Fortifying Your Business Continuity Plan: An Executive Discussion in South Florida

The business community is facing unprecedented challenges. Issues that were once unimaginable in 2019 are driving business decisions in 2020 and beyond. As we learn to live and work in this new world, one of the biggest challenges from a business perspective has been how IT can help companies, teams, partners and customers maintain business continuity while they navigate the unknown.

In these conversations, moderated by South Florida Business Journal President and Publisher Melanie Dickinson and Jeff Livek, field sales manager with CDW, the region’s leading CEOs and IT executives discuss how IT — and the right mindset — are helping their organizations adapt and thrive.

Panelists in the executive discussion included:

• Michael Bock, regional sales manager, Southeast, CDW.
• Ariel Carrion, CTO and senior VP of technology, City National Bank.
• Jose Cil, CEO of Restaurant Brands International, known by its brands Burger King, Tim Horton’s,
• and Popeye’s.
• Tony Luongo, area vice president for US commercial south sales for Cisco Systems.
• Brett Schmidt, vice president, south region for CDW.
• Rocky Wiggins, senior vice president and CIO with Spirit Airlines.

Other participants in the conversation included the following key leaders: Brett Beveridge, CEO of The Revenue Optimization Companies (T-ROC); Joe Gutierrez, CIO with Berkowitz Pollack Brant; Blain Heckaman, managing director with Kaufman Rossin; Prem Khatri, executive vice president of Operations with Chetu; Mike Novak, CISO for Hard Rock International; and Kim Rometo, CIO for the Miami Dolphins.

How has your company has adapted to the work-from-home environment?

Michael Bock: It’s such an exciting time to be passionate about technology, as so many people are looking at tech solutions to maintain that continuity of connections while working from home during this pandemic. What’s equally exciting is to see companies investing in innovation to create new business opportunities and to respond to the needs of their employees, customers, even students and patients. Our team has done an incredible job working with customers and our partners to take things from proof of concept to proof of value for business.

Most organizations had to quickly establish work-from-home guidelines. What were some of the challenges your organization faced and how did you solve them?

Ariel Carrion: Part of our success was driven by innovation and technology we already had in place. You have a business continuity playbook to deal with certain events. But in the end, this pandemic was a new process for us to address, so we had to adapt quickly. We were able to leverage our transition to a hybrid cloud ecosystem dating back from last year’s migration strategy. Our primary goal was the safety and health of our employees. At the same time, we wanted to make sure no gaps were created for both existing and new clients. We had to give the proper tools to our managers on the client-facing side of the organization to help meet the needs of our clients. We also had to quickly provide remote support. We had some hiccups related to our remote end users who were initially not accustomed to work from home, but we were able to quickly transition almost our entire workforce to work from home and have clear and transparent support for our clients and support for the health of our employees.

Organizations have turned to their IT investments to keep things running. What are the biggest changes IT departments need to make today to keep pace tomorrow?

Tony Luongo: We at Cisco have lived in this remote world for so long, sometimes we don’t realize how customers are affected. It’s being viewed as a strategic component of where companies are going. As you brace yourself for the future, make sure the IT organization has a seat at the table with the stakeholders. If they don’t have that seat, we don’t realize how much we’re affecting the people in the organization, the partners and their customers, and the outcomes they’re trying to drive.

What are some of the other measures companies must take to reinforce their continuity plans?

Jose Cil: We focused on a three-part approach. What do we do now, immediately, today. We scrapped everything in our [previous] 2020 plan and set a new series of priorities for the company. The short-term ones were around the safety of our employees and guests. Second was making sure that our financial position, our liquidity, was at a maximum. We drew down on our [revolving lines of credit]. We went out to the market and got high-yield bonds to make sure we were cash-rich to weather the storm. Then, we adapted our work routines for our teams working from home and our teams serving our guests, our communities, and put a plan in place to communicate regularly to our guests, teams and franchisees.

How are you addressing challenges future challenges you foresee in this new normal?

Rocky Wiggins: Corporations need to be careful with this early euphoria around work at home. It’s great in a business continuity scenario to be nimble. As hard as we have worked at Spirit to make this all work and to minimize impact, it’s taken its toll culturally. We get on calls and video to minimize impact. But we’re not under the illusion that we want to keep it this way. We talk to our teams frequently about “when this is over and when we come back to work…”

Brett Schmidt: You have to ask, “What is the priority that has to be out there today?” In all my years at CDW, the thought of selling thermal scanners, sanitization equipment, crowd sourcing, contact tracing [never crossed my mind]. These are the types of technology solutions people were looking for six months ago. So many people scrapped their business continuity plans and scrapped their plans to buy endpoint solutions. In the history of the organization, we’ve never in one quarter sold as many headsets or video cameras. But now, individuals are looking at where we can go next.

Let’s open it up to the participants. What actions should organizations contemplate in order to have a big impact on their continuity plans?

Mike Novak: For us, the common-sense side says, “What’s it going to take to return to operations with minimal to no downtime?” That drives our risk across the organization. How much money is it going to cost to create that kind of resiliency in the application? We do it at the application level because what may be important in one application may not be important in another. So we build out a matrix, and we allocate costs according to impact to revenue. If the investment is higher than the risk, your RTOs tend to change.

Kim Rometo: The first step in business continuity planning is to work with the various business units to determine what applications and corresponding data are mission critical. Then tier those responses so the business knows what would be first priority during recovery. It’s imperative not to do this exercise only once, but revisit it as you will find things change over time. An application that required 100% availability may not require the same level of continuity six months later. Keep those continuity plans up to date and take a hard look at them annually to make sure IT is still in lockstep with the business.

What should we be paying attention to with regard to cybersecurity?

Joe Gutierrez: The risk is increased by going to work from home. But one of the biggest things for continuity is to use the same methodologies that you use for day to day operations as part of your business continuity strategy. For example, 97% of our employees have laptops. We had video conference tech even before the pandemic. Luckily, we moved to a hosted phone solution, so our receptionist can answer from anywhere in the world. By putting the same controls as when you’re in regular operations, the risks of being in a home environment are somewhat mitigated.

Prem Khatri: Security is huge, especially for companies that deal with sensitive or proprietary information. From our experience, for remote work, everyone has to have operating firewalls, secure internet connections and updated software, including antivirus, monitoring networks for intrusion. It’s not just a one-day-and-done deal. You have to continue monitoring traffic, measuring, and upgrading. Solutions — whether that’s phone systems, remote meeting solutions — have to be scaled. It has to be taken seriously.

What are you working on for new products and innovations?

Blain Heckaman: This is a difficult time for people. Not everyone is built to stay home and physically distance from one another. If you add the social injustice and anti-racism challenges that have evolved, you have a lot of people reaching out and really needing one another. We’ve created “real talk” meetings and break-out rooms. Also, we’re in the help business. It’s critical that we communicate with our clients visually and virtually and challenge everybody to do that.

How are you keeping people engaged?

Brett Beveridge: We are trying to embrace technology to maintain and grow our culture. We had a strong culture before the pandemic. We were one of the first to work remotely and we’re definitely not going to be among the first to go back. Flexibility is key. We’re also trying to look at this as an opportunity to reevaluate. After many years of fast growth, what can we make more streamlined? Do we have duplication of systems — what don’t we need, and what do we need to make our remote lives better? We want to make sure the organization is set for future growth and ramp up growth even before this pandemic is over.