Emergency Management Drones and Wildfires: How New Tech is Shaping Wildfire Response June 20, 2019 by Addison Shaw Since being introduced to the market, drones have been used by enthusiasts around the world to gain all-new perspectives, including shots of wildfires, even at a risk to others. Read more »
Emergency Management Predicting Hurricanes: What Do We Know Before Landfall? May 23, 2019 by Addison Shaw Five days before hitting the Florida panhandle, Hurricane Michael was nothing more than a slight disturbance making its way towards the Gulf of Mexico.Over the next five days, a historic hurricane developed in the gulf. Hurricane Michael soon swelled to become the fourth category 5 hurricane to make landfall in US history. Read more »
Business Continuity Getting the Most Out of Real-World Exercises April 17, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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? Read more »
Business Continuity How IT Outages Affect Businesses: Recognizing and Preventing Outages April 3, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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. Read more »
Emergency Management How Much Damage Do Disasters Cause? March 15, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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? Read more »
Business Continuity Top 5 Takeaways from DRI 2019 February 28, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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. Read more »
Airlines HKIA Annual Exercise: Hong Kong Express Excels with Veoci February 21, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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? Read more »
Business Continuity Social Engineering: Preventing Today’s Biggest Threat January 28, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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. Read more »
Emergency Management The Disaster Recovery Reform Act: Is Mitigation the Key to Disaster Response? January 18, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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. Read more »
Emergency Management Utilities Ups and Downs: Learning the Impact of Drones January 4, 2019 by Addison Shaw 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. Read more »
