In today's crisis-sensitive environment, it's important to "rapidly adapt and respond to risk, as well as opportunities, to maintain continuous business operations, be a more trusted partner and enable growth."¹ That's a resilient business - an On Demand Business.

Overall, this represents a shift from the old paradigm of "experience and react" to a new paradigm of "anticipate and adjust."

Of course, business resilience depends on managing risk and making your information more secure. It should cover databases, IT recovery, constant availability and comply with regulatory, security and privacy initiatives.

Some of the hallmarks of a resilient organization:
Continuity of operations means maintaining access to key applications and data, helping protect critical assets, managing risk and aligning recovery costs based on business risk and information value. To achieve these goals you have to reduce disruption to customers and to applications, provide seamless resumption of business processes, recover operations at an alternate location if the data center is disabled and automate repetitive processes so employees can focus on other tasks.

Security When your IT infrastructure is responsive to customers, employees and suppliers, it must also limit risk and vulnerability. This requires a strategic approach to coordinate security policies with business controls.

Regulatory compliance requires strict internal controls and diligence in maintaining, storing and accessing information. The key is limiting the burden and costs of external regulatory requirements.

Resilience: An On Demand Business approach
Business resilience starts with an organization-wide plan that brings together business and technology people to assess your strategic business priorities. While it is impossible to eliminate every risk, it is prudent to rely on technologies that help to mitigate risks in key areas, such as continuity of operations (including availability and recovery), security and compliance.

A flexible business resilience program can help you protect key resources (people, systems and information), deflect the impact of normal outages and disruptions, predict potential disruptions, and adapt when change inevitably occurs.

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