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Monday, July 11, 2011

Enterprise Protection​, Assurance and Continuity (EPAC) - A Holistic and Risk Based Data Security, Privacy, Disaster Recovery Framework

Every enterprise has a plethora of these functions with overlapping domains and interdependent responsibilities. Governed by different (and sometimes non-complimentary though not necessarily conflicting) international standards, each of these functions provide adequate ammunition to their practicing professionals to conceive, plan and implement independent frameworks on their respective areas. Many a times these different frameworks are not aligned with each other and more importantly not aligned to business strategy and operational realities.

As a result, most of these important support functions often do not reach a position of direct business relevance. Thus, they fail to get mind share of business leadership and consequently never reach strategic relevance. In effect they never reach their ultimate destination of business enablement and remain relegated to a regulatory compliance mandated compulsion for the enterprise.

However, in the rapidly transforming business landscape in the ICT defined global markets, the reality is that these support functions, which comprise of the entire risk universe of an enterprise, can contribute directly to business objectives of most organisations, play the role of business differentiators and thus be of strategic relevance.

Thus, there is a scope in many enterprises to re-examine the construct, structure, role and functioning of all these support functions with a view to work out a holistic, business aligned, and uniquely positioned Enterprise Protection, Assurance and Continuity (EPAC) framework which provided integrated and Risk Based Data Security, Privacy, Disaster Recovery assurance to the organisation. As a result of this exercise, besides business enablement, there is a substantial scope of cost savings for enterprises in the form of removal of manning of overlapping domains, outsourcing of non-core function (those not contributing to business enablement) and overall reduction of head count owing to integration.

Hence, it would be worthwhile to undertake in-depth examination of enterprise framework of support functions and provide a holistic picture to executive management comprising of a current status snap shot, gap areas, scope of re-work towards an integrated and business enabled function, and suggested detailed implementation road map with milestones and deliverables. Also important would be handholding through out the implementation and helping the enterprise reach business specified integration targets with periodic reporting through suitable metrics and dashboards.

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