HP looks to broaden its approach to business continuity

HP has announced a strategic appointment to boost and expand its business continuity and availability offering. The company has hired former META Group lead analyst Mark Vanston.

Mark, as senior advisor for Business Continuity and Enterprise Risk Strategies at HP, will bring insight and strategic direction to help further evolve HP's business continuity and availability services. A recognised authority within the business continuity sector, Mark will be responsible for bringing together a set of customisable solutions consisting of people, processes and technologies that are designed to help customers solve business continuity, availability, compliance and operational risk challenges.

"Customers want to drive competitive advantage with an IT environment that dynamically adapts and evolves with ever-changing business needs and helps to mitigate risk - whether the cause is threat, disruption or change," said Belinda Wilson, executive director, Business Continuity and Availability Services, HP. "Our goal is to provide customers with the most up-to-date advice on planning, designing and deploying a business continuity and operational risk plan. Doing this helps our customers become adaptive enterprises in which business and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change."

Belinda believes that various changes are taking place in the business continuity market place, which HP wishes to encourage and lead forward. These include:

• The importance of taking a proactive not just a reactive approach to disaster recovery and business continuity;
• The need for holistic business continuity. All areas of the business need to be considered and to be involved. Business continuity should not be overly technology centric;
• Compliance and operational risk issues will drive growth in business continuity forward;
• Business continuity is moving away from being a type of disaster-related insurance policy to being an important aspect of business process management.

To address the above challenges, HP is developing a wide-ranging service and product portfolio to enable it to offer the complete breadth of business continuity and availability solutions to help build the foundation of adaptive enterprises.

NEW RECOVERY FACILITIES UNDER DEVELOPMENT
HP is to open two new business recovery facilities in the next quarter. These include an office recovery facility in the Los Angeles area and a data centre and office recovery facility in Georgia. In the longer term further sites are planned for New York, Chicago and somewhere in the Nevada/Phoenix area.

•Date: 22nd April 2005 • Region: N.America •Type: Article •Topic: BC markets
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