Arun ShankarIn today’s modern world, the nature of disruptive events that are occurring, whether they are climate change, extreme weather, supply chain, pandemic, earthquakes, volcanic explosions, and others, are beginning to have fundamental impact on businesses. These events are happening more frequently and sometimes they are occurring in a compounding manner, with more than one such event taking place at the same time.
“What we are seeing across this space is that people are exhausted. There is just a lot of fatigue and people are looking for reliable solutions to solve their challenges,” says Vince Willis, COO at Infinite Blue.
Businesses want a programme to engage within the enterprise. Business continuity is evolving from a limited function within an enterprise into a critical business function.
“You need a tool that can scale quickly and is easy to use, that is really what we focus on. Giving organisations clarity and control across their event spectrum and the ability to engage with their entire workforce rapidly,” says Willis.
Business continuity has always been regarded as specialised, point function, within an organisation. However, in the face of continuous external disruption and the need for business continuity to work across the organisation, it has now spread across the organisation, and reached the board and C-suite.
Business continuity can never be effective if it is being set up by a single executive or a single department. To do business continuity really well, you need to be able to see it working across and engaging the entire enterprise. “Which is what our solutions tend to do as a group,” says Willis.
Infinite Blue’s business continuity software, BC in the Cloud, has been built by a team of domain experts. BC in the Cloud, quickly enables organisations to plan, prepare, test, manage, and notify teams how to respond to any potential business disruption. Through a team of industry experts and a software suite with a 99.99% guarantee in uptime, Infinite Blue gives organizations clarity and control over disruptions that can impact their day-to-day business.
“We give people an added layer of confidence because our software is the most reliable solution on the market,” says Willis.
Business continuity must work and address organisational risk correctly. “You have to be able to engage your entire enterprise to be able to do business continuity correctly and to become really prepared. Preparation is very important to us,” says Willis.
Where is Infinite Blue positioned?
Infinite Blue provides a low-code development platform and enterprise applications for the business continuity and disaster recovery industry. Infinite Blue Platform is at the heart of countless business applications running in a wide variety of industries worldwide. Applications built on Infinite Blue Platform can be hosted on-premises or in a public or private cloud. Infinite Blue customers use the platform to build custom applications and to extend existing applications, customising them to meet their needs.
Infinite Blue provides automated tools and services for building business continuity and disaster recovery plans that streamline and simplify continuity, governance, and risk management programmes. As an organisation’s needs grow, the solution evolves to increase resiliency, mitigate risk, and adhere to deadlines. Infinite Blue offers speed-to-market and scalability in an all-in-one solution. BC in the Cloud is currently used worldwide by more than 500,000 users.
Making the solution work
Infinite Blue is able to plan for disruptive events that will happen and build human and machine intelligence around those events.
Infinite Blue helps in addressing business continuity across the organisation, in the following manner:
- What are the risks?
- How do you manage them effectively?
- Which parts are external and which parts are internal?
- What should you be doing to become resilient?
- How do you engage the entire organisation?
Infinite Blue helps to bridge the gaps inside an enterprise and gets all the teams to start communicating. Implementing Infinite Blue’s software makes all teams share clean, proper data, across all levels. It then becomes a repository, benchmark, baseline and grows with the overall business continuity efforts. The software produces dependency maps and hierarchical structures, features of functionality, gap analysis, to help the enterprise move forward.
Managing IT
According to Matt Cox, Vice President of Alliances at Infinite Blue, implementing Infinite Blue is more of a process and change management, rather than a tool.
Infinite Blue has the ability to pull data sources together using the IB Connect tool. “We can connect with 400 other systems and pull all of that data into one place,” says Willis.
Another strength is its ability to use workflows and add information sources to the tool. As an example, threat intelligence across a broad spectrum of risks and markets, can be viewed under a single dashboard.
“We are very good at workflows and being able to customise the workflows as they exist in other organisations, where we are going to deploy the application,” indicates Willis.
To keep up with the requirements of digital transformation, Infinite Blue is adding artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to the software.
“We are moving deeper into the world of predictive analytics, with data insights making systems more reliable and supporting faster responses,” continues Willis.
At a global level, AWS is one of the most important hyperscale cloud partners for Infinite Blue. “We do a lot of work with AWS and we are comfortable and operate global datacentres with AWS,” says Cox. “When we enter new markets, we work with local partners for local datacentres to hold the SaaS solution.” Inside Saudi Arabia, Infinite Blue is setting up local datacentres.
Who is driving business continuity?
In the past, the information technology department has always driven backup and recovery functions of data and ensured data integrity. But sometimes the efficacy and benefit of the role played by the IT department is not visible to the rest of enterprise. Has the IT department spent too much or too little on this role?
By using Infinite Blue, enterprises can begin to rightly position IT in the hierarchical flow of business continuity activities across the entire organisation. Using Infinite Blue, IT can demonstrate whether it is ready with its disaster recovery process and the impact on the rest of the enterprise.
Says Willis, “Disaster recovery is only a subset of business continuity. Disaster recovery typically involves getting IT systems up and running following a disaster. Business continuity is much broader than just the technical part of disaster recovery.”
During the pandemic, organisations had to move away from centralised IT systems into distributed IT systems. But success was dependent on the rest of the organisation redeploying business processes to map to the new IT processes.
In the past, those executives or departments that took the lead in business continuity had mandates from regulators and Boards to do it. “Now you are seeing boards and CEOs reaching out to us directly and to our partners to say, we need to have this,” explains Willis.
Partner engagement
When Infinite Blue started nine years ago, it began with a direct sales model. Traditionally Infinite Blue has followed a direct to customer sales model, while selling to the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500. However, in the Middle East, Infinite Blue has started developing its tier-one channel model as well. As the business continues to grow, Infinite Blue is looking for very strategic and qualified partners.
“We are very fortunate with the channel partners that we have today,” says Cox. But inside the region Infinite Blue is learning. “We are pretty new to the alliance ecosystem here,” he adds. But the preference is for partners with a consulting strength to engage with business in enterprises, rather than channel partners with strength in IT.
According to Cox, successful business continuity requires business impact planning. There is a lot of data that needs to be collected and then incorporated into BC in the Cloud, he points out. It is for this reason Cox feels selling BC in the Cloud through channel partners, “is definitely a solution sell.”
Regional channel partners with consulting strength who are trusted advisors for their customers are now calling Infinite Blue to become partners to implement the solution. “They are seeing the need within their customer base and they do not have a business continuity capability to offer,” says Cox.
These consulting companies have been using spreadsheets and documents previously and now want to use Infinite Blue’s BC in the Cloud application. Infinite Blue is looking for partners who understand business continuity risk and can bring their talent to the partnership table.
Infinite Blue will be using its long baseline of eight years of service and implementation experience, to train the next generation of channel partners, that it plans to onboard.
“We do have that talent in-house, but there is going to be a hybrid approach, where our indirect team is going to have to help with partners. This includes expanding the Infinite Blue brand, overall customer success, and customer retention,” explains Cox.
Some of the regional channel partners working with Infinite Blue include, Centre Systems Group, Elements, Epic Lanka, Foot Print Africa, Global Concept Emerge Technologies, The QAED.
Success story
One of the key success factors in rolling out a successful business continuity programme, is getting the right people that know the right information. “We have a methodology that we follow for our best practices, which has been very successful,” says Willis. “Generating huge user adoption is key to a lot of companies,” he adds.
Snapshot
- Business continuity is evolving from a limited function within an enterprise into a critical business function.
- Business continuity can never be effective if it is being set up by a single executive or a single department.
- To do business continuity really well, you need to be able to see it working across and engaging the entire enterprise.
- Infinite Blue helps to bridge the gaps inside an enterprise and gets all the teams to start communicating.
- Infinite Blue has the ability to pull data sources together using the IB Connect tool.
- To keep up with the requirements of digital transformation, Infinite Blue is adding artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to the software.
- By using Infinite Blue, enterprises can begin to rightly position IT in the hierarchical flow of business continuity activities across the entire organisation.
- Inside the Middle East, Infinite Blue has started developing its tier-one channel model as well.
- Infinite Blue is looking for partners who understand business continuity risk and can bring their talent to the partnership table.
- One of the key success factors in rolling out a successful business continuity programme, is getting the right people that know the right information.
Business continuity can never be effective if it is being set up by a single department and you need to be able to see it working across the entire enterprise.
