How Business Continuity is Used by Onward Technologies, Martin Currie, City Furniture, Southern Glazer’s, and Associated British Ports: Case Studies

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We are in an age where downtime and cyber attacks have become a new normal. 

According to a report by Gartner, 98% of organizations lose around $100,000 for every hour in downtime. It has become crucial for enterprises to adopt a business continuity plan (BCP) to resolve any operational challenge in times of attack.

See below for five case studies on how organizations across industries are employing business continuity solutions:

See more: The Best Data Recovery Services

1. Martin Currie

Martin Currie is an investment management company with headquarters in Scotland and branches across London, New York, and Singapore. 

The firm operates more than $17.7 billion pounds in assets annually and serves a range of clients, including financial institutions, foundations, charities, endowments, family offices, government agencies, pension funds, and investment funds.

Asset management, as a sector, is highly vulnerable to both physical and cyberattacks.

“Our reputation for responding quickly to our client’s needs depends on being able to operate effectively under any circumstances,” says Alan Davidson, business continuity manager, Martin Currie. 

“If our IT systems were to go down or we were not able to communicate with our clients, it could have a major negative impact on our business.”

Martin Currie appointed Sungard AS as its business continuity partner. The management firm set up 110 workplace recovery hubs across Scotland, so no operational work is hampered by disasters. The hubs are designed to relocate core staff immediately and continue business in all circumstances.

Moreover, if Martin Currie’s first choice of recovery location is unavailable, Sungard AS’ network infrastructure allows the company to roll back to alternative Sungard AS sites, with options to choose dual primary recovery locations.

Industry: Investment

Business continuity provider: Sungard AS

Outcomes:

  • Reduce risk of downtime
  • Meet recovery time objective (RTO) within minutes
  • Minimize financial loss with quick business relocation
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements

2. City Furniture

Tamarac, Florida-based City Furniture has 1,800 associates and runs 29 retail locations, two distribution centers, and an e-commerce site. 

The green-conscious home furniture chain is also a top lister of the Sustainable Furnishings Council.

City Furniture previously ran its own on-premises computing operations and stored critical customer data at the local data centers. 

City Furniture was looking for a trusted solution to ensure business-critical computer operations remain unharmed by any hurricane-related disaster situations. The company’s IT management team was searching for a solution that could back up critical data and support network resiliency, regardless of a disaster threat.

City Furniture then ensured network resiliency by migrating to IBM Cloud using Kyndryl. The move created a flexible platform for cloud-based apps and efficient customer service using cognitive computing. City Furniture moved its hybrid legacy system operations to the cloud.

Kyndryl has the sole responsibility for managing the firm’s cloud computing operations covering high availability disaster recovery (HADR) and around-the-clock system monitoring. Based on workloads, the system can now scale up or down, so City Furniture only has to pay for the computing capacity it requires.

Industry: Furniture

Business continuity provider: Kyndryl

Outcomes:

  • Scalable computing power
  • Around-the-clock support with network monitoring and backups at multiple cloud locations
  • Improved rate of business growth

See more: How Data Recovery is Used by Nationwide, Divine Capital Markets, FCR Media, City of Lodi, and Maple Reinders: Case Studies

3. Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits

Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits has operations running in 44 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. The company has over 10,000 employees and business in 200 locations.

As an essential business, Southern Glazer’s aimed to conduct a disruption-free, real-time operational resilience program. 

Southern Glazer’s business continuity team adopted a mass notification system that could alert all Southern Glazer’s sites to potential risks and an operational construct to break down potential silos across the organization.

The team worked with Fusion Risk Management to conduct a critical analysis of every organizational process and identify gaps and potential areas for improvement. Using this data, Fusion created a continuity plan template and presentation-quality reports to engage management and ensure continued flow of information.

Southern Glazer has managed to achieve an operational resilience plan with detailed and efficient dashboards, rules engines, workflows, and automation. The company can now easily manage its vast site data, supply chain, employees, and dependencies in a central repository. The organization can also cross-section data to visualize geographies and systems.

Industry: Beverage manufacturing

Business continuity provider: Fusion Risk Management

Outcomes:

  • Advanced automation and guided workflows
  • A holistic operational resilience approach that prioritizes customer data
  • Increase collaboration and cross-department engagement

4. Onward Technologies

Onward Technologies is a digital and engineering services firm offering digital transformation, data analysis, and embedded systems development. The Mumbai-based company employs over 2,100 people across India, the U.S., the U.K., and Europe.

The company was facing a tough challenge when employees were forced to work remotely: to ensure seamless, remote access to employees without compromising data security and still delivering all client commitments.

Onward previously tried a firewall-based remote desktop extension to manage controls over the weekends. However, the idea wasn’t helpful, given the high work volume and strong graphics support needed on the design floor.

Citrix Virtual Application and Desktop (CVAD) helped the company through this period without compromising on customer data. The security and built-in controls, along with a screen refresh for a better graphics experience, allowed for the right mix of security and productivity. The relatively lower bandwidth requirement of the Citrix solution was an added benefit.

Industry: Technology

Business Continuity provider: Citrix

Outcomes:

  • Greater accessibility with secure controls
  • Optimize employee experience
  • Centralize dashboard for better manageability

5. Associated British Ports

Associated British Ports (ABP) is a large U.K. port operator and manages 21 ports along the U.K. coast, including Southampton, Ipswich and Newport, and Hams Hall rail terminal. 

ABP is part of the U.K.’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and is in contact with the Department for Transport, Environment Agency, Maritime, and Coastguard Agency.

After one of the worst tidal surges in 60 years, Immingham was left submerged and temporarily inoperable with an overall loss of $100 million pounds. This disaster revealed faults in ABP’s emergency and business continuity plans.

ABP then picked Inoni to maintain operational resilience during critical times. Inoni’s business continuity software created a customized continuity plan to meet ABP’s growing business. The two worked together in creating emergency responses and detailed impact analysis specific for each port location, along with port closure access and remote access to the IT systems. The organization can now respond with a higher level of certainty to any major incident in the future.

Industry: Ports

Business continuity provider: Inoni

Outcomes:

  • Structured incident response strategies in place
  • A unified crisis communications plan coupled with customized templates
  • Emergency responses compliant with ISO standards
  • Inception of local resilience forums (LRFs) to create response during disasters

See more: 5 Top Business Continuity Trends

Avya Chaudhary
Avya Chaudhary
Avya Chaudhary is a contributor to Enterprise Storage Forum and Datamation. Previously she was an engineer with a history of experience working with NGOs and civil societies.

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