There seem to be a lot of sightings of “Black Swans” lately. Should we be concerned or are we wishfully thinking, caught up in media hype; or are we misinterpreting what a “Black Swan” event really is?

Continue reading Black Swans or Just Wishful Thinking and Misinterpretation?

Tags: Black Swan, Nassim Taleb

Maintaining the continuity of a business was once viewed in the context of ensuring a disaster recovery plan was safely kept in the trunk of our car. Today, however, organizations must address the entire range and level of their exposures.

Continue reading Examining business resiliency management best practices: How to prepare today for future trends in business resiliency management

Tags: BCRS, BRM, Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, Business resiliency management, IBM

In the online-all-the-time world, business literally runs on data. Data – or more specifically information culled from volumes of stored files – is the resource that drives business innovation, expansion, and profits. Absent this information, business can and sometimes does come to an abrupt halt.

Continue reading Data Preservation: Mapping out a Reliable, Secure, and Effective Backup, Recovery & Archival (BURA) Plan for Small Business

Tags: data backup, data loss, data preservation, data recovery, differential backup, full backup, incremental backup

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a valuable tool for reliability improvement in manufacturing and production operations. Yet, most efforts to implement an RCA program fail to achieve meaningful results despite significant investments in employee training. What needs to be done to assure that RCA becomes a functional work process in organizations?

Continue reading Developing a Root Cause Analysis Work Process

Tags: RCA, Root Cause Analysis

Corporate computing has moved beyond mainframe systems and back office processing; it is only natural that disaster recovery (DR) technologies follow the same path. This is easier said than done, however, as network-based business applications, services, and files often demand low latency connectivity, large amounts of bandwidth, and unforgiving service level agreements (SLAs).

Continue reading Re-architecting Disaster Recovery Solutions Leveraging WAN Optimization Technology

Tags: I.T. DIsaster Recovery, WAN Optimization

SHELDUS™ is a county-level hazard data set for the U.S. for 18 different natural hazard events types such thunderstorms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and tornados.

Continue reading SHELDUS™ Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States

Tags: costs, hazard mapping, Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, HVRI, losses, mapping, natural hazards, SHELDUS, spatial analysis

The Singapore Computer Society (SCS) has launched its new ‘Certification in IT Business Continuity Management’ (CITBCM).

Continue reading Singapore Computer Society launches Certification in IT Business Continuity Management

Tags: certification, CITBCM, National Infocomm Competency Framework, NICF, SCS, Singapore, Singapore Computer Society, Singapore Standard for BCM, Singapore Standard for ICT DR services, SS507, SS540

The IT Disaster Recovery Test as part of the Business Continuity testing is becoming an annual event for most IT departments. It is mandated by a lot of regulators, nearly insisted upon by internal audit and of course a very healthy thing to do.

Continue reading Mitigating Risks of the IT Disaster Recovery Test

Tags: exercise, risk mitigation, Testing

Contemporary emergency response agencies pose what, on first blush, might seem to be an intriguing organizational conundrum. Fire and EMS organizations, for example, are enterprises that are strongly and very visibly accountable for preparedness respecting the big, the bad and the ugly, those major incidents that can subject a community and its leadership to truly undesirable variations on Andy Warhol’s famed 15 minutes.

Continue reading Closing the loop between planning and action: Using the After Action Review

Tags: AAR, after action review, Emergency Response

For many businesses located in tropical and subtropical climates, Hurricanes present the worst-case disaster scenario. In addition to disabling or destroying business assets, as a community-wide disaster, hurricanes can disable employee homes, disrupt transportation, power and communication infrastructure.

Continue reading Five Ways to Improve Business Survival Chances after a Hurricane

Tags: climate, flood, hhurricane, preparedness

Business continuity planning is not difficult. If so, then why do so many small businesses ignore business continuity planning? Perhaps the perception is that if it is so simple, we just don’t need to do it. Although simple, many business continuity planning controls must be performed in advance of a disaster or they will be largely (if not completely) ineffective.

Continue reading Five Easy Ways to Improve Business Survival Chances after a Disaster

Tags: Business Continuity, small business, smb, SME