RSA, the Security Division of EMC Corporation, has introduced two significant additions to its RSA Archer product suite designed to help customers meet ever-changing and comprehensive business continuity, disaster recovery, and crisis management demands.

The first addition, RSA Archer Business Continuity Management and Operations, offers a standards-based approach to business continuity planning. Additionally, integration with other GRC processes—enterprise risk management, incident management and third-party management—helps companies align their recovery efforts with organizational objectives and priorities for enhanced visibility, accountability and reporting.

Offering a flexible platform, continuity professionals can efficiently execute business continuity and disaster recovery process changes while limiting the need to invest in costly professional services. Additionally, RSA provides templates engineered to perform business impact analyses and risk analyses at any level of the business hierarchy or enterprise infrastructure, and tie to other risk assessments.

Features of RSA Archer Business Continuity Management and Operations include:

Risk Register: Helps users identify, evaluate and mitigate risks that may affect their organization, locations, processes or partners;

Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Gives users the ability to evaluate the criticality of their processes and determine recovery objectives that are coordinated across supporting infrastructure;

Centrally Managed Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans: Allows users to develop detailed recovery plans for business processes or IT assets, utilizing automated workflow for plan testing, activation and approval;

Enhanced Crisis Management and Response: Helps enable users to report and manage crisis events, send emergency notifications to communicate crisis information to appropriate personnel, and activate business continuity or disaster recovery plans to recover disrupted business operations, facilities or IT infrastructure.

Tighter Integration with Other RSA Archer GRC Components: Lets users relate Business Continuity Management components such as risks, BIAs, recovery plans or crises to organizational units (e.g., divisions, business units) and infrastructure (e.g., processes, facilities, IT applications or vital records) for visibility, accountability and reporting.

RSA Archer BCM Mobile App

RSA has also introduced the availability of the RSA Archer BCM Mobile App. As a key component in a GRC mobile strategy, the app is designed to augment hard copy plans and enable rapid response during a crisis situation by offering visibility into business continuity or disaster recovery plans and associated strategies, tasks, calling trees and requirements from most locations.

In the event that a data center is not available, RSA Archer BCM Mobile App is engineered to provide high availability, allowing the end user offline access to resources from the time the app was last synced. Additional capabilities including a Mobile App Toolkit built to enable customers to create and design custom applications including questionnaires and assessments will also be supported in a future release.

The addition of the RSA Archer Business Continuity Management and Operations solution and mobile app to the RSA Archer portfolio helps support EMC's overall mission of building trust in next-generation IT solutions by automating the approach to business continuity, disaster recovery and effective crisis management.