Business continuity briefs:
9th October 2009

'Business continuity briefs' provides a summary of new product and services press releases and other useful resources published recently:

Organizations shift ISM investment to strategic solutions
Organizations are beginning to realise the value of taking a proactive and strategic approach to IT security, according to primary research commissioned by Dimension Data and conducted by IDC in 2009. The research, which involved 407 companies of 500+ employees in 18 countries across Western Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia and the Pacific, shows that organizations are shifting their investment focus away from point solutions to more holistic solutions, with 59 percent (69 percent in the UK) planning to invest in IT security audits, 57 percent (79 percent in the UK) in data loss prevention (DLP), and 52 percent (66 percent in the UK) in consulting.

This is in spite of the current economic downturn, which saw only 19 percent of the companies surveyed (only 2 percent in the UK) increase their overall IT spending from 2008 to 2009 and 41 percent (25 percent in the UK) cut their IT budget. IT security budgets fared better, however, with only 20 percent (6 percent in the UK) cutting their investment in this area – indicating that it remains a priority for businesses. For 59 percent of the organisations, the average spend on IT security within the overall IT budget was 10 percent or more.

The report also reveals that respondents view PC theft or loss (54 percent), spam attack (45 percent), misuse or hacking (45 percent), and spying tools (45 percent) as the most likely security incidents they’d have to tackle. The most dangerous security incidents are an IT security breach due to an external cause (52 percent), internal intentional misuse (49 percent), remote access abuse (47 percent), identity theft (47 percent), and virus attack (43 percent).

www.dimensiondata.com

New COOP Systems distributor in Japan
COOP Systems has announced that Kozo Keikaku Engineering Inc. (KKE) has agreed to sell and support the myCOOP business continuity software package in Japan.

"We are very pleased to have KKE as a strategic partner in Japan," said Chris Alvord, CEO of COOP Systems.  "The disaster-prone Japanese market has no native business continuity software available for the large, distributed organizations that are COOP Systems' typical customers.

"The ability of myCOOP to support kanji, hiragana and katakana scripts for the full business continuity life cycle, combined with the ability of users to choose any world currency, date convention, or time zone, make our software a powerful solution for the Japanese market.”

www.coop-systems.com

Continuity Forum SIG
4 November 2009, Sydney.
Continuity Forum’s next Special Interest Group will cover ‘Benchmarking your pandemic plan against best practice.’ It will include:
- the essentials of a best practice pandemic plan
- methods of benchmarking your pandemic plan against best practice
- a sample self-assessment questionnaire for reviewing your plan.
The meeting is for experienced business continuity practitioners only.
Please email Lucy at web@continuity.net.au for more details.

Sun update for Solaris 10 operating system enhances business continuity options
Sun has announced the availability of the Solaris 10 operating system. This has been extended with new performance and power efficiency enhancements, more streamlined management of system installations, updates and fixes, new updates for Solaris ZFS and advancements to further leverage the functionality of the latest SPARC and x86 based systems. "Sun continues to add significant capabilities to the Solaris OS, delivering sophisticated power management and performance for the data center and helping our customers protect their business continuity," said Jim McHugh, vice president, Datacenter Marketing, Sun Microsystems. For more information and to download this update visit: http://sun.com/solaris/get

Current environmental stories with business continuity implications:

FEMA daily SITREP

World weather impacts

•Date: 9th October 2009• Region: Various