Speaker Biography
Stephanie Balaouras
Vice President, Research Director
Sessions Featuring This Speaker
Forrester's Security Forum 2012
05/24/2012
11:05 AM - 11:50 AM
Integrating Continuity And Information Security For Business Resiliency
Aggressive global competition, greater service demands, more restrictive regulatory requirements, and increasingly rigid corporate oversight all raise the expectations for achieving and demonstrating business resiliency. Business continuity, IT disaster recovery, and information security are essential elements of business resiliency, with the common objective of managing the risks of business disruption. While all have traditionally operated as separate silos, they follow very similar business impact analysis and risk assessment processes, with heavy reliance on controls documentation, monitoring, and testing. Security & Risk Professionals should apply a common risk-based approach to these disciplines to streamline processes, improve cross-discipline collaboration, and provide a common system of managing risk.
Research Focus
Stephanie serves Security & Risk Professionals. She leads a team of analysts who provide research and advisory services on topics like IT security frameworks; governance, risk, and compliance (GRC); identity and access management (IAM); application security; data security; and IT infrastructure security. She also provides Forrester's coverage of specific risk topics including business continuity (BC), IT continuity/disaster recovery (DR), and backup and recovery.
Previous Work Experience
Stephanie has more than 12 years of experience in BC/DR, backup and recovery, and information storage industries. Prior to joining the security and risk team, Stephanie was a principal analyst on Forrester's infrastructure and operations team, where she was instrumental in the development of Forrester's research and offerings in continuity, availability, and information storage and protection. Prior to joining Forrester, Stephanie was a senior analyst with Yankee Group, where she provided insight on technology trends to key system, storage, and information protection vendors and consultative advice on strategic and tactical initiatives. Before Yankee Group, Stephanie worked at EMC, first as a technical architect and then as a senior education and productivity consultant. As a technical architect, she articulated EMC's value to partners and customers and designed solutions to meet customer and new market opportunities. As an education and productivity consultant, she managed and supported complex technical training programs for business and practice managers in EMC's Technology Solutions Group. Prior to EMC, Stephanie worked at Accenture as a consultant, focusing on the implementation of business applications (SAP, PeopleSoft) for global businesses.
Education
Stephanie holds a bachelor's degree in business administration and finance and investments from Babson College.