Challenges and Trends for 2016

With every new year, and increasing, changing resources, come the predictions of changes in business continuity and disaster recovery. Many experts and surveys have predicted and/or identified the trends and challenges for BC for 2016. As you look over these articles, consider whether these newest predictions impact your organization and what you should be doing or thinking about to improve your BC/DR situation.

The majority (55.72 percent) of respondents to a Continuity Central survey expect to see small changes, whilst almost a third (30.35 percent) is anticipating large changes in Business Continuity. (Item #1)     Cloud-based disaster recovery and compliance concerns are chief challenges in 2016. (Item #2)     As the growth in data presents new challenges at a range of levels, organizations can take advantage of newer cloud resources, ensuring they make the most of the data explosion. (Item #3)    

New technologies are likely to be targets for cyber-criminals, who will try to exploit inherent weaknesses, lack of user experience, or both. (Item #4)     The cloud changes the nature of recovery, because recovery and production no longer have to be treated as two separate entities. (Item #5)     BC has a clear role in embedding resilience in the organization. (Item #6)    

As always, I look forward to hearing about your concerns with regard to business continuity. If there are any topics that you'd like to see covered, email me at [email protected].

Bob Mellinger, President
Attainium Corp

1. Business continuity trends and challenges 2016

During the final quarter of 2015 Continuity Central conducted an online survey asking business continuity professionals about their expectations for 2016. Whilst many of the survey findings are similar to the same survey a year earlier, there are some interesting changes. The survey asked respondents: "What level of changes do you expect to see in the way your organization manages business continuity during 2016?"
http://www.continuitycentral.com/index.php/news/business-continuity-news/776-business-continuity-trends-and-challenges-2016

2. 2016 business continuity and disaster recovery predictions

With the large amounts of data organizations are responsible for, cloud adoption is growing. IT DR managers are hailing the benefits of the cloud for DR - specifically disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).With this new delivery method, there are fundamental compliance concerns that are becoming more notable as well.
http://www.itproportal.com/2015/12/18/2016-business-continuity-and-disaster-recovery-predictions/

3. Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity In 2016

With 1,800,000,000 gigabytes of data created in the last year, the various causes of data loss and downtime such as human error, UPS failure, cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and IT equipment failure take on a great significance. Especially since most of these are entirely preventable.
http://cloudtweaks.com/2015/12/disaster-recovery-business-continuity/

4. Three Broad Categories of Cyber-Security Trends for 2016

System hacks, data breaches and information theft are frequently in the news, and will surely continue to feature strongly in 2016. However, recent crystal ball gazing by different actors and experts yielded an intriguing variety of predictions for the coming year. Broadly speaking, there are IT security trends we can expect, those we should suspect, and those that sound a little like cyber-fiction, but still sound just credible enough to be given at least a modicum of attention.
http://www.opscentre.com.au/blog/3-broad-categories-of-cyber-security-trends-for-2016/

5. Five IT Trends to Help You Plan Strategic Change In 2016

In recent years, cloud adoption has led many misinformed businesses to believe that they were "covered" from a business continuity and recovery standpoint. After all, the cloud is virtual and distributed, and running it is the responsibility of the cloud provider - what could possibly go wrong?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sungardas/2015/12/22/5-it-trends-to-help-you-plan-strategic-change-in-2016/

6. The Resilience Challenge for the Business Continuity Profession

The global financial crisis, for example, has demonstrated the networked nature of risks which impact upon the complexity, range and cost of business disruptions. These emerging changes challenge practitioners in the 'protective disciplines' (business continuity (BC), risk management, information/physical security, supply chain management) to reassess how their methods contribute to an organization's overall resilience.
http://www.bcifiles.com/8thReport.pdf