IBM quantifies the benefits of business continuity management for companies suffering a data breach

Companies with BCM identified breaches almost three months faster

Companies using business continuity management and disaster recovery (DR) services cut their time to identify and contain a breach, saving - on average - almost $400,000, according to a survey by IBM (conducted by the Ponemon Institute).

Business continuity management (BCM) is a framework for identifying an organisation's risk of exposure to internal and external threats. The study lists the key benefits, which include: lowering the time taken to identify and contain a breach; reducing the cost of a breach; and minimising disruption to business operations. A further benefit, which we found interesting, was some mitigation to the reputational damage of a data breach. 52 per cent of companies with BCM involvement said that their reputation or brand had suffered as the result of a breach, but this number stood at 62 per cent for companies without BCM.

More than half (226) of the 419 companies in the study reported that they had used BCM in resolving data breaches, of which almost all (95 per cent) rated the involvement of BCM as either 'significant' or 'very significant'.

"Automating and orchestrating these disaster recovery and business continuity plans will help to not just protect sensitive data, but also ultimately boost productivity, strengthen competitiveness in the marketplace, and deliver greater return on investment in the long term," said Laurence Guihard-Joly, general manager of IBM Global Resiliency Services.

The per-day cost of a data breach was on average almost 40 per cent lower for companies using some form of BCM, incorporating DR automation and orchestration, than their counterparts, the study found: a net difference of $1,655 per day. Companies with manual DR paid around $5,000 per day; those with automated DR paid $3,500; and those with automated DR that also provided resiliency orchestration paid $3,360.

As companies move to the cloud, they are migrating their resiliency orchestration there, too. This is a cloud-based approach using DR automation and a suite of continuity-management tools, designed for hybrid-IT environments, meaning that IT professionals have time to spend elsewhere.

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