Uncategorized

Disaster Recovery and When “Back to Normal” Isn’t Enough

When IT systems go down, operations grind to a halt. Hence the importance of good disaster recovery planning to be sure that business critical applications can be restarted as soon as possible, with any data loss remaining within acceptable limits. However, a little thought suggests that if you just bring things back to normal, you are still likely to be worse off than if you had had no disaster. Read more

2017-06-16T10:09:15+10:00By |Disaster Recovery, Uncategorized|

If You Can’t Measure Supply Chain Risk, Talk to Your Insurer

Supply chain optimisation is the reason why companies like Walmart dominate their sectors. Supply chain continuity is essentially business continuity in this case. That should mean risk assessment and mitigation to make sure everything keeps working. However, supply chain risk seems to be a slippery item that is difficult to pin down. Businesses often state their concern about the chances of interruption to their supply chain, yet have no clear solution for measuring or managing that risk. Could your insurer help out? Read more

2015-05-08T14:57:49+10:00By |Uncategorized|

Why DRaaS is Getting Both Customers and Vendors Excited

If your enterprise is of small to medium size, effective disaster recovery solutions may have seemed out of reach. While you could back up your data (and your configuration files, mailboxes and what have you) and send everything off to the cloud for safekeeping, real DR was still a step or two further away. If you wanted to know for sure that you could recover in the face of IT disaster, you had to arrange for your own duplicate systems, download your backup data, start up your applications and check it all worked again. This kind of heavy lifting was out of range for SMBs. However, DRaaS looks set to change all of that. Read more

2015-05-04T09:43:17+10:00By |Uncategorized|

7 Basic Ways to Ensure Good Business Continuity Planning

Smart business continuity planners regularly return to the basics. Although BCP can be complex if a particular situation makes it so, good plans are still built on solid and simple foundations. By keeping these in mind, BC planners can avoid straying from the straight and narrow path that must be followed if business continuity is to be guaranteed. Read more

2014-09-29T15:17:11+10:00By |Uncategorized|

BCOE-PF1 1-Day Pandemic Influenza Continuity Plan: the Importance of the 2 Weeks After

The 1-Day course for Building a Business Continuity Plan to deal with Pandemic Influenza packs vital information into an action-oriented format to help organisations prepare for possible outbreaks of influenza. It’s a risk that is always present to a greater or lesser degree. To counter it, participants are guided by expert trainers through the differences in a pandemic-specific plan to the optimal ways to exercise and maintain the plan. Thorough step-by-step instructions, using a selection of appropriate tools for project management, data gathering and creating the plan, are all part of the course. But the two weeks that follow the course are of critical important too. Read more

2014-06-30T11:34:16+10:00By |Uncategorized|

‘Selling’ Your Business Continuity Plan to Your Organisation

You know the business continuity theory, you’ve made the BC plan, but have you thought about how your target audience will receive your message? Dry documents tend to get filed in dusty places, never to be looked at again. So how can you capture and hold the attention of people in your organization? Perhaps a few tips from sales and marketing experts will help you to ‘sell’ your BC plan to the people who are the most important to its successful execution when it’s needed. That means managers and employees in your organisation, and possibly suppliers and business partners too. Read more

2014-03-31T09:51:43+11:00By |Uncategorized|

And the Winner for Overall IT Security is… Linux?

Windows and Mac OS, watch out. A UK government agency tested different IT platforms to see which would be the most secure, and found that Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 in particular) was significantly better than Windows 8 and Mac OS X. The tests were run to evaluate performance in areas such as disk encryption, secure start-up, malicious code prevention and detection, virtual private networking and platform integrity under multi-tasking. The agency (CESG, Communications-Electronics Security Group) also identified a Samsung platform based on Android as a leader in mobile device security. Will the business world now flip over to Linux and Android as a consequence? Read more

2014-02-03T09:53:19+11:00By |Uncategorized|

Business Continuity Management for the ‘Non-Business’

It may be called ‘Business Continuity Management’, but BCM goes beyond the business sector and private enterprise. How government agencies, municipal authorities and communities handle staying operational in the face of adversity varies, not only between countries but even between counties. Some entities see themselves as driving forces in getting their constituents (including commercial companies) up to speed. Others adopt the role of active participation in a greater scheme of things, and as part of a larger team. If your brief is to manage business continuity for a public body or community, you may find yourself facing the choice below. Read more

2013-11-25T10:29:14+11:00By |Uncategorized|

Building In Business Continuity from the Beginning

The bolt-on approach has been tried in many contexts and discarded after problems of compatibility, quality and efficiency. In product marketing and development, functions are now designed in from the start. In organisational supply chains, the pressure is on to have features that make handling and distribution easier as part of the initial product design specifications. So then why not do the same for business continuity? All the same arguments apply in favour of thinking about BC as initial and continuing part of the lifecycles for product and process development in an organisation. Read more

2013-11-25T10:28:30+11:00By |Uncategorized|