialized distributed operations are forcing new requirements for much higher levels of system availability, recoverability and continuous operating capability. Existing Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity constructs that have grown up around a traditional hotsite model are becoming increasingly cumbersome, resulting in serious gaps [...]
The final flaw may be the most critical. A BIA typically is a static report whose data reflects the business’ needs at a specific point in time. Once the report is presented to management, it is usually put on the shelf to gather dust until the next refresh…two or three years from now. But gaining [...]
WTG offers a unique focus on multi-tiered, multipurpose recovery architectures and on establishing disaster recovery capabilities as an inherent part of continuous business operations. We believe that it is no longer sufficient to address “disaster recovery” or even ”business resumption” as typically defined in the industry. Instead, the focus must be to facilitate continuous [...]
The DR/BC industry is on a constant crusade to Simplify! The traditional BIA is never far behind. Unfortunately, the crusade is founded on a false belief…that DR/BC planning can be simplified by reducing or eliminating the details. We believe this grail search is naïve at best, and potentially catastrophic at worst. We believe that the [...]
Are the basic assumptions of your recovery plan still valid for 2018 and beyond? Can you really restore all backup data in the time allowed by your recovery time objective? How do you solve for cross-functional prioritization? Are business units 100% self-sufficient, or do they require centralized support staff? Are all of your backup files [...]
Who would have thought when the terms RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) were coined, that 30+ years later, the industry as a whole would still be arguing about what they meant, the “certifying bodies” would still be debating about when their clocks start and end, and the standards organizations would still [...]
CIOapplications.com March 30th 2018 Having been in the industry from its inception, the William Travis Group (WTG) has seen and worked hands-on with all of the industry’s disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. As an impartial third party whose only stake is to help their clients apply these solutions to their benefit, WTG considers itself [...]
The next problem comes from a fundamental flaw in thinking that the BIA process perpetuates. By focusing on business processes in an attempt to place responsibility for defining criticality and budget with the business owners (as opposed to IT), the BIA infers that “process recovery” is the goal. In fact, there are few if any [...]
The Short List ; ) How does your plan help you dynamically define the recovery steps for the specific disaster event? How does your plan incorporate remote resources and staffing ATOD (At Time of Disaster)? How does your plan address closing the business pre-emptively? How does your plan enable you to manage critical stakeholder [...]
This flaw manifests in sub-optimal and/or overly expensive recovery architectures. Most BIAs gather information based on the “Sweet Spot” premise. The “Sweet Spot” premise was formulated in the DR/BC industry’s early days and was illustrated as two opposite curves plotted against a vertical axis of solution costs and a horizontal axis of recovery time. The [...]
Curious about how your DR/BC Plan compares to similar business? Ask yourself some of the hard questions... How does your plan help you decide if and when to declare a disaster? How does your plan direct proportionate responses to differing disaster impacts? How does your plan direct different communication messages to different audiences via [...]
The next flaw is a variation of the previous flaw. BIAs do not aggregate process criticality across various interdependencies. That is, they do not provide a methodology to dynamically adjust a process’ criticality based on unplanned, but nevertheless present interdependencies that change the assumptions that were used when determining the process’ inherent criticality. One such [...]
The best plans direct not only the Who, What, When and Where of the response, but also the How, Why and Why Not across all plans, all teams and all sites. Check out WTG’s 18 Point Checklist for an Optimal Plan. First and foremost, plans must be action oriented. The action tasks must contain [...]
The fourth flaw comes from the inability of traditional BIA methodologies to weight and differentiate process criticality. Most methodologies prioritize processes according to a scale (1 – 5, low – medium – high, critical – important – deferrable, etc.). Regardless of the chosen scale, the problem arises when multiple impact categories are considered (legal, financial, [...]
End-to-end delivery of advanced continuity capabilities, from strategy through design, development, implementation and testing. Leverage your existing IT infrastructure, working with the details of your production environment to derive, build and seamlessly integrate new multi-level contingency solutions into your daily operations. Provide expert technical consultants that construct and write robust recovery plans with customized, detailed [...]