Scott Ream, President & CEO News about floods, riots, and droughts hitting the U.S., can mark the end of a business or atleast costly interruptions. Worse, you do not have to be remotely present amid the chaos to bear a loss, a power grid failure or civil commotion is enough to shut down the operations of businesses that your company is dependent on. So staying prepared for the likelihood of interruption is a top priority for any modern business let alone the existing juggernauts--especially when customer retention, loss of sales, reputation, and employee morale do not fall into the category that your insurance will cover.
Withstanding the test of time, and evolving with the technologies is Virtual Corporation--a business /technology continuity management and organizational resilience industry leader in software and consulting. Virtual Corporation caters to private, public, and government organizations with various aspects associated with continuity, recovery, and resilience planning. The firm helps clients design, implement, and continually enhance dynamic BCM and resilience programs that encapsulate identifying, mitigating, and acting upon prioritized risks across the enterprise.
Virtual Corporation takes a customer-centric approach to engineer and deliver meritorious software and professional services. The firm has developed extensive and proven methods and toolkits, and a thirst to go beyond just conducting a gap analysis of integrated disciplines that contribute to enterprise resilience. From disaster recovery / IT continuity and cybersecurity to crisis and emergency management, the company performs precise current state assessments to help clients enhance their resilient capabilities. “While IT and its ability to deliver technology are tightly interwoven into operations, the organizations must ensure their critical functions have high availability and minimal downtime,” states Scott Ream, the president and CEO of Virtual Corporation. “It is all about finding the right balance between the business and IT departments on justifying the capital and service expenditures required for a high degree of resilient infrastructure that is fundamental to this cause.”
That said, Virtual Corporation’s true essence lies in its ability to work collaboratively with their clients, and leverage its landmark tools—the Business Continuity Maturity Model® (BCMM®) and Sustainable Planner (SP)—to seamlessly execute a phased implementation of the BCM/DR program. The BCMM plays a crucial role in measuring organizational competencies: leadership, employee awareness, program structure/pervasiveness, metrics, resource commitment, and external coordination over six maturity levels. This represents the clients’ potential to implement the integrated disciplines of enterprise resilience as a standard practice. Deemed as the global standard for resiliency program assessments, Virtual Corporation’s BCMM also holistically addresses the four tangential program disciplines of incident management, technology recovery, security management, and business recovery.
While IT and its ability to deliver technology are tightly interwoven into businesses, the organizations must ensure their critical functions have high availability and minimal downtime
In a nutshell, this model serves as a framework for the recurring roadmap to implement a sustainable enterprise resilience program. The company additionally provides Sustainable Planner, a cost-effective and customizable enterprise resilience software solution to simplify the implementation process for building, updating, and maintaining continuity and risk management plans.
Virtual Corporation recently helped a client in the pharmaceutical industry combine their IT and risk management segments to implement enterprise resilience while complying with the board’s, regulatory, and customer demands. Upon interaction, Virtual Corporation’s highly skilled team collaborated efforts with the client to develop an executive business impact analysis (eBIA). Virtual Corporation designed a Materiality Grid to identify the various streams of impact, be it financial, production, regulatory, and reputational. “The analysis include dasking each executive how they would quantify their disruption tolerances, and prioritize the recovery of critical functions of the organization within their span of control,” Ream explains. Once this information was accumulated, it was found that a mere 36 of the client’s300+ drug manufacturing sites met the ‘Materiality Threshhold’. Virtual Corporation then utilized its BCMM and Sustainable Planner to assist the client in implementing a scalable and sustainable enterprise resilience program focused where it mattered most.
While similar stories reflect the competency and proficiency of Virtual Corporation’s services, the company has recently integrated cyber security including data classification, as part of its enterprise resilience suite. As Ream recalls his shared vision with Scott Baldwin, a close friend and the Director of Enterprise Resilience program at Symantec, “We believe enterprise resilience can be the central “service bureau” that helps all stakeholder communities collect resilience data on assets, risk, dependencies, and recovery strategy. Though the service bureau concept is very new, we see some great resonance for it in the marketplace.”
