Far too many organizations’ business continuity (BC) plans failed to anticipate a global pandemic, and it cost them dearly. Chris Butler, Lead Principal Consultant, Resilience and Security at Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) joins IT Availability Now to dissect the state of preparedness both before and after the pandemic, along with how companies are now rethinking resilience and what steps they can take to achieve their goals:

• The evolving role of the C-suite in BC planning
• What areas you must focus on when re-evaluating your future state of operational resilience
• What you can do to make sure your company doesn’t fall back into bad habits.

Oliver Lomer is a Senior Solutions Marketing Manager at Sungard AS, where he illustrates business challenges and how technology can solve them through engaging content. Oliver has six years’ experience in marketing, commercial and sales enablement roles in global technology organizations.

A former Lieutenant Colonel and helicopter pilot in the British Army, Chris Butler now provides executive advisory services in the field of organizational resilience, business challenges of the 21st century, and cyber resilience. As a resilience consultant at Sungard AS, Chris provides senior leadership teams with bespoke training sessions on crisis leadership and management, business continuity, disaster recovery, information security, IT service continuity, and crisis response capability building and coaching.

Your data is more secure in your data center than in the cloud, right? Not so fast. Miki Sandorfi, Senior Vice President, Product Engineering at Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), joins IT Availability Now to address this common misconception and set the record straight. Other highlights:

• How to determine the right data location
• What security protocols you need in place, regardless of where data is stored
• Why “on-premises vs. cloud” is more psychological than anything else

Brian Fawcett is a Senior Manager of Global Sales Engagement at Sungard AS. With over 15 years of experience in a range of industries, he specializes in forming enterprise-wide global talent and learning development programs. Brian has enriched corporate learning culture by matching organizational vision and core values to curricula, leading to application and impact.

In his role as Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at Sungard AS, Miki Sandorfi is responsible for advancing global product engineering and leading global program management. Drawing on his in-depth knowledge of IT systems (Oracle, SAP, VMware), as well as cloud-first technologies (OpenStack, AWS, Azure), he develops plans and solutions to aid customers’ digital transformations. 

55% of consumers abandoned a company during COVID-19 because of IT issues. John Beattie, Principal Consultant at Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), joins IT Availability Now to discuss what this means for businesses, and how they can avoid damaging their short- and long-term relationships with customers.

This episode also dives into which digital services grew the most during the pandemic, how consumers struggled to maintain everyday life due to technical issues and concrete steps businesses can take to improve availability.

Brian Fawcett is a Senior Manager of Global Sales Engagement at Sungard AS. With over 15 years of experience in a range of industries, he specializes in forming enterprise-wide global talent and learning development programs. Brian has enriched corporate learning culture by matching organizational vision and core values to curricula, leading to application and impact.

As a Principal Consultant at Sungard AS, John Beattie works closely with organizations to implement third party risk management programs, and reduce operational risk by establishing new business continuity and disaster recovery programs or transforming existing ones to improve effectiveness.