What a week it's been! We met with Gartner analysts Roberta Witty and John Morency to present the updates to our RSA Archer Business Continuity Management & Operations (BCM&O) solution for their 2013 BCM Magic Quadrant study, announced the new solution to our customers and the public, presented a live webcast last Thursday on the new solution (here it is if you want to see the January 24th BCM Webcast) and just had an article published by Disaster Recovery Journal (read it here at BCM Regulatory Soup) on BCM regulatory guidance.
We're ecstatic to have had such a successful launch of the new solution and the interest has been phenomenal. I would like to recognize our internal team and also our BCM customer working group in all of this. Customer feedback is invaluable and I'm proud to say that we had plenty of it that went into the new solution updates. By the way, we're always looking for more participants in our working group.
In all the research, customer input, and testing and validation we did we also took time to stop and take stock of where the BCM industry is today and where it seems to be heading and does this BCM solution really address the industry's needs. We looked at things from a lot of different viewpoints - from the executive that has a high level view of and interest in BCM, to the program teams that live BC or IT Disaster Recovery (DR) daily, to business process or IT owners that have to document or test their plans infrequently. For all of them, and for us, BCM is an area of increasing importance and we all still have so much to learn and do. There are many factors at play here and, as you can imagine, no one is standing still.
The fact remains that most organizations still use rudimentary and uncoordinated approaches and tools for their risk assessments, Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) and BC/DR plans. We've attempted to provide a solution that helps coordinate all this, and takes as much of the rote actions out of BC/DR planning as possible but doesn't replace that invaluable human judgement and experience. We built the solution around best practices and industry guidance because we found that most BCM programs are looking for that extra bit of help and validation. I think the new solution does a pretty good job at this.
Let me just say a word or two about our new mobile capabilities. We're pleased to offer the option to access your BC/DR plans on your iPhone or iPad. Check out the app on the iTunes app store. We're even more pleased to be starting the next phase of mobile capabilities with assessments and the ability to develop your own mobile apps. Lots more to come on this topi!
Now that we've launched this new BCM solution, is this it? Are we done? I can emphatically say NO. But that's what is exciting. We're already thinking about how we can do more around topics like third party continuity, cloud recovery and geopolitical feeds - plus any intriguing topics that come up from our working group, which we know they'll come up because this group isn't shy. So stay tuned for the next chapter and my next blog where I'll talk about the keys to effectively managing a crisis event with an automated tool. To many successful recoveries!
