DISASTER RECOVERY 
JOURNAL

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(314) 894-0276 
Fax: (314) 894-7474
Internet www.drj.com 
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PUBLISHER &
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

SENIOR EDITOR
Janette Ballman
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MANAGING EDITOR
Jon Seals
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Richard Sandhofer
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Pamela Clifton
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ADVERTISING 
Robert Arnold
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_____________

Corporate

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Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
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Vice President 
Robert Arnold
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Patti Fitzgerald, CBCP
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Merce Knese
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Laura Baugh
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EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
Patrick Corcoran, IBM Bus. Cont. & Rec. Services
Jeff Dato, MBCP, KPMG
Edward S. Devlin, E.S. Devlin & Associates
Judith Eckles, SunGard Availability Services
James Hammill, CBCP, JMH Consulting Inc.
John Jackson, Independant


INTERNATIONAL
CONTACTS
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Business Continuity 
Phone: 0161-237-1007
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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
www.drms.com.br

Click Here for a Printable Version

An Interview with Jim Simmons
of SunGard Availability Services

By JUDITH ECKLES

Jim Simmons is chief executive officer and president of SunGard Availability Services, one of the world’s largest independent providers of information availability services. He joined SunGard in 1993 as senior vice president and played an instrumental role in driving SunGard’s current leadership in defining the emerging concept of information availability.

Eckles: Jim, in tight economic times, many companies are looking for ways to trim costs. With resources stretched, are companies investing enough to provide their organizations with information availability?
Simmons: The short answer is no. And that’s not simply my opinion. It’s what companies themselves are saying. At SunGard, we commissioned an independent research firm to interview more than 200 U.S. companies. More than 80 percent said they didn’t have the methodology in place to keep their businesses running in the event of a significant business disruption. Most said they wouldn’t be able to meet their own availability requirements in the event of a disruption. If I were a stakeholder of such a company, I’d be concerned about the future.
Business continuity services are an easy target for cost cutting because the risks are not obvious until after a disruption occurs. But it’s a risky bet.

Eckles: Okay, but what funding arguments should IT professionals make to senior management when they hear, “Take a number.”
Simmons: Today, more than ever, IT professionals need to be able to articulate to the C-level executives the business impact of losing access to critical business information. You have to be able to quantify the risks and the consequences and put them in a real-world context: jobs lost, revenues at risk, impact on stock prices, customer loyalty programs and so on.

Eckles: It sounds like an important role.
Simmons: It’s a very important role. With the recent regulatory publications and recommendations (i.e. The Interagency White Paper, Sarbanes-Oxley), we are being forced to acknowledge that IT is now a critical part of operational risk, along with areas such as people and processes. And the risks are only half of the equation. There’s an upside benefit that needs to be communicated to the C-level executives as well. Traditional business-continuity planning focuses on recovering from a disaster. Information availability is about keeping people and information connected, no matter what. An information availability strategy allows organizations to be more productive, more flexible and more nimble – even when disasters don’t occur.
Eckles: You’re saying that an information availability strategy affects day-to-day operations?
Simmons: Absolutely. It’s more than a project or a task; it’s an organizational strategy. It means building information availability into your business processes and IT applications from the start, not retrofitting.

Eckles: So what’s the urgency for doing this now? Can’t it wait until the company’s financial condition improves?
Simmons: The question is whether conditions will improve if the business falls behind the curve. Increasingly, businesses are competing along the dimension of time. Customers demand and expect faster turnaround and greater access, and they can find suppliers who can deliver it. IA gives firms a competitive advantage in this dimension.

Eckles: Does information availability mean that every organization should be moving toward high-availability solutions?
Simmons: Not necessarily. Planning for information availability starts with precisely this question: How much availability does each business process or application require to keep the business running? The key is to look at every process and balance the cost of availability versus the risk of downtime. Some applications need to be available in two seconds while others may only need to be available within two hours and still others two days. The bottom line is when employing an information availability strategy across the enterprise the integration of all of these applications and processes should be seamless. To facilitate this seamless continuity you might, for example, want to store your most critical information at the same location as your backup processor and network.

Eckles: If an IT manager did one thing today to get top management buy-in for these issues, what would you recommend?
Simmons: Conduct a business-impact analysis, identifying how interruptions would affect key operations. That allows managers to see how their own areas of responsibility are vulnerable, and provides data to support a meaningful analysis of a company’s IA needs.

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