Issue Archive: November/December 2008

This isn't a story about a pandemic or the hurricane that recently hit Texas, but you can think of the retirement of 76 million Baby Boomers as the equivalent of a human tsunami. It's coming, and many managers are looking for ways to capture and retain intellectual capital as workers born between 1946 and 1964 prepare to retire.

This special section highlights an array of new and innovative business continuity products and services. Want to know where your plans stand? Check out a brand new, custom benchmarking service that promises to benchmark your program according to your specifications. Trying to tackle training? An online training service seeks to address the gap identified in the 2008 Continuity Insights/KPMG Business Continuity Benchmarking Survey, which reported that nearly 60 percent of respondents felt BC training was inadequate. Concerned about pandemic planning? Learn about a new, modular approach to planning for influenza pandemics. And if emergency notification and communication during an incident is an area in which you need some help, one or more of the vendors listed here may have just the solution for you, including integrated mass notification, e-mail continuity, alert notifications and incident management, authenticated communication, Web-based notifications, and mobile alerts.

Hearing that your network or e-mail is down or that hardware has failed is a sinking feeling. With business continuity planning being top of mind for most IT professionals, it makes hearing about unplanned downtime that much worse. Until recently, the importance of the physical layer and the hardware that ultimately drives both software and networking has been largely ignored. The natural disasters and terrorist attacks of this decade have served to put more firms on notice that realistic business continuity plans and testing methods are imperative; but it is hardware and cable failures that are the leading cause of downtime. Without a solid, self-healing physical layer, even the best laid business continuity plans can falter when called upon in critical times.

What is this "third frontier"? What are operating entities? And why should you care? Well it dates back to a long time ago and involves a very dear friend of mine who works for a manufacturing and distribution company located in Oregon. One day at Comdisco, she said something like, "You know, John, we have a great recovery solution in place for our data center and out corporate offices, but what would we do if one of our distribution facilities suffered an outage? Essentially, where could we send finished goods to, where would we fill customer orders from, and how would we get our business back on track?" This third frontier, as I call it, can be a fascinating but somewhat difficult challenge for business continuity professionals. There are no vendor hot sites to move into. There's not typical DR/BCP supplier who can supply a manufacturing line via "quick ship." These are different problems, and they require different solutions.

Like natural disasters, a sudden financial crisis can result in uncertainty, loss, and anxiety about the future. Much of what is known about the emotional and behavioral response to other types of disasters can be helpful in managing the psychological consequences of the financial crisis. Left unchecked, these consequences can further complicate individual, community, and organizational recovery. Lessons learned and strategies for coping developed in other disasters can be employed in financial crises to mitigate the emotional and behavioral consequences of the situation.

Professions generally grow along a predicable trajectory. The founders enter from other fields when they redefined their duties in response to an identified need. Business continuity professionals came from a host of backgrounds, including IT, security, emergency management, and business. The first professionals cobbled together duties that, though often shared with other fields, together constituted their own set of competencies. These initial trailblazers defined the profession and its standards of excellence as they went along.

To a great extent, decision makers have gotten the message. The data breach threat is real. An unauthorized release of personal information will be damaging to a business. The price tag may range from simply being costly to having a negative impact on a company's stock price and on the value of its brand. Data breach incident response planning and risk mitigation strategies must become priorities. How a breach incident is handled has huge business consequences.