Disaster Recovery Journal- Volume 17, Issue 4 - Fall 2004 Issue

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Fall 2004 Issue

DISASTER RECOVERY
JOURNAL

P. O. Box 510110
St. Louis, MO 63151
(314) 894-0276
Fax: (314) 894-7474
Internet www.drj.com
E-mail drj@drj.com

PUBLISHER &
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

SENIOR EDITOR
Janette Ballman
janette@drj.com

MANAGING EDITOR
Jon Seals
jon@drj.com

COPY EDITORS
Richard Sandhofer
richards@drj.com
Pamela Clifton
pamelaclifton@hotmail.com

ADVERTISING
Robert Arnold
bob@drj.com

_____________

Corporate

President/CEO
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

Vice President
Robert Arnold
bob@drj.com

CONFERENCE COORDINATOR
Patti Fitzgerald, CBCP
patti@drj.com

CONFERENCE REGISTRAR
Merce Knese
mercedes@drj.com

CIRCULATION
Laura Baugh
laurab@drj.com

EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
Mike Croy, Forsythe
Jeff Dato, MBCP, KPMG
John Jackson, IBM
Edward S. Devlin, E.S. Devlin & Associates
James Hammill, CBCP, JMH Consulting Inc.
Pat McAnally, SunGard Availability Services
Randy Till, Mastercard International
Brian Turley, Strohl Systems
Belinda Wilson, Hewlett-Packard

INTERNATIONAL
CONTACTS
England: Thom Hetherington
Business Continuity
Phone: 0161-237-1007
thomh@tempus.demon.co.uk

Australia: Anthony J. Harvey
Journal of Business Continuity
Phone: 0011-613-953-0055-8
fax: 0011-613-953-0528
sector@notability.com.au

Japan: Shinji Hosotsubo
Quake Japan Co., Ltd.
Phone: 03-3215-2880
fax: 03-3215-2881

Brazil: Jose Carlos Ferreira
Disaster Recovery Mercosul
Phone: 55 11 3666-9506
conc2000@uol.com.br

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EXECUTIVE COUNCIL

Business Continuity Chronicles

By Patrica A. McAnally

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third of a seven-part series featuring the members of our executive council. Through these personal accounts, we hope to not only highlight their careers, but also give a seven-sided view of the history of the disaster recovery/business continuity industry.

I had the good fortune of making my career in the disaster recovery industry with the company that pioneered it – SunGard. When I began in 1993, the company was one-tenth its current size, yet well ahead of its time in terms of understanding the issues of keeping people and information connected.
I came to SunGard from an international analyst research company, where my team designed and built an information services group focused on new technologies. Before that, I spent eight years at an international manufacturer and distributor of products for the IBM midrange market. At SunGard, I started as director of marketing strategy, which, similarly, was dedicated to developing availability solutions using new strategies and technologies, especially targeted to meeting the needs of the quickly growing mid-range market. As distributed computing became more commonplace, its continuity needs grew and became more complex.
One area of key focus for SunGard has been its consulting services. I spent eight years as that group’s marketing director, where we grew to be the industry leader. I saw tremendous need for services beyond the traditional scope of disaster recovery planning to both infrastructure- and risk-related topics such as availability engineering, business recovery, and information security. I’m really proud of the fact that business expanded 10-fold during my tenure as marketing director, and our clients included an impressive percentage of the Fortune 20.
My experience in continuity planning and software gave me a unique perspective that forms the keystone of everything I do today, because the audience for professional services always expands beyond the technology organization to include CFOs, audit and compliance executives, business unit heads, and now chief security officers and chief compliance officers. These people all need to integrate the world of technology with their own areas of concentration, and it isn’t easy. Even today, when I come to DRJ and speak to people on the trade show floor, nearly half of everyone I meet come from outside of IT. We, as practitioners of information availability, have a responsibility to extend the reach of our conversations to include anyone who is touched by information, which, of course, is everyone.
Today, I am responsible for SunGard’s Thought Leadership program, which is dedicated to bringing the intellectual capital and experience of SunGard’s team of 2,000 global experts to the industry. One of the topics I’ve been working on is the flood of new regulations and their impact on both the public and private sectors relating to risk and availability, and then presenting this information (along with SunGard’s solutions) to our employees and customers.
Regulatory issues and compliance are still relatively new concerns for information managers, but visibility is growing fast. Consider the ubiquity of technology and our increased dependence on it, and you have to consider the concepts of operational resilience and operational risk. That’s fundamentally what compliance is forcing us to do.
When I speak to organizations, I find that the conversations between compliance officers, IT, and business executives are not happening as often as they should. There are still silos, and until they come together, you simply can’t effectively address the issues. That will evolve, especially given today’s conviction for C-level accountability.
The kinds of questions people are asking:
• How can we create architectures that don’t go down in the first place?
• What is the best practice in the compliance and regulatory areas?
• Can you help benchmark ourselves against others?
• How do we integrate information and physical security?

What will we see in the short-term?
• Continued board-level, C-level accountability for continuity, security, and privacy
• A big focus on e-mail, IM, and their next generation technologies
• Growth in consulting and professional services to help companies build and execute a solid plan that spreads risk
• An assurance to regulation and compliance

My work with SunGard’s Thought Leadership practice has been an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding role that gives me access to the forefront of the industry and provides an audience with some of the world’s greatest minds on the topics that we face each day. Best of all, I get to take all this great information to our customers, who benefit the most by leveraging every detail into architectures of resilience.

A veteran of the business continuity industry for more than a decade, Pat McAnally currently heads SunGard’s Thought Leadership program. McAnally joined SunGard in 1993 as director of marketing strategy, and spent eight years as marketing director of the Planning Solutions group. McAnally holds a McGraw Hill award for excellence in new product development, an Aces Award from the Business Marketing Association, and her work has been cited in case study material by Bitpipe for the successful use of intellectual capital in generating awareness. She holds a MBA in marketing and BS in English education, Magna Cum Laude, from Temple University.