Exercising a BCP is rarely as simple as the online guides suggest. A business continuity manager has to jump through a lot of hoops to get that final, show-ready polish on a BCP. They’re often chasing buy-in from each corner of the organization and bugging business unit leads and department managers to test BCPs and record the outcomes. What can a business continuity manager do to encourage the heads in their organizations to actively participate and do their part in preparing for disruptions?

How much damage can a business system outage cause? As is pretty clear these days, they happen often, and can have serious impact. Take, for example, Visa’s payment network outage. On June 1st, 2018, Visa’s payment system in Europe went down for nearly ten hours, halting many personal and bank transactions. The massive, complex nature of the system made it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of the outage, adding hours of downtime and many degrees of frustration for the company’s customers. After performing their root cause analysis, the company identified a “very rare partial failure” of a switch in one of their data centers as the cause of the outage.

Hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes each leave distinct impacts on the regions they affect. This leaves one question: What are the most destructive natural disasters (of these types) in history? How much damage does each type of disaster cause, and what contributes to their destructive potential?

If there was one very clear theme to this year’s DRI conference in Las Vegas, it was the importance of having a diverse community in the world of business continuity management (BCM). From the sessions to the talking points in the exhibit hall, it’s clear that the future of BCM depends on having a strong and diverse community of practitioners and leaders. Here’s our top 5 takeaways from DRI 2019.

Responding to major business disruptions are a company-wide effort. Every team gets involved during the response and recovery. But despite how great having help from every angle is, it can be disruptive and throw the cart of the rails quickly. How do you keep a steady course through these difficult crisis management challenges?

Just after lunch one day, you receive this email: “Can you send me the password for our network? I just can’t seem to remember it right now. Thanks.” At first, this seems a bit weird to you. No one in your office asks for passwords over email. But you also remember that some of your colleagues from another office are visiting for the next couple of days, so now this seems somewhat plausible.

In early October 2018, the president signed the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 (DRRA) in tandem with the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 2018. After extreme wildfire and hurricane seasons in 2017, FEMA and Congress worked hard to reform how US communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. The result of that is this bill.

On December 12th, 2017, user Primpwatcher at phantompilots.com posted a video of their latest drone outing on a message board. When you watch the video, see if you notice what they saw when they watched the flight footage back.

A strong social services program can make a big difference in a community. It’s why some of New Haven’s own residents run the city’s Youth Stat program, a school-based intervention program seeking to reduce justice involvement and improve health and wellness outcomes in students from elementary and postsecondary education.

There’s a lot of paper, email chains, work, and time involved for every facility running EOC Rounds. But it doesn’t need to this strenuous.