Continuity of Business

A requirement for doing business today

By Joanna D'Aquanni

How would your company react in the event of a natural disaster, a flu pandemic or a terrorist attack? Increasingly, customers require reassurances that their strategic suppliers have plans in place to recover from even the most unexpected emergencies. As the Program Manager of the SAS Continuity of Business (COB) Program, I work with a global team to build recovery strategies to address risks to our business.

As organizations continue to expand their use of SAS for core business operations, customer needs and expectations have increased. Today, a growing number of companies view SAS as a critical supplier, an honor that carries with it increased levels of risk and responsibility. Our resiliency indirectly influences our customers' resiliency, which in turn influences their customers' resiliency. In other words, we recognize that the health of our company has a direct impact on many other companies, and we are planning accordingly.

Whatever the potential disaster or event, our underlying approach begins with a self-assessment of what drives our business. As a mature software company with a unique employee-focused culture and a strong reliance on long-term customer relationships, SAS sees the following as the drivers for its COB program:

• Protecting the life and safety of employees.
• Providing customer support.
• Restoring the services on which critical business functions are dependent.

Within our business model, the first two drivers are tightly tied together. Because we are a knowledge-based company, the continuity of our customer relationships is affected by customer knowledge and the development of software solutions that address our customers' ongoing business needs. By protecting our employees and helping them to prepare themselves and their families for disaster, we put them in a better position to assist in the short-term recovery of the company and continue to support our customers in the long term.

In the event of an emergency, we want our customers to have the support they need to continue using our software. As such, SAS' business recovery plans are focused on services that must continue after an event occurs. Additionally, COB supports application service provider agreements where SAS is responsible for hosting customer applications and data. Customers may also have concerns about COB based on government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II accord, or based on industry standards for information security. 

Whether the motivation for business continuity is regulatory, prompted by industry standards or just due diligence, the goal remains the same: to ensure timely recovery and resumption of business operations by assessing and mitigating the risks.

In the global economy, we've seen supply chains tighten and – with the natural disasters and terrorist events of the past few years – we have a heightened realization of the widespread and long-term impact these events can have on people, organizations and the economy. Overall, the SAS COB program helps assure customers that SAS is focused on recovery strategies that will minimize the impact of threats on its business and theirs.

Bio: Joanna D'Aquanni is the Continuity of Business (COB) Program Manager at SAS. joanna.daquanni@sas.com.