Business Continuity

As well as creating tailored technological solutions, such as command and control systems, Thales also provides consultancy and evaluation services that address the wider operational concerns of businesses, critical infrastructure operators and governments. This activity embraces everything from providing advice for individual companies, to formulating security policy at national and European level.

A key part of Thales’ consultancy offering is resilience engineering. This deals with developing the awareness and capacity organisations need in order to surmount unexpected and extreme disruptions that could be caused by natural disasters, terrorist attacks and any combination of unforeseen events.

“Resilience is most needed not when your organisation might get slightly wounded, but when it may get badly hurt. It’s about dealing with events that are not predictable, for which you may be unprepared, and that threaten the very life of a system, company or population” says Paul Théron, Resilience Engineering Expert, Thales.

Top-to-bottom protection
Thales works with customers around the world to identify foreseeable risks and to develop strategies to manage both those risks and unexpected dangers effectively. A multi-tiered approach is adopted. At the most basic level, that means assuring systems and operations safety in order to reduce or eliminate the risk of failure and human error during normal operations. Security – the next level up – counters predominantly external threats, including unauthorised intrusions, terrorist attacks and cyber-attacks.

Business continuity planning, the third level, means formulating strategies to deal with severe disruptions that have the potential to bring businesses to a halt, such as pandemics, systemic failures, geological and meteorological phenomena and political unrest affecting remote suppliers.

The fourth level up is crisis management. This is the mechanism by which an organisation prepares itself in peacetime to think the unthinkable and to respond to extreme shocks. “There will always be something you haven’t planned for which is going to take place” says Mr. Théron. “But if you’ve done your job well at those four levels, you’ve already hugely protected your infrastructure organisation or government.”

Thales’ command and control solutions play a critical part in business resilience strategies. “Technology is absolutely mandatory because you can’t address these issues without it” stresses Mr. Théron. “It’s part of the development of situation awareness and response capacities. That’s very important, because you can't know in advance what’s going to strike.”

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