Being Disrupted Doesn’t Have to be Disruptive
There is a lot of hype about the rapid pace of change in technology, and whether you are a ‘disrupter’ such as Uber, Netflix and Amazon, or the ‘disrupted’ such as Nokia, Blackberry and Kodak. [...]
GDPR Suddenly Got teeth – Don’t Let it Bite You
When we think about Enterprise Resilience we generally think about the things that can go wrong and which might harm an organization’s viability or even make it fail completely. In my last blog I made [...]
Meta-leadership: Re-defining Emergency Management
At the professional level, the critical tasks leading to, during and following a disaster involve coordinating multiorganizational, intergovernmental and intersectoral response and recovery operations. In the early 70’s wildfires in California brought the implementation of [...]
Challenges Facing Emergency Managers Today
By its very definition, emergency management is a field that deals constantly with challenges. Back in 2005, we co-authored an article that examined some specific “critical obstacles” facing emergency managers at the time, including: an [...]
Must-Have Business Skills for a Security Risk Management Program
On May 29, 2019, I performed a Google search for the words “Business Risk Management Approach” in news headlines. I got close to 5,000 results from just the previous 24 hours. I am sure I [...]
Effective Business Continuity: Program vs Plan
Many organizations think that effective business continuity planning is synonymous with great plan documentation. It’s not. Yes, plan documentation is extremely important. BUT… many organizations fail to recognize that effective business continuity plans – and [...]
NFPA 1600 2019 Edition: A Resource for Every Practitioner’s and Auditor’s Toolbox
The 2019 edition of the American National Standard, “NFPA 1600 Standard on Continuity, Emergency, and Crisis Management” has been published by the USA-based National Fire Protection Association. This standard, which is the most mature standard [...]
Can “Resilience” Survive? – The Fundamental Questions behind Resilience
Introduction On the west side of the city sits an outfitting shop that sells everything a person needs to survive in the wild; to the owner, resilience means being able to live without modern conveniences. [...]
Security Budgets and the Risk Tolerance Question
We’ve all been there. It’s annual budget time and we are told that belts are tightening and we have to cut costs. Where does the finance organization look first for savings? That’s right… to the [...]
An Enterprise Needs More Than a Compliant BC Program to Be Resilient
IT Disaster Recovery (ITDR) is about 40 years old and its younger sibling Business Continuity (BC) has passed the 30-year mark. The premise for ITDR was that we needed to be capable of dealing with [...]
The True Value and ROI of Business Continuity
One of the biggest challenges that someone charged with overseeing a Business Continuity Program has is to prove that the program is worth its cost: “What is your program’s ROI?” I call that the “dreaded [...]
How do you Communicate Security Risk to Business Executives?
Security and Business Leaders: A Communications Gap When I find myself talking to a group of security professionals, eventually the topic will turn to whatever security breach was in the news that morning, and how [...]