Veoci Blog

The business continuity and emergency management managers of MIT, NYU, and VCU came together for a panel discussion on the challenges—and solutions—of being the engines behind these vital programs.

Risks today are increasingly interconnected, and the future forecasts a tighter bond will form between them. And thanks to the modern world’s web of risks, businesses and organizations can never be sure which dominoes will fall when an incident kicks off. Preparation, through business continuity planning, is essential for any entity hoping to have a lasting impact.

Anyone with the will and skill could crack the bug, which spelled serious danger for MuleSoft’s users and those users’ customers. MuleSoft needed to patch the bug immediately. And they did, all while making their customers aware of an issue that could’ve flown under the radar.

As the IT market is replete with contenders, it’s important for companies to stand out from the crowd - getting named by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant is a big boost.

In the past, you may have heard the terms “business continuity” and “disaster recovery” used in conjunction, or even interchangeably, but what do they really mean? You probably won’t be surprised to discover that they have many similar goals when it comes to recovering from an unplanned incident and restoring essential functions, but it is the nuances of their differences that are really crucial to understand.

Much of the strength behind a BCMP solution lies in the institutional knowledge it inherently establishes. There are many platforms out there that can help you build your BCMP components, but it is essential that you find one that also has the capacity to foster institutional knowledge.

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.

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?