October 23, 2009

Archer’s Chief Information Risk Strategist, John Pironti, was recently featured in an ITWorld article by Daniel P. Dern called “How to Stretch Your Security Dollar.” The piece shares advice from IT experts on gaining ROI from hardware and software related to business continuity and disaster recovery.

Article Excerpt:

The process of planning business continuity and resiliency can lead to immediate, ongoing savings, according to John Pironti, Chief Information Risk Strategist, Archer Technologies.

"When creating and adding new business processes, people often do not realize that these resources already exist," says Pironti."Key tasks in planning a business continuity and resiliency strategy are asset identification and business process mapping. Companies will often uncover a lot of redundancy and inefficiency, including duplicate elements in your data or infrastructure. Once collapsed, you can significantly reduce the ongoing costs and complexity of business processes and activities, as well as ensure accuracy of data stores and structures. Performing asset identification and business processing mapping reduces the cost to provide resilience."

Databases are often the biggest culprit, according to Pironti. "You find that many are not accurate, or synchronized, with what is supposed to be the same data."

How much unneeded redundancy (some redundancy may be legitimate rather than unintended) might this kind of inspection turn up?

"Typically you can find ten to fifteen percent, but I have seen up to thirty percent unnecessary and redundant data and infrastructure uncovered in one of these exercises," says Pironti. In addition to reducing costs, Pironti also points out, "Identifying redundancies that can be eliminated helps the CIO or CTO show that they are being diligent in pursuing efficiency."

To read the full article, visit ITWorld online.