Climate Change Puts New Pressures on Resilience Managers
I am writing this blog while rain pours down outside of my office, much as it has done for much of the past 3 months in the United Kingdom. Many parts of the country are [...]
How Cyber Security Is Shaping Enterprise Resilience
For many years the practice of Business Continuity (BC) was reasonably straight-forward, if often misunderstood. To most corporate employees, it was viewed as what we do when things go badly wrong with IT or premises. [...]
Don’t Let Protesters Stop You Carrying out Your Critical Business Functionality
Risks such as natural disasters, terrorism, industrial incidents and pandemics dominated our concerns in the past. Although they are still important, the main focus for resilience professionals is moving towards technology disruption and risks emerging [...]
“How Will They Ever Recover from This?” – When Resilience Just Means Survival
“How will they ever recover from this?” This is a phrase that I am sure we all have uttered many times while watching the scenes of destruction graphically played out on our television screens. We [...]
Prove the Value of Your Program: Create a Compelling Security Metrics Report
Developing and maintaining a high-quality security risk management or enterprise resilience program takes dedication from those of us tasked with these responsibilities. It takes planning, revision, continual improvement. It takes executive support and, of course, [...]
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 [...]