by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 17, 2013 | Hot News
Just more than four hours into the Boston Marathon there were two explosions within a few blocks of the finish line. Federal officials believe both devices were small and at least one device was placed in a trash container. The explosions killed three and wounded more...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 17, 2013 | Hot News
Before 3 p.m. ET on Monday, April 15, two explosions at the Boston Marathon killed three people and injured more than 180 others, and turned the race into what ABC News said resembled “a war zone.” The explosions occurred almost simultaneously near...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 16, 2013 | Hot News
We’ve published a new ebook, “Business Health, Partner Healthy: Five Prescriptions to Stop Healthcare Disasters.” Told through the lens of four StorageCraft partners, the ebook explores the various challenges faced by managed service providers who support...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 16, 2013 | Hot News
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have undertaken the biggest risk-management behaviour shift in a generation, with 53 per cent spending more time on their business strategy and risk management than they did before the financial crisis, according to a study by...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 16, 2013 | Hot News
Parts One and Two of this series explained how new energy-management methodologies and approaches have changed best practices relating to disaster recovery and power capping. In this final installment, the focus shifts to high temperature ambient (HTA) data center...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 16, 2013 | Hot News
Grocery story chain Schnuck Markets Inc. now says about 2.4 million debit and credit cards were likely compromised as a result of a breach of its point-of-sale network back in December (see Retailer Says ‘Code’ Compromised Cards). In a statement and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 16, 2013 | Hot News
BOSTON (AP) — Police and federal agents appealed to the public Tuesday for amateur video and photos that might yield clues to the Boston Marathon bombing as the chief FBI agent in Boston vowed “we will go to the ends of the Earth”...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 16, 2013 | Hot News
The deadly explosions at the Boston Marathon reverberated on both sides of the Atlantic as cities from Los Angeles to London saw a surge in security. The White House, New York’s Times Square, and the preparations for former Prime Minister Margaret...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 15, 2013 | Hot News
Or blown away by a tornado or struck by lightning or any other calamity that interrupts business. A primer on business income insurance and how it can help. Worst-case scenario: Your association’s building suffers a four-alarm fire. You lose all hardcopy records,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 15, 2013 | Hot News
Disaster recovery (DR) isn’t something that business owners think about often, but when it’s needed, these tools can have an enormous impact – either positive or negative. “With DR, I think there are a lot of businesses out there that hear...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 15, 2013 | Hot News
Bloomberg News reported that the Chinese government has invited four international flu experts to come to China to help authorities respond to the country’s widening bird-flu emergency. The team will arrive on about April 17 to offer technical advice....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 15, 2013 | Hot News
The April 10, 1979, Wichita Falls tornado brings back memories for those who recall its wrath, and in conjunction with the 34th anniversary, Interfaith Ministries hosted a Wicked Weather Weekend, teaching people how to prepare themselves for a disaster and how to deal...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 15, 2013 | Hot News
In February of 2011 I wrote a post titled “… from ‘Piper Alpha’ to ‘Deepwater Horizon’, do we really learn?“. It was part of an ongoing series relating to Culture and Resilience. This is also a theme in my recent article “A Fork in the Road”....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 4, 2013 | Hot News
In 2008, software engineer Vidur Dhanda was consulting on a risk management project on Wall Street when he noticed a fundamental problem: Even the country’s biggest lenders, in the midst of the financial crisis, did not have good data on the health of America’s small...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 4, 2013 | Hot News
The scientists announced on April 3 that the H7N9 virus is troubling because it can generate no symptoms in poultry while seriously sickening humans. Dr. Masato Tashiro, a WHO scientist studying the virus’ genetic data, says the virus also appears to have mutated into...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 4, 2013 | Hot News
California may be known for its vulnerability to earthquakes and wildfires, but the state also faces the risk of devastating floods, according to a report being released Wednesday by the state Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 4, 2013 | Hot News
One of the areas of disaster planning that seems to get very little attention is the handling of mass fatalities. I was reminded of this by a thoughtful presentation by my colleague James King at yesterday’s Emergency Management Summit in San Francisco sponsored...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 4, 2013 | Hot News
Internal audit has never been easy, but modern business practices are challenging IA professionals even further. Social media, fraud risk and data analysis tools are areas in need of attention and, in some cases, improvement....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 2, 2013 | Hot News
The blog I posted about Sticky Messages generated lots of great comments about disaster messaging and got me to thinking about a different kind of messaging: memes. The term meme was coined by a British biologist, Richard Dawkins, using evolutionary theory to explain...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 2, 2013 | Hot News
Corporate risk comes in many forms: regulatory compliance rules, hackers, rogue employees. These risks can potentially penetrate every level of an organization, making communication of the threats — and the strategy to offset them — vital to business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 2, 2013 | Hot News
What a thing to come out on April Foods day! The official Chinese news agency Xinhua has reported that two people in China have died and another remains critical after falling ill with a strain of bird flu not detected before in humans. Both of those who died,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 2, 2013 | Hot News
Perhaps you’re traveling, and while your back is turned to take an important call, someone steals your laptop. Through no fault of your own, small businesses are vulnerable to theft in a variety of contexts, including cyber theft. For example, people could...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 2, 2013 | Hot News
Risk management in the real world is not an easy endeavor. On one side, people use toilet seat covers thinking they do something, on the other side, millions of people smoke cigarettes, ignoring the empirical evidence of their danger....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 2, 2013 | Hot News
With recent years bringing about unprecedented change in the healthcare industry, Health Service Organizations (HSOs), more than ever, need to manage their risk through ensuring they maintain effective corporate compliance programs. Maintenance is key. However, just...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 2, 2013 | Hot News
The term “integration” and more specifically, “integrated disability management” has been bandied about for more than a decade in ways that are inconsistent and have caused much confusion about the underlying opportunity represented by this...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 1, 2013 | Hot News
The product recall in mid-January when equine DNA was found in supermarket burgers has rapidly turned into an international scandal exposing complex cross-border supply chains....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 1, 2013 | Hot News
During a crisis, the last thing you want to have to worry about, on top of everything else that is already stressing you out, is who within your team may or may not be discussing private details that have not yet been made public – even if only to their own friends...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 1, 2013 | Hot News
“Big data” has arrived as a big business initiative. But the hip, experimental, ad hoc veneer of blending data streams to surface bold discoveries belies a massive cultural and technological undertaking not every organization is ready for....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Apr 1, 2013 | Hot News
Having identified some of the drivers of complexity in supply chains in the first part of the roundtable report, how are organisations dealing with the challenge? http://thebceye.blogspot.com/2013/04/meeting-supply-chain-complexity.html
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 28, 2013 | Hot News
Of particular interest to executive management and the board of directors are normal and ongoing business management risks, emerging risks, and critical enterprise risks. In this column, we focus on the last category, which we define as the top five to 10 risks that...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 28, 2013 | Hot News
In today’s wireless world, change is rapid and inevitable. Look at your personal life to see how rapidly technology impacts your relationships, home life, recreation and communications. On a business level, the pace of change can be even greater. ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 28, 2013 | Hot News
On Friday I presented a webinar, on scenario-based exercising, as part of the Business Continuity Institute’s Business Continuity Awareness Week 2013. And I have to tell you, it was one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve done for a long time. ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 28, 2013 | Hot News
When asked, leaders in communities everywhere will say that communication is by far the biggest problem during an emergency. Communication is such a broad term that it does not pinpoint the problem. Is it actual communication systems like phone lines and cell towers?...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 27, 2013 | Hot News
One of the truly unfair things about information security is that the scope of risk doesn’t scale downward with the size of the organization. A large global enterprise has to deal with all sorts of potential threats: APTs, phishing, malware incursion, insider threats,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 27, 2013 | Hot News
Research by ClusterSeven on C-level executives and senior managers working in financial services in the UK has revealed dangerously poor attitudes to business critical data managed in spreadsheets and similar databases. Half (51%) of C-level executives say there are...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 27, 2013 | Hot News
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — It’s not just homeowners on Staten Island who are struggling after Hurricane Sandy — businesses, too, are faced with the task of rebuilding, and the city will use federal money for recovery programs targeted at them, too. ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 27, 2013 | Hot News
Last month, the Northeast blizzard Nemo dumped as much as 40 inches of snow in some areas and knocked out power to 659,000 people across nine states. Overall, more than 40 million people were affected. In President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union, he cautioned,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 26, 2013 | Hot News
Over 73% of SMEs using old-fashioned tape back-ups 90% of businesses never perform test back-ups 26% of SMEs aren’t backing up all their data as their tape is at capacity Businesses using traditional tape back-ups rather than cloud-based alternatives could unknowingly...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 25, 2013 | Hot News
With so much data streaming real-time from network logs, vulnerability managers, infrastructure monitoring tools, and security appliances across the enterprise, sometimes one of the most difficult first steps IT risk managers must make in developing a security metrics...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 25, 2013 | Hot News
Why can’t Emergency Managers succeed in getting the message across to the public that they should be prepared for a disaster? We all try very hard, and yet survey after survey shows that people just aren’t internalizing the message. I have an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 25, 2013 | Hot News
ERM is a small, expert group of information security and risk assessment consultants that is constantly guarding against people who are out to steal information or money and penetrate computer systems at financial institutions, government agencies, hospitals,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 25, 2013 | Hot News
IN the 1960s, mainframe computers posed a significant technological challenge to common notions of privacy. That’s when the federal government started putting tax returns into those giant machines, and consumer credit bureaus began building databases containing the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 25, 2013 | Hot News
My topic of choice for yesterday’s webinar listen-into was the one on Cyber Threats and Cyber Security by Brendan Byrne from IBM in which Brendan shared both IBM’s and other organizations experiences from the dark world of cyber threat. ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 22, 2013 | Hot News
A close look at the customer cabinets inside SunGard Availability Services’ data center located at 1500 Spring Garden, Philadelphia, PA. SunGard Availability Services believes business continuity services should be simpler for its customers to manage. This isn’t...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 22, 2013 | Hot News
Many organisations I talk to fail to adopt appropriate Business Continuity (BC) strategies. They either plan for scenarios that are unlikely, decide on an approach that is unachievable or fail to align BC strategies with other strategic initiatives. Identifying,...
by Bob Arnold | Mar 22, 2013 | Hot News
Spring World 2013 was a resounding success for attendees and exhibitors! This conference was held March 17 – 20 in Orlando, Florida at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort. It attracted hundreds of industry practitioners from around the globe. Each attendee was greeted...
by Bob Arnold | Mar 20, 2013 | Hot News
View the Full Photo Album from the Awards Last night’s celebrations in Florida at the BCI North America Awards 2013 paid tribute to some of the finest talent in the BC industry in North America. The Awards were celebrated during Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ)...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 13, 2013 | Hot News
What do cloud gateways, emergency communications tools, and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) all have in common? All are changing the way businesses run their continuity programs. The products that make up the business technology resiliency market landscape...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 13, 2013 | Hot News
Companies that deploy software-as-a-service often don’t know everything about the security provisions their SaaS providers and partners have in place. Experts say it’s because they don’t know what to ask, they don’t know what to test and they...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 13, 2013 | Hot News
I was recently listening to a podcast by Jon Toigo (the podcast is currently sponsored by Iron Mountain) where he talks about cloud vs tape backup. The talk covered many interesting considerations about backup and most importantly, recovery and the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 6, 2013 | Hot News
One of the goals we have set for this year’s BCAW is to make Business Continuity a global trending topic through the initiation of a tweet-a-thon. ‘Tweet-off’ will be at 10:30 GMT on Monday, 18th March 2013, marking the beginning of Business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 6, 2013 | Hot News
Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer have taken a beating in the media for the company’s recent ban on telecommuting, but creating a more collaborative startup mentality within the struggling tech giant is the right move, according to industry experts....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 6, 2013 | Hot News
A lot of business tech articles, including here on IT Business Edge, start from the assumption that a project or tech purchase has been decided upon. It’s the project and product details, the staffing, the timeline and budget that need to be cleared up before...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 6, 2013 | Hot News
The government has identified information security as a key priority for 2013. In recent months, new initiatives to address growing cyber security threats have been announced. Most recently, the European commission announced its security strategy, which...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 6, 2013 | Hot News
The emerging field of “behavioral ethics” examines the effects of various social, cognitive and emotional factors on ethical decision making, and, in numerous experiments, has demonstrated the limited role that traditional notions of rationality play when we are faced...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 4, 2013 | Hot News
From a regulatory and compliance standpoint, data protection and industry vertical are two essential and interlinked factors when companies in Asia decide to deploy software-as-a-service (SaaS). Danni Xu, Asia-Pacific research analyst for data center and cloud...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 4, 2013 | Hot News
When the snow falls and roads, railways and airports grind to a halt as they did in January, the idea of mobile working must sound very attractive to people stranded in their cars, on railway platforms and in over-crowded departure lounges. Attractive, that is, if...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 4, 2013 | Hot News
FAST FACT: 40% of companies that fail to recover data from a disaster within three days eventually go out of business, according to Iron Mountain’s report on Offsite Tape Vaulting. DID YOU KNOW? Does your policy cover loss of business, loss of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 4, 2013 | Hot News
Enterprise data protection capabilities have actually diminished since late 2011. A study by Veeam reveals that businesses in the U.S and Europe are still not reaping the benefits that virtualisation offers to data protection. Veeam surveyed over 500 CIOs worldwide...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 4, 2013 | Hot News
Business continuity planning (BCP) for software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a must if companies have offices located in areas within emerging markets that have weak or fledging broadband infrastructure, given the higher possibility of outages which can bring operations to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Mar 4, 2013 | Hot News
Officials in British Columbia have encountered a unique problem in recent years that most jurisdictions would be thrilled to have: Infrastructure projects are being completed not just on time, but early. Way too early. Builders have been finishing hospitals, for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 28, 2013 | Hot News
On December 28, 2012, China’s legislative body issued a decision that lays out the basic framework for protection of electronic personal data, which took immediate effect. On November 15, 2012, China’s standard-setting authority issued a non-binding national...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 28, 2013 | Hot News
1. Unrealistic Expectations Many plans are created expecting that power, cell phones, phone lines, Internet, and water will all be working, and roads will be open. Plans are written expecting that everyone will show up for work, staff...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 28, 2013 | Hot News
Many information security professionals complain that they are under-resourced and unable to effectively execute on their mission. The problem is that they are under-funded and this is due usually to a lack of executive engagement. Here are a few tips to help the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 28, 2013 | Hot News
No satire in social media crisis management from the kings of fake news The Onion is well known across the ‘net for lampooning, well, everything. Headlines on its front page right now include, “Republicans Reach Out To Women With New ‘No Punch Pretty Lady’ Bill” and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 28, 2013 | Hot News
When he was 17, Benjamin Franklin ran away from Boston to live in Philadelphia. He would also become the British postmaster to the colonies and would establish the first national communications network. And even though he was a firefighter at heart, Ben would be...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 28, 2013 | Hot News
Not all Business Continuity plans are created equally. Calling something a “plan” doesn’t make it one. Real planning should go into its creation – not simply filling in blanks in a template, or copying a bunch of lists to an appendix. A viable Business Continuity plan...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 27, 2013 | Hot News
How important is a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)? Well, it depends on how important $1.9 million would be to your organization. That’s how much, on average, a CISO can save an enterprise during a data breach, according to a comprehensive data breach...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 27, 2013 | Hot News
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced its second National Field Hearing on Thursday, Feb. 28, to examine challenges to the nation’s communications systems during natural disasters and other times of crisis. An agenda has not yet been released. This...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 27, 2013 | Hot News
Despite an increase in natural disasters in the last few years in Australia, disaster recovery (DR) planning is still not ranked highly on the agenda of most organisations. Most organisations, view DR as an ‘expensive insurance policy’, and their investments are made...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 27, 2013 | Hot News
Thucydides or Herodotus; Herodotus or Thucydides. Which is your favorite? I admit to vacillating between the two. Thucydides wrote about the end of the Athenian dynasty from the Peloponnesian War and the debacle of the Sicilian Invasion. Herodotus wrote about the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 26, 2013 | Hot News
Business continuity often conjures images of fully redundant systems housed at a remote government facility. Federal data centers housing standby systems are still part of that picture, but agencies can now tap other options that supplement and, in some cases,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 26, 2013 | Hot News
Members of the hacker group Anonymous targeted the U.S. Department of Justice and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently in retaliation for the death of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist and programmer who took his own life in January after...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 26, 2013 | Hot News
What type of leaders do you want at a time of crisis? Decisive. Fast-moving. Smart. Yes, all that. But how about leaders who focus on advance preparation that either mitigates an emergency or avoids it in the first place....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 26, 2013 | Hot News
If you’re a government contractor, the time to prepare for the across-the-board budget cuts contained in the Budget Control Act of 2011 (the “Act”), also known as the “sequestration,” is — well — yesterday. The Act requires the federal government to cut $1.2...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 25, 2013 | Hot News
RAPS’ latest publication covers the theory and application of risk management principles as they relate to the development and approval of drugs and medical devices. The 145-page publication, Risk Management Principles for Devices and Pharmaceuticals: Global...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 25, 2013 | Hot News
NYSE Euronext (NYX), owner of the largest U.S. equities exchange, is considering ways to improve its plan for dealing with disasters and said exchanges should consider mandatory testing after Hurricane Sandy caused the longest weather shutdown since 1888....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 25, 2013 | Hot News
We recently wrote on the NY Times Hacking and what it means to you, but the latest news from the world of cyber-threats makes that attack look like small potatoes. In a groundbreaking move, U.S. computer security firm Mandiant released a 60-page account of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 25, 2013 | Hot News
Dozens of citizens concerned with their safety and security and that of their communities got some ideas Saturday morning, February 23, on just how to answer that question. Sandy Springs Police Department’s training room was filled to standing room only as 56 members...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 22, 2013 | Hot News
Hurricane Sandy presented incredible IT recovery challenges due to unprecedented flooding, prolonged power outages, extensive property damage and logistical problems caused by wide-scale road closures. As a result, many mid-Atlantic and northeast companies found that...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 22, 2013 | Hot News
Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW2013) is an annual global event that is facilitated by the BCI and takes place from the 18th – 22nd March 2013. As a Gold Partner of the BCI, ContinuitySA will be focusing on a host of events to showcase the value of business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 22, 2013 | Hot News
Social media data is increasingly becoming an invaluable asset for marketing teams, and businesses are regularly coming up with new and exciting ways to make use of this data. But London-based law firm Kemp Little warns that restrictions on use of social media data...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 22, 2013 | Hot News
The best businesses (buyers and service providers) develop effective business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies well in advance of natural and man-made catastrophes. AT&T’s investment and development of physical solutions to help customers recover...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 22, 2013 | Hot News
Whether you live in the country or the city, your water supply relies on electricity. If the water purification system in your area is compromised, whether due to severe flooding, power outages, or other problems, the water supply becomes unsafe to drink....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 20, 2013 | Hot News
Last week I wrote about the revelation (to me, at least – maybe other people knew this was going on) that MEPs were simply cutting and pasting from lobbyists’ proposals and presenting them as amendments to the important Data Protection regulation. I also...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 20, 2013 | Hot News
At this point, everybody knows that flying is safer than driving. Many Americans still have an emotional fear of the friendly skies, but the numbers don’t lie: more than 30,000 people die each year on the nation’s roads while just 153 perished in plane crashes in...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 20, 2013 | Hot News
The APMP qualification includes a great emphasis on risk management within a project, and shows project managers how they can effectively prepare for risks within the project environment. The benefits of being able to deal with risks in an effective and proactive way...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 20, 2013 | Hot News
This week will see the Government meeting with food industry chiefs for the second time in recent weeks as the horse meat saga continues with Tesco announcing that their ‘Everyday Value Spaghetti Bolognese’ range has been withdrawn from sale when it was...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 20, 2013 | Hot News
Now that we’ve had the weekend to absorb Friday’s news of a meteor exploding over Russia’s central Ural mountains, injuring up to 1,200 and causing damage to buildings in six cities, here’s a quick recap of the insurance impact. According to a report by catastrophe...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 19, 2013 | Hot News
Stirling Council serves nearly 150 schools and offices in the Scottish city of Stirling. However, with just an eight-person IT department at its disposal, the council is struggling to manage the approximately 5,000 computers within its network. In a recent...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 19, 2013 | Hot News
The concept has certainly achieved buzzword status, so now all that remains is for everyone to understand it in order to see how it fits into any given organization and/or enterprise. According to SAS Institute Inc., “Big data is a popular term used to describe...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 19, 2013 | Hot News
Rapid change seems to be the order of the day, as the speed and complexity of business continue to increase. Technological advances such as cloud computing, mobile devices and social media continue to take hold. Regulatory demands continue to expand. Workforce...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 19, 2013 | Hot News
Some 225 organizations have now either been granted or applied for authority to issue alerts through FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). That’s 225 out of thousands of local, state, and federal agencies eligible to apply to send alerts...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 13, 2013 | Hot News
A recent WHO Technical consultative meeting classified the novel human coronavirus as having significant potential to cause widespread serious consequences, it is therefore something that business continuity mangers should monitor. The latest identified case of the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 13, 2013 | Hot News
Yesterday in London, executives of the Royal Bank of Scotland testified in front of a Parliament commission of banking standards. The topic at hand was of course the much-publicized Libor rate-rigging scandal that cost RBS more than $600 million in fines from the UK’s...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 13, 2013 | Hot News
It’s well-known that disaster recovery is vital to sustaining a business. Organizations simply cannot function without their IT systems. That first wave of DR solutions dating back to the 1970s created a safety net for computer systems, but still involved days...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 13, 2013 | Hot News
With data protection issues becoming a hot topic for the Irish legal system, Fintan Lawlor advises how companies can comply with legislation. The mass use of social network sites such as Facebook, the use of cloud computing to store data on the web, together with our...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 13, 2013 | Hot News
I used to work for Ancestry.com, the largest family history company in the world. One of the interesting challenges I had there was that, while the principles of family history are the same for everyone, each person’s individual quest was radically different. The...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 13, 2013 | Hot News
Hello, this is Derrick Spooner, Cyber Threat Solutions Engineer for the CERT Program, with the last of 19 blog posts that describe the best practices fully documented in the fourth edition of the Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats. The CERT Program...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 12, 2013 | Hot News
In last week’s blog I tempted fate by referring to the likelihood of needing to regenerate the “Mud Army” from the 2011 floods in Brisbane. Unfortunately that turned out to be a prophecy and indeed this year’s disruption to businesses and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 12, 2013 | Hot News
Last October Superstorm Sandy socked the Northeast, leaving a wake of devastation including loss of life, homes and business and complete exposure of the massive infrastructure problems facing our communities. Now, just slightly more than three months later, another...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 12, 2013 | Hot News
Many organisations I’ve talked to have failed to adopt appropriate business continuity (BC) strategies. Instead, they plan for scenarios that are unlikely, decide on an approach that is unachievable, or fail to align BC strategies with other strategic...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 12, 2013 | Hot News
Although many companies in the information security industry prefer to tackle challenges with sophisticated hardware, the art of lying continues to be a towering risk difficult to deal with. The ancient threat of social engineering is in the news all the time, often...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 11, 2013 | Hot News
As the modern business world becomes more and more sophisticated, so too do the supply chains on which organizations rely. And as these supply chains have become more sophisticated and intertwined, the risk of possible problems has grown....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 11, 2013 | Hot News
Hello, this is Randy Trzeciak, Technical Team Lead of Research in the CERT Insider Threat Center, with the eighteenth of 19 blog posts that describe the best practices fully documented in the fourth edition of the Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats. The...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 11, 2013 | Hot News
With all the attention companies pay today to collecting more data to analyze, not enough business and IT leaders are considering the critical issues of backup and disaster recovery and the big data question: What if it breaks?...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 11, 2013 | Hot News
Every major initiative – or project – within an organization has a sponsor; someone that champions the project and supports everyone involved. Ultimately, they are the one paying for the project; resources, employees, technology equipment, contractor/consultants and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 11, 2013 | Hot News
The Winter Storm Nemo blasted into the Northeast packing hurricane-force wind gusts and blizzard conditions swept through the area overnight. The governors of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York all declared states of emergencies on...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 8, 2013 | Hot News
The federal government has nearly finalized its first major overhaul to the primary handbook to federal cybersecurity standards in nearly four years, and its most significant update since the initial release of that handbook in 2005. The National Institute of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 8, 2013 | Hot News
A major winter storm, with blizzard conditions, is bearing down on the Northeast and New England, with between one and even up to three feet of snow expected in certain areas Friday night through Saturday. Here in New Jersey the snow is already falling and blizzard...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 8, 2013 | Hot News
Given the recent news about Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, my title may surprise you. Please read on. As I write this, I am in seat 1A of United flight 1607 from Philly to Houston. playing on the screen in front of me is CNBC. I make no secret of my disdain for much...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 8, 2013 | Hot News
For those readers growing up in the 1970s, you are probably familiar with the commercials for Fram oil filters. For those who don’t know, they featured a grease covered mechanic talking about how changing your oil filter for a few dollars would prevent far more costly...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 8, 2013 | Hot News
After being taken to court for underpaying a cook at his Oriental Teahouse restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, to the point where she was owed $28,000 in back wages, owner David Zhou appears to have decided some crisis management was in order. We would assume that’s...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 7, 2013 | Hot News
Effective risk management in the coal industry is all about people. To succeed, you need to embed a risk-aware culture and make the risk process simple and relevant so that it becomes part of everyone’s daily job. At the end of the day it is people who manage risks,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 7, 2013 | Hot News
It is in the public sector’s interest to protect itself against data breaches, writes one specialist, who says taking precautions is infinitely preferable to closing the door after the horse has bolted Devon County Council, Leeds City Council, the London Borough...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 7, 2013 | Hot News
Natural disasters played a prominent role in 2012′s narrative – not just in their destruction of neighborhoods, but in the damage they caused businesses as well. As a result, the need for disaster recovery surged to the top of the priority list for many company...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 7, 2013 | Hot News
Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) today claimed the capital’s international airport had become the first in the world to achieve ISO 22301:2012 certification for its strong business continuity management system. DIAL, which operates the Delhi airport, has been...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 7, 2013 | Hot News
This Thursday, February 7, 2013, at 10:15 AM (CST), over 2.7 million people in the Central U.S. will participate in the Great Central U.S. ShakeOut, the region’s largest earthquake drill. Join communities throughout Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 7, 2013 | Hot News
It is normal human tendency to really not think of the possibility of things going wrong, especially when everything is hail and hearty. People like to refrain from paranoid behaviour, so that they can enjoy their present and also not get tagged as a ‘psycho’ or a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 7, 2013 | Hot News
Businesses must ensure that they have robust information security safeguards in place to protect their operations and attract more clients as IT-related risks continue to rise, according to a PwC survey. PwC warns that business leaders globally are far too optimistic...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 6, 2013 | Hot News
Colina Insurance Company has unveiled its updated Business Continuity and Hurricane Preparedness plans, believing these will give it a competitive advantage in rebounding after a natural disaster. #The plans, which cover potential risks such as natural disasters,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 6, 2013 | Hot News
Risk management is not new. It is something we are born with. The most basic risk management systems are part of our DNA. We adapt, develop and occasionally improve on aspects of our natural heritage to build resilience. Nature evolves – it changes, it learns, it gets...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 6, 2013 | Hot News
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today announced the launch of the DHS Campus Resilience Pilot Program (CR Pilot) for U.S. colleges and universities. Together with the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, DHS will work with state, local and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 6, 2013 | Hot News
“Cloud computing” is not a new development where information technology (IT) is concerned: indeed, it’s becoming a mainstay of sorts for a wide array of businesses, including many that serve the trucking industry. Yet as more and more critical data moves to and fro...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 5, 2013 | Hot News
NEW YORK – Survivors may not know about disaster help from the U.S. Small Business Administration that could lead to a smarter, faster recovery for businesses, homeowners or private nonprofits. There’s a loan for lost business caused by Hurricane Sandy. There’s also a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 5, 2013 | Hot News
San Jose, Calif. – InMage®, leading provider of backup, application recovery, disaster recovery and cloud computing announced today that SIFY, a leader in IT Solutions and Services space with its core offerings on Enterprise IT Transformation, Managed IT and Cloud...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 5, 2013 | Hot News
Is your facility ready to weather a disaster? Most FMs would answer yes, but most of them would be wrong. Preparation doesn’t stop at testing the alarm systems. In fact, the law requires much more emergency planning than many realize. No one is safe from disaster –...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 5, 2013 | Hot News
DeLoach: I’m a managing director of Protiviti and am based in Houston. I am a member of the firm’s Solution Leadership and a member of the Executive Council to the CEO. I’ve been with the firm since its inception in 2002 and formerly was a partner of longstanding with...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 5, 2013 | Hot News
There is nothing more anxiety-inducing to an information security department than the preparation, presentation, and approval of its annual budget. This process can create unnecessary tension, stress, and other negative feelings between the security team and company...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 5, 2013 | Hot News
The majority of Americans watched the lights go out during Super Bowl XLVII, while the minority witnessed Puppy Bowl IX, one of the greatest sporting events in our nation’s history. The power surge in New Orleans didn’t occur because of a natural disaster or a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 5, 2013 | Hot News
What does an Oreo have to do with the use of Social Media and Crisis and Emergency Management?!?! I am thinking role model! When the blackout occurred during the Super Bowl, Oreo was ON IT! Within minutes they sent out the following tweet to their...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 4, 2013 | Hot News
When that massive storm tore through the Southeast and parts of the Midwest early this week I thought – wow, this is just like Groundhog day! This incredible storm flipped cars on the interstate, demolished homes and businesses, killed at least one person,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 4, 2013 | Hot News
OVER the years, the United States and Europe have taken different approaches toward protecting people’s personal information. Now the two sides are struggling to bridge that divide. On this side of the Atlantic, Congress has enacted a patchwork quilt of privacy laws...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 4, 2013 | Hot News
The influx of computing devices, from laptops to smartphones and tablets, into the workplace might bring convenience and increased productivity to individual employees. However, this bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend also surfaces a range of security risks and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 4, 2013 | Hot News
What do employees want most in their company’s values? That is a question that has plagued companies for many, many years. I would argue that one of the concepts which should be in the conversation is respect for a company’s ethical values. One of the tasks in any...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 4, 2013 | Hot News
I’ve been following the recent attacks on The New York Times and other newspapers with much interest in recent days. It’s yet another snapshot of how much trouble China will continue to be in the years to come and elevates the discussion on state-sponsored...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 1, 2013 | Hot News
The bigger a business is, the more it has to lose. If a company doesn’t create an effective risk management plan, it could soon find itself in major trouble for overlooking an easily avoidable event. The price of not having a risk management plan can very quickly...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 1, 2013 | Hot News
During the past 18 months, we at Egon Zehnder International have examined the enterprise risk management (ERM) practices at 10 major global banks, and the good news is that all of them see ERM as a strategic imperative. They recognize that risks of all kinds — not...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 1, 2013 | Hot News
One of my favorite clients, World Compliance, publishes an occasional email newsletter. World Compliance (http://www.worldcompliance.com/en/default.aspx) claims it “helps mitigate risk by providing an information advantage through access to the world’s largest,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 1, 2013 | Hot News
On January 29, Robert Meyer came to New York to speak about disaster resilience. As a co-director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Process Center, few know more about the topic than he does....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Feb 1, 2013 | Hot News
Yes, there is still lots of flu out there but are now trending down well. CDC will be issuing their “Flu Weekly” report on Friday that will offer laboratory confirmation....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 31, 2013 | Hot News
Floods, fires, earthquakes and other misadventures will happen in spite of our best plans. Their impact will sometimes be severe simply because we chose to locate our factories, offices, schools and homes in disaster-prone locations. A bush setting means that your...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 31, 2013 | Hot News
It used to be that the local priest was the best-informed man in town, but his monopoly over confessions has been broken by websites such as Facebook. A single visit suffices to find out anything from name, age, education, employment history and political views to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 31, 2013 | Hot News
This morning’s San Francisco Chronicle had a major headline: 20,000 in state own guns illegally. Being the contrarian I am, my immediate reaction was, “How do they know that?” Actually, in this case it was a real number based on a database of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 31, 2013 | Hot News
Having a strategic vision in place is critical for success. Without a roadmap, IT can become too caught up in technology trends. For the six CIOs interviewed here, having a renewed focus on a core strategy for 2013 means directing the entire staff along a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 31, 2013 | Hot News
Hello, this is Ying Han, Graduate Research Assistant of the CERT Enterprise Threat and Vulnerability Management team, with the thirteenth of 19 blog posts that describe the best practices fully documented in the fourth edition of the Common Sense Guide to Mitigating...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
Cyber crime has been a thorn in the side of both corporations and individuals for decades. In the early years, one could argue that cyber attacks were mostly a nuisance, almost like pranks, resulting in little more than a dysfunctional IT system for a few...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
Frank Perlmutter (CBCP) (MBCI), president and co-founder of Strategic BCP®, will present a one-hour Webinar—“Business Continuity Standards Untangled: Deciphering Confusing and Overlapping Requirements, Using the BCP Genome”—as part of the popular Disaster Recovery...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
As the Super Bowl gets under way Sunday in New Orleans, event organizers will be working feverishly behind the scenes, making certain that all aspects of the game go off without a hitch. From plans that focus on the potential for severe weather to controlling alcohol...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
It’s hard some times to see the forest from the trees, particularly if you are in the deep weeds of daily government or organization communications. But one big thing that is happening in our world is the expectation of engagement. That is participation. That is...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
Data protection is the top security priority for more than half of UK organisations in 2013, a survey has revealed. This is unchanged from 2012, but went up from 43% to 50% of more than 300 IT security professionals polled by TechTarget and Computer Weekly....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
FEMA just released new federal flood maps that reveal that more areas, farther inland are expected to flood. Tidal surges will be more ferocious. And 35,000 more homes and businesses will be located in flood zones, which will almost certainly nudge up insurance rates...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
A California state lawmaker announced legislation on Monday, Jan. 28, to build an $80 million early warning system that would alert state residents seconds before an earthquake hits. If approved, the system would take a year or two to deploy and warn residents about a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 30, 2013 | Hot News
As the risk for severe weather conditions continue throughout parts of the Midwest and South, we wanted to take a second to remind everyone in areas expected to see severe weather to take necessary precautions now. We encourage all individuals in areas where severe...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 29, 2013 | Hot News
Monday was Data Privacy Day. Do you know where your customer information is? If your answer is somewhere in the “no” to “sort of, for the most part” range, you’ve got work to do. Even if your answer is a resounding “yes,” it...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 29, 2013 | Hot News
Today I will look at our predictions 5 and 6, which have some degree of overlap. Firstly we predicted that “ISO 22301 will start to take off, with certificates issued in more than one country”. Hardly a difficult prediction I know, but still an opportunity to test the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 29, 2013 | Hot News
Effective risk management requires identifying — and then managing — the pitfalls or threats that could severely impact an organization. In the pest management industry, the risks have dramatically changed over time, according to Fred Whitford, coordinator for the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 29, 2013 | Hot News
Although Business Continuity Management (BCM) has not been on the boardroom agenda of many organizations in the Middle East, it has, however, still enjoyed a significant presence in the region. It is fact that Business Continuity is emerging as a very important area...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 29, 2013 | Hot News
It is becoming increasingly important that leaders need be more proactive in their approach to the ethical considerations of their roles, power and influence on their people and respective organizations. Here are few questions to help, at least, start ethical...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 29, 2013 | Hot News
Communication is a fundamental of emergency management and yet an inherent struggle during disasters. Superstorm Sandy was no exception as complaints about a lack of information were common. This came from communities in pockets of the East Coast where information was...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 29, 2013 | Hot News
DeLoach: I’m a managing director of Protiviti and am based in Houston. I am a member of the firm’s Solution Leadership and a member of the Executive Council to the CEO. I’ve been with the firm since its inception in 2002 and formerly was a partner of longstanding with...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 28, 2013 | Hot News
When disaster – or a crises – strikes, organizations must be able to refer to a plan to help guide them through the tasks they need to consider executing to respond, restore and recover, systems and operations. All to often when a BCM / DR plan is pulled off the shelf...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 28, 2013 | Hot News
So, you’ve seen one nasty case study too many and you’re finally ready to get proactive with your crisis management. You’ve got pen and paper (well, probably more like laptop or tablet) in hand and are ready to crank out that awesome, airtight crisis management plan,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 28, 2013 | Hot News
There’s a war going on, and it’s raging here at home — not in the streets or the fields, but on the Internet. You can think of it as a war on the digital homeland. If you work for a power company, bank, defense contractor, transportation provider, or...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 28, 2013 | Hot News
Companies don’t have as many walls as they used to. In an effort to reduce costs, improve efficiency and flexibility, and leverage new technologies and expertise, most large companies today have engaged hundreds or even thousands of third-party vendors to provide...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 28, 2013 | Hot News
In Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath, many companies built virtual instances of employees’ systems so they could resume work from alternate locations. By untying software and data from physical machines, businesses can more easily relocate impacted workers and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 28, 2013 | Hot News
Flu season is upon us, and it’s an ugly one this year. According to the latest reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 7.3% of U.S. deaths last week were a result of the flu, slightly above the official epidemic threshold. What does this mean to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 28, 2013 | Hot News
While trying to manage an unprecedented volume of claims from Sandy, many insurers with local claims offices and staff experienced extensive power, phone, and computer outages, not to mention property damage from flooding. Staff had limited access to transportation to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 25, 2013 | Hot News
e-Skills has issued an invitation to input into the public consultation for the development of the UK’s NOS (National Occupational Standards for Information Security (aligned to the IISP Information Security Skills Framework) and to participate in a NOS...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 25, 2013 | Hot News
Every year, multiple surveys find that many organizations do not feel confident in their own DR plans. In 2013, it’s time to stop procrastinating. Whether you’ve been putting off disaster recovery and contingency planning entirely or just haven’t...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 25, 2013 | Hot News
Most IT professionals correctly refer to the internal cloud as their virtualization project, and often roll their eyes when a vendor refers to it as a cloud. Nevertheless, virtual infrastructures can benefit from the actual public cloud to augment what they are doing....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 25, 2013 | Hot News
If you’re like the majority of privacy professionals, you know the frustration of trying to get senior management or your board of directors involved with cyber governance. In fact, many C-suite executives and boards of directors don’t exercise even basic governance...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 25, 2013 | Hot News
Hello, this is Todd Lewellen, Cybersecurity Threat and Incident Analyst for the CERT Program, with the eleventh of 19 blog posts that describe the best practices fully documented in the fourth edition of the Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats. The CERT...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 23, 2013 | Hot News
We often hear the terms ‘disaster recovery’ and ‘business continuity’ used interchangeably. The truth is they are not the same and it could be a huge mistake to think that protecting a company’s computing assets in the event of a disaster will also provide business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 23, 2013 | Hot News
The FCPA Guidance contains many important compliance reminders which should be incorporated into every anti-corruption compliance program. Perhaps the most important observation included in the FCPA Guidance was the statement that...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 23, 2013 | Hot News
Do you use Skype, Tinychat (tinychat.com), or something similar for video calls? Do you make those calls from your office, perhaps a home office? Do you ever look at the image YOU are sending? If not, it might be a good idea. A fellow with who I video chat has a huge...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 23, 2013 | Hot News
As we head towards Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW), the BCI’s annual global awareness raising campaign for business continuity (BC), it makes sense to begin with a simple question: What is business continuity? If you look at the main BCI website and take a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 23, 2013 | Hot News
The demands of upcoming regulatory requirements put evermore pressure on financial institutions and their risk management infrastructures. As a result, data and analytics must be fast, consistent and transparent. Meeting these demands will require financial...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 23, 2013 | Hot News
As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online. Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 22, 2013 | Hot News
Availability of information is an area that is often overlooked in the information security space. Having in place a strong business continuity programme, however, requires successful integration between a business and its IT function....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 22, 2013 | Hot News
At the time of this writing, it’s not quite December 21, the day the world is going to end—at least according to people who believe in that Mayan calendar deal. Those people have more than likely been outfitting themselves with supplies: water, food, guns, fuel,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 22, 2013 | Hot News
I’m excited to have Jane Jordan-Meier share her thoughts on crisis communications and public relations with our online reputation management blog. Jane Jordan-Meier is a high-stakes specialist, author and crisis media trainer and coach. She is the author of the highly...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 22, 2013 | Hot News
Many security and compliance projects begin with a simple idea: assess the organization’s risk of vulnerabilities and breaches. Indeed, implementing an IT security risk assessment is absolutely critical to the overall security posture of your organization. An...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 22, 2013 | Hot News
While organizations often focus their corruption monitoring activities on gifts, meals and entertainment, they may not have thought about other touch points with government officials that could give rise to corruption risk. Understanding these touch points is...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 22, 2013 | Hot News
Hurricane Sandy will go down in history as one of the most destructive storms ever, inflicting at least $50 to $60 billion in damage across the Northeast, according to early estimates. As the dust settles and our country manages the recovery phase of this crisis, it’s...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 21, 2013 | Hot News
The entire United States is on fire with the flu. Looking at either the CDC Flu Weekly or the Google Flu Trends map will tell you that however CDC lab value data suggests that perhaps the flu has peaked....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 21, 2013 | Hot News
The one thing that sets risk management professionals apart from other insurance sales people is the way we think about risk. It’s not just about the headline risks, the ones everyone looks out for. It’s the little risks and the big risks that you never even thought...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 21, 2013 | Hot News
I have recently been asked if the research paper about key leakage across VMs running on a hypervisor invalidates the position I advanced in this series of blogs? No, it doesn’t, although key management is something which deserves far more attention than it gets from...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 21, 2013 | Hot News
Most would agree that farming, by its nature, is filled with risk. Whether growing soybeans or wheat, farming 500 acres or 5,000, growers face risk and worries around weather, input costs, yields, market demand, and volatile grain prices — just a few of many...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 18, 2013 | Hot News
Boeing’s Dreamliner 787 has been billed as the marquee aircraft for passenger lines the world over, but a recent string of scary electrical errors has led authorities in many countries, including Europe, Japan and India, along with our FAA, to ground the planes....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 18, 2013 | Hot News
It should come as no surprise at this point that organizations of all sizes are flocking to the cloud with high hopes of reducing CapEx, making OpEx more predictable, enhancing scalability, making management easier and improving disaster preparedness. In fact, here in...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 18, 2013 | Hot News
Talk about migration tends to center on operating systems and new hardware. That’s especially true in the wake of a huge industry event such as CES 2013. An unintended consequence of a fascination with the new and shiny is that many functions and operations...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 18, 2013 | Hot News
The data explosion is increasing demand for data storage, driving up costs, amplifying the risk of data loss or exposure and complicating disaster recovery plans and strategies. Furthermore, organisations are increasingly moving away from cumbersome, error-prone,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 17, 2013 | Hot News
The news that Tesco and other major supermarkets have been selling beef burgers containing up to 30% horsemeat has led to headlines, social media jokes, but above all consumer concern. What is it we’ve been feeding our children exactly?...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 17, 2013 | Hot News
In a typical year influenza inflicts about $90 billion worth of economic damage and kills about 36,000 Americans – and this year’s epidemic is shaping up to be worse. Yet Uncle Sam spends far more on homeland security than on flu prevention. Poor resource allocation...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 17, 2013 | Hot News
There is never a good time for something to go wrong with your IT. It always happens when you least want it to. A project is due or your workload is particularly high. But what can you do about it? It’s just something that happens, right? Well, that is where you are...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 17, 2013 | Hot News
Few corporate sagas capture the virtues and vices of state-owned companies and private enterprise better than the drama of BP’s roller-coaster ride between failure and success. Few corporate sagas capture the virtues and vices of state-owned companies and private...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 16, 2013 | Hot News
One topic high on the data protection agenda for 2013 will be the continuing negotiations of the new European Data Protection Regulation, which is designed to introduce a harmonised data protection law across Europe, and to account for changes in technology since the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 16, 2013 | Hot News
How can you ensure that your BCM programme and resources are allocated in a way proportionate to the current and potential threats that the company is and will be facing? That’s a real question one of our members faced last year from her senior management team. While...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 16, 2013 | Hot News
It’s no secret that one of the biggest threats to securing corporate information infrastructures isn’t, ultimately, the latest variation of the Flame virus or new malware that exploits vulnerability in an operating system or application. One of the biggest threats is...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 16, 2013 | Hot News
Geary Sikich provides five questions that you can work through to assess whether your organization’s planning is resulting in brittleness. Good intentions do not make for the creation of a robust/resilient organization. Business continuity plans, disaster recovery...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 16, 2013 | Hot News
Following recent technology glitches that hampered the largest banks in the United Kingdom, the timing of a recent whistleblower lawsuit that accuses the Lloyds Banking Group of faulty business continuity processes couldn’t be worse (for Lloyds). After all,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 14, 2013 | Hot News
Managing risk is a topical and controversial issue for housing associations. With three high-profile failures and frauds recently reported by the Homes and Communities Agency in its regulatory judgements, good governance is high on all boards’ lists of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 14, 2013 | Hot News
Hello, this is Jason Clark, Insider Threat Researcher for the CERT Program, with the sixth of 19 blog posts that describe the best practices fully documented in the fourth edition of the Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats. The CERT Program announced the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 14, 2013 | Hot News
If you heard shots fired in class, would you know what to do? Unfortunately for most students, the answer is “no.” Most of us have spent all our school years under the shadow of shootings. From Columbine to Sandy Hook, it’s something that has always been on our minds....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 14, 2013 | Hot News
With the winter season in full swing and in the wake of Super Storm Sandy, a great divide has emerged between companies that can deliver quality customer care regardless of circumstance and companies that leave callers stranded. In today’s highly competitive business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 14, 2013 | Hot News
The hospital that bears the name of the most destructive Southern California earthquake in recent years has no excuse to be unprepared, said Susan Shamban, disaster coordinator for Northridge Hospital Medical Center. “We did survive the Northridge...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 14, 2013 | Hot News
Organizations do not work in isolation; they require suppliers, vendors, partners and clients/customers. Without any of these and organization cannot – and does not – operate. Even an organization that might be the only provider of a service or product still needs...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 14, 2013 | Hot News
The 2012-2013 flu season arrived earlier than usual and is hitting the Puget Sound region particularly hard. As the nation braces for increased flu activity, now is the time to prepare yourself, your business and your employees. Not only is prevention important for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 11, 2013 | Hot News
The country is in the grip of three emerging flu or flulike epidemics: an early start to the annual flu season with an unusually aggressive virus, a surge in a new type of norovirus, and the worst whooping cough outbreak in 60 years. And these are all developing amid...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 11, 2013 | Hot News
In the wake of disaster from Hurricane Sandy, more time and funding will most likely be given to continuity planning for 2013. As every company surveys its risk during these final months of the year, organizations are making several costly mistakes when crafting a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 11, 2013 | Hot News
With 2012 all but a distant memory now, attention has quickly turned to what is in store for businesses in the coming 12 months, particularly when it comes to business continuity and the changes expected. http://www.barclaysimpson.com/blog/blog-38810561350
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 11, 2013 | Hot News
Corporate compliance is easily defined. In formal terms, it’s the observance of statutory and company regulations on lawful and responsible conduct by an organization, its employees, and its management and supervisory bodies. But successfully fulfilling all of the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 11, 2013 | Hot News
The American National Standards Institute(ANSI) Homeland Security Standards Panel(HSSP) has released a workshop report examining approaches to safeguarding international supply chains – which rely heavily on transportation and postal infrastructure – from the dangers...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 11, 2013 | Hot News
The third annual 2013 International Crisis & Risk Communication (ICRC) Conference at UCF (March 5-6, 2013) explores crisis/risk communication and focuses on the sub-theme: Rethinking Media. Effective crisis/risk communication makes the difference in crisis...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 9, 2013 | Hot News
Lombard, IL USA, January 8, 2013 – – The International Consortium for Organizational Resilience (ICOR), an international non-profit professional development and credentialing organization, has formed an alliance between the BCI, a global institute and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 9, 2013 | Hot News
If you are interested in learning about the difference between how a CUSO delivers Disaster Recovery vs. a normal company you have come to the right place. Quite often I am asked, especially by folks outside of the Credit Union industry, what is a CUSO? A CUSO, or...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 9, 2013 | Hot News
But how do you do this? Where do you focus? Is it really possible for organizations with thousands of suppliers “to map out their supply chain, including first-and-second tier contracted suppliers, and quantify each link by financial stability and even geopolitical...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 9, 2013 | Hot News
There is little argument among IT security practitioners and thought leaders that the shortage of qualified information security personnel places many organizations at greater risk of attack and exposure to other vulnerabilities that threaten the security of IT...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 9, 2013 | Hot News
The (ISC)² is a pioneer organization that, with its CISSP certification, has become the dominant international professional body for information security, and also the favored target for critics. As a board member, chairman for two terms, and now a member of the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 9, 2013 | Hot News
The world is more at risk as persistent economic weakness saps our ability to tackle environmental challenges, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2013 report. The report highlights wealth gaps (severe income disparity) followed by unsustainable...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 9, 2013 | Hot News
Run – Hide – Fight is a powerful new video created by “Ready Houston,” a not-for-profit organization whose goal is getting Houston ready for a major disaster. Their motto: Make a Plan, Build a Kit, Stay Informed, Know your Neighbors tells you quickly what the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 8, 2013 | Hot News
Last time out I wrote about how snapshots have a visibility problem, meaning it’s difficult if not impossible to tell what’s inside them without having to look into each one. Yet snapshots are a very effective way of capturing data quickly and often, especially...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 8, 2013 | Hot News
Nikki Haley didn’t see information risk management as a key part of her job when she was sworn in as South Carolina governor two years ago. But a breach of the state tax system, in which a hacker exposed the records of nearly 4 million taxpayers, changed all...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 8, 2013 | Hot News
Whether a tornado, hurricane or some other disaster slams an area, small businesses can take steps to mitigate the impacts on their operations. The U.S. Small Business Administration and North Carolina-based Agility Recovery recently conducted a webinar describing the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 8, 2013 | Hot News
Companies, jurisdictions and agencies spend a tremendous amount of time and effort developing crisis communication plans. Some studies I’ve seen suggest that less than half actually have communication plans, but I’m not really talking to or about them....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 8, 2013 | Hot News
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced the first HIPAA breach settlement involving fewer than 500 patients. The Hospice of North Idaho (HONI) agreed to pay $50,000 after an investigation found the organization had violated the HIPAA...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 8, 2013 | Hot News
At the start of the year it is always tempting to forward and make some predictions. Like New Year resolutions, however, they are generally much modified as soon as they come into contact with reality. Nevertheless at the BCI we asked our experts what they thought...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 8, 2013 | Hot News
Excerpted from “Five Security Tools Every Small Business Must Have,” a new report posted this week on Dark Reading’s SMB Security Tech Center.] When it comes to IT risks, small and midsize businesses face many of the same threats as larger...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 7, 2013 | Hot News
A common theme in the world of data backup is the confusion of business continuity with disaster recovery. When it comes to protecting your data, it’s important to understand that these are two different concepts. The misunderstanding of the terms could result in...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 7, 2013 | Hot News
Google is so serious about its disaster recovery planning that it tests for most scenarios imaginable, no matter how unlikely, including an alien invasion of its offices. You see, nothing puts fear into a CIO like a system outage — it gives new meaning to having a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 7, 2013 | Hot News
I found this listing to be right on the money. It reflects the challenges and the duration of an event. Someone sent me this via an email so I’m using the attribution that came with it....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 7, 2013 | Hot News
Social media has amply demonstrated its abilities as an outbound tool, a means for government to push information out to its constituents. Municipalities tweet emergency information during crises. Politicians rally friends on Facebook....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 4, 2013 | Hot News
EU privacy watchdogs have given the go ahead to ‘data processors’ to put in place ‘binding corporate rules’ (BCRs) that commit those organisations to certain data security and privacy standards relating to their processing operations....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 4, 2013 | Hot News
We know more about the food on grocery shelves today than ever before because instead of buying whatever produce or meat is in front of them, consumers are asking questions and demanding answers. http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/blog/tag/sewer-sludge/
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 4, 2013 | Hot News
Risk management can provide visibility, analytical insights and governance that can help companies better manage and optimize their innovation portfolio. In this article Adi Alon and Ken Hooper look at learnings from the VC industry and risk management practices to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 4, 2013 | Hot News
The title of this short article definitely caught my eye…”Will a megathrust earthquake strike the NW in 2013????” It brought up several things…such a quake would be incredible destructive, no doubt killing thousands and costing billions in damages. Has earthquake...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 4, 2013 | Hot News
In some shape or form, data protection is top of mind for most CIOs these days. It’s no surprise that many CIOs list bring-your-own-device (BYOD)/mobile and cloud computing among the top things that keep them awake at night. Mobile and cloud erase the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 4, 2013 | Hot News
Hello, this is George J. Silowash, Cybersecurity Threat and Incident Analyst for the CERT Program, with the first of 19 blog posts that describe the best practices fully documented in the fourth edition of the Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats. In the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 4, 2013 | Hot News
Louisville, Colo. – Jan. 3, 2013 – As the new year kicks off, Coalfire, an independent IT GRC auditor, compiled their predictions for cybersecurity in 2013. “Last year was a very active year in the cybersecurity world,” said Rick Dakin, CEO and co-founder of Coalfire....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 3, 2013 | Hot News
The statistics are staggering: Last year, Symantec blocked a total of over 5.5 billion malware attacks, an 81% increase over 2010, and reported a 35% increase in Web-based attacks and a 41% increase in new variants of malware....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 3, 2013 | Hot News
When a disaster strikes, the pre-existing relationships between government and the private sector must be leveraged to launch an effective response and recovery effort. The objective for community crisis response is to support and bolster the capabilities that...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 3, 2013 | Hot News
2012 was a year of natural catastrophes. From Hurricane Sandy to the record-setting drought to the third most destructive wildfire season on record, the year was fraught with disasters that took a toll not only on communities nationwide, but on some of the world’s...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 2, 2013 | Hot News
From Tuesday, companies have three months to put measures in place before they can collect and use consumers’ personal data for any commercial transactions. IT has been work around the clock for the Personal Data Protection Department (JPDP) since its launch early...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 2, 2013 | Hot News
At first glance, “risk” always seems like a bad thing that enterprises want to reduce or eliminate at every opportunity. After all, doesn’t risk mean an imminent possibility or danger of failure or loss? But in financial services – as in life, generally – few rewards...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jan 2, 2013 | Hot News
If you are a contractor to the US Government with a continuing resolution, having a risk management plan has never been more critical for your organization....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 20, 2012 | Hot News
There are many more questions than answers about the shooting that took the lives of 20 kids and six administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14. But in general schools and businesses can and should examine their emergency plans and how they would...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 20, 2012 | Hot News
Each year, it seems that more and more disasters hit with increasing severity. September 11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina, Sichuan, Haiti, Japan, Sandy. Society has not been able to prevent their devastation, and the impact of each is still being felt today....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 20, 2012 | Hot News
When I first learned about the fundamental truths of networking from RFC 1925, I thought it was a fun little April’s fools joke and quickly forgot about them. I was reminded recently of their existence and realized there can be some insightful lessons to be learned...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 20, 2012 | Hot News
Data brokers who collect vast amounts of information on consumers will be the ones turning over information this time. The US Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into nine data brokerage companies, ordering them to tell the agency how they harvest...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 18, 2012 | Hot News
Anyone who has children, or has had to deal with very young children, will understand how powerful the word “why” is and how it can drive their curiosity. Innocent-sounding questions such as “why is the sky blue?” can lead to the question “but why?” to each of the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 18, 2012 | Hot News
As we’ve seen with Superstorm Sandy in the Northeast and storms on the West Coast, natural disasters can happen anywhere, at any time. Even though we receive advanced warnings of these impending events, there is no way to predict when IT issues will occur due to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 18, 2012 | Hot News
Experts agree that global dependence on the Internet makes it a prime target for criminal hackers seeking to penetrate networks and otherwise victimize large organizations. http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Public-Private-Partnership-Cybersecurity.html
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 18, 2012 | Hot News
By mid-November 2012, Dropbox reported having over 100 million registered users and thanked us for it. You’re welcome Dropbox! With that many people sharing files with one cloud storage provider, what are people doing to protect sensitive and personal data?...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 17, 2012 | Hot News
We were told that for health and safety reasons we would have to close half of our health centre (8 consulting rooms) for two weeks during a planned refurbishment. We are a large practice with 10,600 patients. Having struggled in the past with 48 hour access to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 17, 2012 | Hot News
Recently I attended a great conference on a subject connected to the Emergency Management and Preparedness industry. It was quite informative and as I always try to do, left with greater knowledge than when I arrived; always taking with me information that can help...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 17, 2012 | Hot News
Years ago, long before even the murders at University of Virginia, Columbine, and Sandy Hook, I wrote an article on how to keep killers out of buildings. As usual, it was based on lessons learned from Israel, with a little input from NASA....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 17, 2012 | Hot News
I, like many in our nation today, awoke with a deep sorrow and profound sadness surrounding me like a cloak. Last night I found myself looking through FaceBook postings aimlessly, with no purpose in mind and I came upon something that gave me great solace…Mr. Rogers....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 17, 2012 | Hot News
Despite huge losses caused by the financial crisis of 2008, and the collapses of many high profile financial institutions over recent years, risk management is still not as robust as it should be in the financial sector. Part of the problem is cultural. After all,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 17, 2012 | Hot News
BANGALORE, INDIA: Business continuity planning (BCP) should cover an organization’s ability to avoid major business disruption from a disaster while addressing the principal concerns of business risk mitigation, and protecting and preventing lost data. Business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 12, 2012 | Hot News
Some business continuity practitioners have argued that Risk Management techniques provide a tried and tested approach to dealing with conventional threats, but have limited effectiveness in identifying or evaluating rare but potentially catastrophic issues....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 12, 2012 | Hot News
Disaster recovery is no longer a massive expense with the advent of virtualisation and cloud, and with innovations in the disaster recovery sphere making it easier to deploy and maintain a DR site it is an insurance policy all enterprises should look at, according to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 12, 2012 | Hot News
The new James Bond film Skyfall parachutes 007 into a chilling cyberspace of computer hacking and cyber terrorism in which malicious software – known as malware which infects and damages computers – is more dangerous than exploding pens. In true Bond style the battle...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 12, 2012 | Hot News
The downtime of IT systems for businesses leads to lost opportunities and revenue. This downtime also includes the recovery of lost data. However, businesses can protect against unforeseen downtime by having plans for disaster recovery that include the use of multiple...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 12, 2012 | Hot News
I am the County Administrator for a county approximately the size of Rhode Island. With over 4,000 square miles, Lane County extends from the Pacific Ocean to the mountains, and includes dunes, wetlands, oceans, rivers, lakes, ski resorts, a large university,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 11, 2012 | Hot News
Risk enchantment. Every organisation and business needs a wizard working for them to achieve the holy grail of risk management. Or do they? As we move closer towards the newest Peter Jackson instalment of Lord of the Rings, being The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey, we...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 11, 2012 | Hot News
For a medical app that covers a plethora of icky illnesses, WebMD is probably your best bet (free for iPhone, iPad and Android). It’s jammed with data, and can present it to you in a number of ways. What every hypochondriac’s dreams for, the app’s Symptom Checker...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 11, 2012 | Hot News
If your co-op or condo board hasn’t given it thought before, superstorm Sandy brought home the point with hurricane-force winds: Buildings need to have an emergency preparedness plan. It’s not just about stocking up on flashlights or buying a generator —...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 10, 2012 | Hot News
Following on the unprecedented success of last year’s inaugural event, the BCI is truly excited to announce its 2013 BCI North America Awards, which will be taking place in March 2013 at DRJ Spring World in Orlando, Florida, USA . The categories for the 2013...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 10, 2012 | Hot News
Australia’s small to medium business owners (SMEs) are said to have a false sense of security about data and document safety measures as highly sophisticated business technologies transform the way many organisations operate....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 10, 2012 | Hot News
Data centers of all sizes struggle with securely and reliably protecting their data, but the medium-size data center might have the most unique set of challenges. These organizations tend to be heavily virtualized, have very dense virtual machines to host ratios, and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 10, 2012 | Hot News
Las Vegas – Turning responsibility for corporate information security over to end-users seems akin to the inmates running the asylum. But Tom Scholtz and his colleagues at Gartner are exploring the notion that the people using IT systems and corporate data are...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 10, 2012 | Hot News
More than three decades before Superstorm Sandy, a state law and a series of legislative reports began warning New York politicians to prepare for a storm of historic proportions, spelling out scenarios eerily similar to what actually happened: a towering storm surge;...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 10, 2012 | Hot News
Studies have found that the survival time for both kinds of viruses varies greatly, from a few seconds to 48+ hours. The reasons have to do with a number of factors, including the type of surface, humidity and temperature....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 6, 2012 | Hot News
Events such as Superstorm Sandy provide an opportunity for business continuity pros to shine. What are the essential skills they need to face a crisis? When Sandy struck the east coast in late October, businesses, hospitals and entire communities struggled to maintain...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 6, 2012 | Hot News
PwC India has unveiled an assessment of the state of information security in organisations in India. The study “The State of Information Security Survey -India, 2013’’ is a shot in the arm for businesses seeking to replicate global best practices in information...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 6, 2012 | Hot News
The unprecedented impact of Superstorm Sandy is forcing financial institutions to rethink assumptions about disaster recovery, contingency planning, and the vulnerability of on-premise solutions. And as a result, we may see widespread adoption of cloud-based...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 6, 2012 | Hot News
In the broad spectrum of activities which might be called Information Security, we must always first and foremost implement, execute and follow through with risk management. Risk management is the backbone or foundation of any good information security program. ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 6, 2012 | Hot News
Set against the background of the recent severe flooding that was affected or at least threatened to affect large areas of the UK, putting both business and homes at risk, there is no better time than now for businesses to think about how prepared they are to deal...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 5, 2012 | Hot News
After several close calls with hurricanes, executives at Florida Hospital in Orlando decided to rethink their disaster plans. A direct hit by a storm could, of course, endanger patients. But it could also destroy the technology that the facility depends on for medical...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 5, 2012 | Hot News
The development of agility is part of the changing infrastructure of IT in general, in which entrenched monolithic views of information processing give way to a vision of multiple users, multiple developers, and multiple devices interacting to form something greater...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 5, 2012 | Hot News
If your experience of engaging senior and executive management feels like a constant struggle to sustain momentum or defend investment, then you should take 15 minutes to look at the C-Suite EngagementToolkit that has just been launched by the BCI....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 5, 2012 | Hot News
The thing about most disasters —- after the massive news coverage dies down, the rest of us think it is business as usual. And to be fair, there was much of NYC that was unscathed in Superstorm Sandy. There is one aspect of life that can be leveling...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 5, 2012 | Hot News
This blog has previously discussed the impact that severe weather can have on a community, including businesses of multiple sizes. When a comprehensive business impact analysis has been conducted, employees will understand necessary preparations but also what needs to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 4, 2012 | Hot News
“Critical management system requirements and guidelines for improvement of occupational safety and health” are provided in a newly revised standard, according to Gary Lopez, chair of the American Society of Safety Engineers’ Standards Development...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 4, 2012 | Hot News
The author explains some of the important nuances of establishing business interruption economic damages for an insurance claim or for litigation.When an unfortunate occurrence such as the recent Hurricane Sandy causes damages that result in a disruption to a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 4, 2012 | Hot News
Booz Allen Hamilton works with financial services firms to identify and benchmark best practices and challenges for long-term cybersecurity prevention and protection. This process is part of Booz Allen’s Cyber M3 (Measure, Manage, Mature) capability, which evaluates...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Dec 4, 2012 | Hot News
It’s hard to believe I have been working alongside our disaster relief team in New Jersey for more than a month. Thirty-five days have passed since Hurricane Sandy first made landfall on the New Jersey coast on October 29th. This marked one of the most...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 30, 2012 | Hot News
There are all sorts of templates and thoughts on how the various Business Continuity Management (BCM) program components should look – the “plans.” Every organization has its own self-styled plan; every consulting agency has its own look and feel and every...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 30, 2012 | Hot News
Hurricane Sandy caused devastating effects to both personal and business operations. Coping with its aftermath has been particularly tough for those business professionals whose responsibility is dealing with IT disaster recovery. At Bellevue, New York City’s flagship...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 30, 2012 | Hot News
Every business should have a disaster recovery plan. But with payroll companies, a disaster recovery plan is even more critical. Think about it: when a flood, hurricane, or other natural disaster hits, a payroll company could be taken down at the exact time when...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 30, 2012 | Hot News
A majority of organisations (78.95%) have a disaster recovery/business continuity plan in place. This was one of the key findings of the ITWeb/ContinuitySA disaster recovery survey, which ran on ITWeb Online for 14 days in October, attracting 135 responses. However,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 30, 2012 | Hot News
To highlight the importance of annual influenza vaccination, and to foster greater use of influenza vaccine in the months of December, January, and beyond, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and other agencies will be conducting educational and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 26, 2012 | Hot News
Hurricane Sandy was an awful, albeit salutary, reminder of the importance of effective IT disaster recovery and business-continuity planning. Whether or not you think the climate scientists are right, Mother Earth is indisputably volatile and unpredictable....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 26, 2012 | Hot News
Were you ready for Sandy? Sure it was downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm, but it still had a devastating effect. For those of us who manage data centers, that impact had many layers. Let me start at the core and work my way out. To read the article, please...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 26, 2012 | Hot News
I know…there are so many things that could go wrong at anytime! Natural disasters, disease outbreaks and of course those manmade fears. The National Academy of Sciences gave me another reason to be sleepless at night in a report entitled “Terrorism and the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 26, 2012 | Hot News
There are all sorts of templates and thoughts on how the various Business Continuity Management (BCM) program components should look – the “plans.” Every organization has its own self-styled plan; every consulting agency has its own look and feel and every...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 21, 2012 | Hot News
IT organizations continue to struggle with the details when it comes to enabling BYOD for applications beyond email, and a new study finds that while employees are eager to access corporate resources from their mobile devices, they have little tolerance for controls...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 21, 2012 | Hot News
Whether you are building a compliance program or revamping an existing one, it makes good business sense to examine the models used by companies with successful track records. Five strategies stand out as common to businesses that have avoided compliance missteps and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 21, 2012 | Hot News
I’m sure you’ve all heard about Hurricane Sandy but I wanted to share with you my experience as I was there with my family when it hit New York.We got there a couple of days before the hurricane hit New York so managed to pack quite a lot in those days and did as much...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 21, 2012 | Hot News
Sometimes we are given a sober reminder of our need to be prepared for disaster, as we were recently when multiple severe storms hit the northeastern United States. Our hearts go out to all those affected. As we go through the recovery process, our first thoughts...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 21, 2012 | Hot News
On the afternoon of June 29, a severe thunderstorm tore across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. By day’s end, the intense storm, called a “derecho,” had left 22 people dead and millions without power (some for as long as a week) in six states and the District of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 21, 2012 | Hot News
Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged parts of the East Coast last month, proved that companies with a good disaster recovery plan don’t have to feel powerless, even when they lose power in their offices or data centers.Prepared firms used a variety of business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 19, 2012 | Hot News
Data recovery experts have been busy in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which left a slew of data centers underwater, damaging equipment and posing a significant threat to business-critical data. Apparently disregarding weather forecasters’ widespread warnings and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 19, 2012 | Hot News
The first thing Marsha Hedgepeth did when she moved into her home three years ago was count the steps from the front door to her second-floor apartment, a preparatory measure for future grocery-lugging. Fifteen. Then Sandy hit, and the superstorm provided her with...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 19, 2012 | Hot News
From tax incentives to energy rates, there are several key factors that directly impact the total cost of ownership over the lifetime of your data center. Building your facility in the right place, then, is no small task. Here’s what you need to know to keep...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 19, 2012 | Hot News
Battered by Superstorm Sandy, North Jersey Community Bank maintained operations and customer communications during the storm. CEO Frank Sorrentino discusses the key elements of business continuity. For North Jersey Community Bank, an $882 million community institution...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 19, 2012 | Hot News
CAEs face a multiplicity of urgent challenges, including new legal/regulatory requirements, increased enforcement activity, changing and incompatible stakeholder expectations, increased sensitivity to risk incidents, faster risk velocity, and greater public scrutiny...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 13, 2012 | Hot News
This article examines the disaster recovery options that are available in Linux and why it’s your key insurance policy for business continuity. Every organisation needs a disaster recovery plan and some strategies in place to ensure that their IT keeps running during...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 13, 2012 | Hot News
As Business Continuity has grown in significance, so has the desire to measure it effectiveness. Hence the internal audit function, who believe themselves to be the “eyes and ears” of the Board, have an increasingly important role to play. To do this, however,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 13, 2012 | Hot News
It probably goes without saying, but it has been a trying couple of weeks for just about everyone in the New York/New Jersey area. With Hurricane Sandy-related power outages, transportation issues and gas shortages still ongoing, getting back to normal has been a lot...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 13, 2012 | Hot News
Americans have a false sense of security when it comes to disasters, and should they become victims, most haven’t taken steps to help themselves during the first few days after one strikes. Experts say either the preparedness message isn’t getting across, or the wrong...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 13, 2012 | Hot News
As we basked in 70 degree temperatures in parts of the Northeast on Sunday, just a few days in the wake of a nor’easter and nearly two weeks after Hurricane Sandy, it’s understandable that the topic of climate change is trending online. In a post over at the Wall...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 12, 2012 | Hot News
Power inverter My personal favorite is a power inverter. I keep one in my car at all times. They plug directly into the cigarette lighter. It will accommodate any two or three-pronged electrical device and that means you don’t need a special car charger for your...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 12, 2012 | Hot News
This week marks 25 years since the Great Storm of 1987, widely (but erroneously) considered the only UK hurricane in living memory. 23 people died in the storm, which also caused £7.8bn worth of damage, cut power to thousands of homes and drove transport to a halt as...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 12, 2012 | Hot News
Take a second to think back to the year 2009. The US was in the thick of the financial crisis; companies were slashing budgets, and the unemployment rate was in double-digits. And do you remember a little thing called the “swine flu”? The World Health...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 9, 2012 | Hot News
THE Protection of Personal Information Act (Popi) will soon be enacted into South African law and the latest draft has already been passed by the national assembly.However, many large and well-known organisations are not even attending to some of the basics of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 9, 2012 | Hot News
Were you ready for Sandy? Sure it was downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm, but it still had a devastating effect. For those of use who manage data centers, that impact had many layers. Let me start at the core and work my way out. To read the article, please...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 9, 2012 | Hot News
n”>Businesses in New York and New Jersey that were preparing insurance claims for losses from Superstorm Sandy now have a second headache: how to deal with new losses from an early winter snow storm. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 9, 2012 | Hot News
You are implementing a business continuity management system (BCMS) for the first time and you discover that one of the requirements is to conduct ‘internal audits’. What do you do? Who should be the auditor? Do they need to be trained? All valid questions (along with...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 8, 2012 | Hot News
The goal of a business continuity plan (BCP) is to minimize operational risk in the face of a natural or man-made disruption. There are three key components to creating an effective BCP – people, infrastructure and processes — and we’ll take a look at each...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 8, 2012 | Hot News
OK, this is where that nurse part of me leaks out a bit…but I do really like CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). It is a great weekly report that follows all kinds of disease and health trends and many frankly that business continuity planners...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 7, 2012 | Hot News
Kim Bondy was in New Orleans seven years ago when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, and scores of patients died in flooded hospitals cut off from power. She never thought that she might face that danger herself. But on Monday night, as superstorm Sandy submerged...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 7, 2012 | Hot News
In New York, New Jersey and other northeastern states, millions of residents are still coping with the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy. Meanwhile, information security professionals are continuing to help carry out business continuity plans. At least 76 people...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 7, 2012 | Hot News
Compliance officers are a confident bunch. Yes, they can worry like all the rest of us, but in the end, they have faith that they can accomplish their mission. Forward thinking companies are recognizing the importance of empowering compliance officers and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 7, 2012 | Hot News
The classic quote from Warren Buffett about a financial crisis is also true for data centers. It’s “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked,” the multibillionaire businessman said. Hurricane Sandy brought the tide...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 7, 2012 | Hot News
Many of us are still taking in the damage, destruction and humbling force of Superstorm Sandy. This incredible weather event has created a lot of new interest in other devastating hurricanes. I heard a program on NPR about a report issued from the National...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 7, 2012 | Hot News
What is the “pecking order” in disaster declarations? I thought I understood that but then I saw that New Jersey and New York had been elevated to a “major disaster” and then I realized I wasn’t sure. Here is how it really works (from the “horses mouth,”...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 6, 2012 | Hot News
One week ago today, millions of Americans from North Carolina to Maine braced for Hurricane Sandy. That evening for over 12 hours, hurricane and tropical storm force winds, storm surge, and flooding impacted 12 states, with over eight million people losing...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 6, 2012 | Hot News
For the past week, the technology headlines have been clogged with dozens of breathless stories all prattling on around the same theme. Hurricane Sandy taught us all in information technology a big lesson, they say. Never has the case been more clearly made for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 6, 2012 | Hot News
When it rains, yes it can sometime pour but really?!?!?! New Jersey did indeed have an earthquake on Monday – It was a relatively small quake, just a 2.0 magnitude which struck at 1:19 a.m. Monday. But N.J. residents reported hearing a loud boom at the time of the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 2, 2012 | Hot News
A storm like Sandy is a perfect reminder on why every small business needs to constantly be prepared for disaster. This isn’t just ensuring that your company’s data is backed up offsite. It means knowing what to do when a disaster like Sandy knocks down utilities,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 2, 2012 | Hot News
For Tim Shea, the founder and CEO of Alpha NetSolutions, a 10-year-old managed services and cloud computing provider based in Millbury, Mass., Hurricane Sandy was a non-event for his customers. That’s because of the technology advances that have come with...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 2, 2012 | Hot News
Once again, a terrible natural disaster strikes, and Americans from the Carolinas to New England are doing their best to sort through the wreckage and get their lives back to normal. Already, some, including The New York Times, have said natural disasters prove...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 2, 2012 | Hot News
Disaster preparedness is a well-known best practice in running a data center, but Hurricane Sandy is showing that in disasters, the unexpected happens. When it does, some disaster recovery plans turn out to have holes in them, while others may still require...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 1, 2012 | Hot News
When seawater flooded streets in lower Manhattan Monday night, it filled the bottom floors of the basement of an office building at 75 Broad St. and its lobby up to four feet. This was not a good development for the data center operated by Peer1 Hosting. To read the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 1, 2012 | Hot News
The most recent Amazon Web Services outage left customers (and rival cloud providers) blaming Amazon. Instead, CIO.com columnist Bernard Golden says, everyone needs to accept that cloud computing is not immune to failure. Fortunately, a key advantage of the cloud...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 1, 2012 | Hot News
In the aftermath of the recent storm, Sandy, it’s good to examine Disaster Recovery.Organizations, solutions partners (vendors), and practices have created a ready handle for recovery from disastrous harm – Disaster Recovery – with the attendant “Disaster Recovery...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 1, 2012 | Hot News
If you don’t mention it, you appear heartless; if you give in to it, you appear weak.That is the fine line that each one of us faces in communicating with colleagues, customers, bosses, vendors, friends and family, in the aftermath of historic hurricane Sandy – and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 1, 2012 | Hot News
As a lifelong New Yorker who left the center of the known universe to move to Santa Fe, NM just a month ago, and the author of more than a few IT disaster recovery plans, I’ve obsessed over the news of the damage caused by superstorm Sandy up and down the East...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Nov 1, 2012 | Hot News
When we write business continuity plans (BCPs), we right them in a vacuum. We only know that they work if we: 1) do an exercise or 2) have a disaster. The East Coast is now experiencing a disaster like never before. Other events like Irene hit less...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 31, 2012 | Hot News
On Monday, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast of the United States, flooding entire towns in New York and New Jersey, triggering large-scale power outages and killing at least 17 people. The health and safety of individuals is the first and foremost priority,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 31, 2012 | Hot News
Duke Ellington is known more for his great music, such as Take the ‘A’ Train (alas, it’s flooded right now) than for his inspirational quotes, but in thinking about what has gone with the weather on over the last two days—and where the recovery is headed over the next...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 31, 2012 | Hot News
Our thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been affected by Hurricane Sandy. While the worst of the weather is beyond some areas on the East Coast, Sandy remains a very large storm system that continues to pose life-threatening hazards for coastal and inland...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 31, 2012 | Hot News
A mind-boggling video shot from the scene posted by NBC News showed homes in the beach community flattened by the flames.Fire officials say the fire was reported at about 11 p.m. Monday and is located in a flooded Zone A area. City officials say it appears most of the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 31, 2012 | Hot News
Hurricane Sandy powered its way onshore on the Eastern seaboard of the United States on Monday, Oct. 29. As reports are now coming in, the devastation is widespread and continuing to be reported. The storm, billed as a historic super storm, moved into U.S. states on...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 29, 2012 | Hot News
n today’s environment of 24-7-365 global operations and competition, downtime means more than immediate lost revenue and productivity–it can also cause lasting damage to your corporate reputation and erode customer confidence in your brand. Enterprises...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 29, 2012 | Hot News
Hurricane Sandy continues to swirl closer to the coast, with impacts already being felt in several states as of Sunday afternoon. At the direction of President Obama, FEMA continues to coordinate the federal government’s assistance and preparations for Hurricane...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 29, 2012 | Hot News
Winds from Sandy are already being felt on the East coast, and with widespread power outages predicted the public is going to have to be prepared. FEMA has done an excellent job of sharing information over the ‘net, utilizing several websites, social media accounts,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 29, 2012 | Hot News
FEMA has already issued four disaster declarations due to Hurricane Sandy. Stay tune for more. Massachusetts Hurricane Sandy 10/28/2012 01:10 AM EDT Emergency Declaration number 3350 on Oct 28, 2012 New York Hurricane Sandy 10/28/2012 01:10 AM EDT Emergency...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 29, 2012 | Hot News
A disaster preparedness plan is crucial to organisations operating in 24/7/365 environments. With zero disruption the goal, management must carefully evaluate and mitigate risks to the physical infrastructure that supports the mission-critical facility. According to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 29, 2012 | Hot News
For those of you not familiar with Google’s disaster passion – you have got to check out the Google Crisis Response Project. They have been responding to natural disasters since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by making information such as storm paths, shelter...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 25, 2012 | Hot News
Lately I’ve talked with two risk management experts who expressed their disappointment in the direction many in risk management have taken—or they might say lack of direction.One risk management and insurance industry expert was explaining that captive insurance...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 25, 2012 | Hot News
Corporate compliance and enterprise risk management are two closely inter-related spheres. A company’s risk management program would be incomplete without covering compliance risks and without using compliance tools to mitigate risks. On the other hand, compliance...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 25, 2012 | Hot News
Nobody believes you, no matter what you say, more and more people gather around, the roar of the crowd, the vicious comments, the loud voices, so many voices, and no matter what you or your employees, or your agencies do, the noise just doesn’t go down and often...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 25, 2012 | Hot News
When you sit down to make a recovery plan, you’ll often hear two pieces of advice: figure out what pieces of your operation are business critical and make sure you have a plan for everything. On the surface, these seem like contradictory statements, but they really...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 25, 2012 | Hot News
While 2012 has been a very active hurricane season in terms of total storms, the effects on life and property have been relatively small and the need for disaster recovery less than many years. Let’s all be thankful for that. Right now, Tropical Storm Sandy is...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 25, 2012 | Hot News
Governor Deval Patrick says the approaching Hurricane Sandy will not only test the state’s emergency preparedness planning, but also that of utilities now operating under a new law aimed at making them accountable for emergency response services and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 25, 2012 | Hot News
According to the analysts and assorted experts at Wikibon, one of the biggest IT challenges this year for organizations of all sizes is data protection and disaster recovery. There is no question that the increasing occurrence of natural disasters in the past few...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 24, 2012 | Hot News
CISOs increasingly are asked to manage both information security and risk. What new skills and tools do they need to juggle the dual role? David Sherry, CISO of Brown University, shares his views.Why the combined role for CISOs? Sherry explains: To read the article,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 24, 2012 | Hot News
This set of 3 tabletop exercises has proven popular over the intervening years, so here’s another troika for testing your processes for resilience or recovery.You know the drill: Appoint a moderator, gather a team representing multiple departments within the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 24, 2012 | Hot News
There are three key components of supplier management: contract management, risk management, and performance measurement. Through these key supplier management activities, procurement organizations can successfully reap the rewards of strategic cost management and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 24, 2012 | Hot News
One Case Sparks National ActionImagine… A patient goes to the doctor for a routine steroid injection. A couple weeks later, the patient feels sick – headache, fever and suddenly uncomfortable in bright light. Within days, the patient is admitted to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 24, 2012 | Hot News
Disaster recovery procedures are nothing new, but the evolution of cloud hosting allows organizations to leverage aspects of physical and virtual technologies to ensure their information systems and internal business practices remain operational in the event of any...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 24, 2012 | Hot News
It’s been 43 months since the last deadly airline crash in the United States, the longest period without a fatal domestic accident since commercial aviation expanded after World War II. That sounds like unvarnished good news, but one consequence of having such a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 23, 2012 | Hot News
I mentioned last time that I would be talking about snapshots and data protection. And so I shall! But snapshots cover a lot of ground, and I prefer to focus on particular aspects of them, rather than painting a high-level story that many are familiar with.But let’s...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 23, 2012 | Hot News
The seven defendants, all members of the “National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks,” were convicted after an apparently emotional trial in which the testimony of people who had lost loved ones were allowed. One can only imagine what...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 23, 2012 | Hot News
This set of 3 tabletop exercises has proven popular over the intervening years, so here’s another troika for testing your processes for resilience or recovery.You know the drill: Appoint a moderator, gather a team representing multiple departments within the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 22, 2012 | Hot News
You name it, the government has a pile of data about it: genomics, energy use, the weather and more. Various open data and big data initiatives at the federal government aim to make this information available to anyone who wants it. Can the inherent complexity of big...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 22, 2012 | Hot News
What a horrible and fascinating medical drama is unfolding in front of our eyes! And from a perspective of crisis leadership and crisis communications is pretty darn interesting. What is it? The multistate fungal meningitis outbreak among patients who received...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 22, 2012 | Hot News
A modification of America’s generally accepted auditing standards, or GAAS, will soon have a significant impact on audit and attestation engagements undertaken by Certified Public Accountants. Although the goal of the “clarified standards” is to make GAAS easier to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 18, 2012 | Hot News
For a minute on Oct. 18 at 10:18 a.m. some 60 radio stations will broadcast the sounds of an earthquake followed by an explanation that it’s a drill and what should be done to survive a real earthquake. Schools and other organizations will participate in drills as...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 18, 2012 | Hot News
A few weeks ago, we had a data center go down. In fact we purposely dropped it down 18 stories from a building right in the heart of Silicon Valley.What happened when this data center went down? First, it made a really, really loud boom, and then it seamlessly failed...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 18, 2012 | Hot News
his week marks 25 years since the Great Storm of 1987, widely (but erroneously) considered the only UK hurricane in living memory. 23 people died in the storm, which also caused £7.8bn worth of damage, cut power to thousands of homes and drove transport to a halt as...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 18, 2012 | Hot News
We have hurricanes in North Carolina. We have tornados, floods, ice storms and an occasional four-inch snowfall that’ll have our streets closed for days and our Northern transplants aghast and confused by the empty bread and water shelves in grocery stores. But we...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 17, 2012 | Hot News
“What exactly is a data scientist?” This question is increasingly on the minds of many in the tech world today. The mix of skills needed to be called a “data scientist” is still very much a work in progress—however, the role may not be as new...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 17, 2012 | Hot News
I talk to a lot of healthcare organizations that are embracing the cloud. They see it as a practical and cost-effective way to meet the intense demands of managing the staggering amount of patient data — and of course, medical imaging is the biggest...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 17, 2012 | Hot News
The “Timeline” portion of the November issue of Risk Management (online and in print November 1) features a disturbing sequence of workplace homicides based on retaliation, from the first Post Office shooting that coined the term “going postal” to the more recent...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 17, 2012 | Hot News
A review of disaster recovery capabilities has made multinational specialist recruitment company Hudson more resilient in its day-to-day business.“We have improved Hudson’s business continuity by modifying our disaster recovery strategy,” said Bas Alblas, IT director...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 16, 2012 | Hot News
During a recent presentation on the value of business continuity and data recovery services, the moderator threw the virtual floor open for questions from the audience. The solution provider crowd was an engaged and chatty bunch, but the questions stayed pretty...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 16, 2012 | Hot News
It is frustrating to see the amount of budget allocated to compliance when you consider that most of the money goes to documenting security controls, not improving defenses. One of the biggest reasons is that risk management, a carry-over from the bigger world of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 16, 2012 | Hot News
Current business security models fail to prepare for cyber threats in the face of highly sophisticated, powerful cyber attack tools that are no longer the preserve of nation states, as they filter down to a wider community of attackers.For the first time, hackers are...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 16, 2012 | Hot News
The establishment of a new BCI chapter for the SADC region is expected to provide a platform for practitioners to build business continuity management skills, says BCI Board member Louise Theunissen. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 16, 2012 | Hot News
As vice president of the UPS Air Group and Transportation Security, Robert Smith is a regular on the emergency management talk circuit educating audiences on how UPS handles security and helps communities in crisis. Smith is the chairperson for the Louisville, Ky.,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 15, 2012 | Hot News
Yes, indeed…that guy is the one and only! The captain of the Costa Concordia which ran into a rock and capsized off the Italian coast in January, killing up to 32 people, has sued for wrongful dismissal. And yes, he is the same Captain that abandoned his...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 15, 2012 | Hot News
Email sputters to a halt, the website goes down, and clients are suddenly on every phone line: if you don’t have an IT department to do damage control, what happens next?For many enterprises, the popularity of cloud computing and managed services has been a boon to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 15, 2012 | Hot News
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about…well, thinking.It started a few weeks ago when I was asked to talk to a group of neighborhood cub scouts about communication. I’m aware that the topic of communication can get a little deep (read: boring), so I came up with some...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 15, 2012 | Hot News
GRAND RAPIDS — Every company’s nightmare scenario is a media firestorm centered on a product recall, but according to experts, a public relations crisis doesn’t have to cause permanent damage if it’s handled properly and clearly communicated.Business people shudder at...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 15, 2012 | Hot News
No matter the point in your company’s social journey, missteps are bound to occur. For better or worse, customers now have an alluring outlet for their opinions, allowing for the dissemination of personal reflections at lightning speed. While companies aim to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 15, 2012 | Hot News
Think about the workplace of the early 2000s; if the email server went down, there was a good chance that you were still able to perform business-critical tasks while waiting for service to be resumed. Yet consider the same scenario today – the lack of access to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 11, 2012 | Hot News
Even the best companies, with a culture that flows from the top and oozes a commitment to compliance, will make mistakes. We’ve all seen it, time and again, in the papers. But some avoidable mistakes are made more often than others, and that is the focus of this...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 10, 2012 | Hot News
On June 1, 2011, a freak EF3 tornado hit Massachusetts. Many affected communities had little experience with what is generally considered a problem only in the Midwest and the South. But rather than sit around with the rest of their townspeople, wondering what to do...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 10, 2012 | Hot News
So, are you a good crisis manager? This is a difficult question for a business continuity practitioner to ask because generally they will be asking it of a senior executive or even a CEO, who is unlikely to believe they are anything less than excellent. However, many...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 10, 2012 | Hot News
IT executives and project management experts share their tips on how to choose the right PM software for your organization and how to get your employees to use it effectively. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 10, 2012 | Hot News
The first Great Southern California ShakeOut was held November 2008 and was reported to be the largest earthquake drill in U.S. history involving 5.3 million participants. This drill took place in homes, businesses, schools, places of worship and communities across...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 9, 2012 | Hot News
Gunshots rang out at North Lake College in Irving as part of a simulated school shooting Friday.Unfortunately, the student body had no warning that it was just a drill.Students, interrupted from their tests, dove beneath desks, bracing for the shooter’s entrance....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 9, 2012 | Hot News
In today’s environment of 24-7-365 global operations and competition, downtime means more than immediate lost revenue and productivity–it can also cause lasting damage to your corporate reputation and erode customer confidence in your brand. Enterprises...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 9, 2012 | Hot News
News today – whether good or bad – breaks immediately and spreads instantly, due to the constant stream of information from social media. Generally, it is a good thing that knowledge can spread so easily and readily to larger extents than ever before. The...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 9, 2012 | Hot News
Financial institutions around the world are feeling the impact of increased capital requirements on certain business lines, with 25 percent exiting these businesses, according to the fourth annual survey by the Professional Risk Managers’ Association (PRMIA), which...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 9, 2012 | Hot News
We finished the upgrade of ASA’s website last month, and tweaked our logo as well. These investments reflect our confidence that the work we do is valuable; and that the research and publications we make available on our website are being utilized. ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 8, 2012 | Hot News
We probably all remember with a certain amount of fear and trepidation when Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) emerged from China and Toronto like a rocket in 2003. The outbreak totaled 8,422 cases and 916 deaths worldwide, and highlighted the potential for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 8, 2012 | Hot News
Let’s face it, there’s some level of risk in everything we do. We work to ensure that the risks never come to pass by mitigating them and monitoring situations. If the situation escalates maybe our risk becomes an actual issue. This is true for when...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 8, 2012 | Hot News
So how prepared are Americans for a disaster that is likely to befall them in their area? Well, given our history…9/11, Katrina, Joplin, LA/San Diego fires…just to name a few, you think we would all be ready. The good news is that we are making progress!...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 8, 2012 | Hot News
Today’s IT worker is mobile and traditional ideas about brick-and-mortar offices no longer apply. This shift is a good thing as companies are already reaping benefits such as reduced costs, better productivity and a larger pool of IT talent. Of course, there are...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 8, 2012 | Hot News
As a haggard old former techie nursing the scars of years in the DR trenches, I’m very excited by the opportunities that well implemented cloud computing can bring to BCM. It’s easy to be an evangelist for a technology that, when done right, can reduce at a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 8, 2012 | Hot News
While some may use the two terms interchangeably to describe the same process, “business planning” is distinguished from “strategy setting” in two fundamental ways.First, strategy setting establishes the enterprise’s overall strategic direction, differentiating...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 8, 2012 | Hot News
According to a survey of 56 corporate and governmental organizations conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the average amount they paid for all the costs associated with cyberattacks was $8.9 million during the past year. That’s up 6% from the previous...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 5, 2012 | Hot News
Companies may not always have preparations in place to deal with disasters, but cloud computing’s remote backup can help store mission-critical data off-site so information is out of harm’s way. Cloud Times’ Florence de Borja recently explained the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 5, 2012 | Hot News
In just about any business, managing risk has been a little like keeping order on a storm-tossed ship. The environment is always changing, creating new challenges with every passing day. But over the past few years, it has frequently felt more like being caught in...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 5, 2012 | Hot News
Advances in technology have linked business activities closer than ever. In coping with disaster, a weakness on one front can endanger the entire operation of a company or organization.Yet, national data indicate that fewer than half of all businesses have business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 5, 2012 | Hot News
The value placed on organizational resilience is growing. Big business, government, institutions, professionals and insurers each strongly promote it, encouraging uptake of business continuity management across all sectors and scales of activity. This...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 5, 2012 | Hot News
The 1980’s Tylenol poisoning murders spurred panic, wide-spread fear, and perhaps the best-ever corporate response to a major public relations crisis. James E. Burke, then CEO of Tylenol-maker Johnson & Johnson, died on September 28 at the age of 87. He will be...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 4, 2012 | Hot News
We’ve reached a tipping point in cyber-crime and the bad news is that the bad guys are winning.The top five hacks since 2011 affected more than 211 million users worldwide. In the US alone, there were 855 corporate data breaches involving 174 million records last...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 4, 2012 | Hot News
A single electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack could affect the entire United States. Power would go out, financial infrastructure would be lost, electronics would be fried. Cars, trains, and airplanes would be useless hunks of metal. If energy, pumps, and transportation...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 4, 2012 | Hot News
The economic down turn that began in 2008 prompted many companies to rethink their employee-hiring requirements and practices—which largely involve acquiring employees with unique IT skill-sets. Many of these skills and areas of expertise do not require...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 4, 2012 | Hot News
I just finished a research document titled Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Data Security And Privacy Program for the The Security Architecture And Operations Playbook. This was a lot of fun to write, because I was able to look back at the 50-plus interviews...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 3, 2012 | Hot News
More than 400 new U.S. cases of West Nile virus [infection] emerged in the last week in an outbreak that remains the 2nd worst on record but has begun to show signs of slowing. So far this year [2012], 3545 cases have been reported to federal health officials as of 25...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 3, 2012 | Hot News
Natural hazards — earthquakes, tropical cyclones and thunderstorms, for example — occur with considerable frequency around the world. Fortunately, most events are either not intense enough or too remote to cause damage. But the probability that a given natural hazard...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 3, 2012 | Hot News
Each year, Forrester Research and the Disaster Recovery Journal team up to launch a study examining the state of business and technology resiliency. Each year, we focus on a particular resiliency domain: business continuity, IT disaster recovery or crisis management...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 3, 2012 | Hot News
NEWARK, N.J. — A recent Decision and Order issued by the National Labor Relations Board that invalidated electronic posting or social media limits enacted by Costco Wholesale Corp. could have a chilling effect on many companies, according to Joseph P. Paranac Jr., a...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 3, 2012 | Hot News
An MIT professor once said there is zero correlation between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence abounds throughout any healthcare organization. When faced with a potential data breach or other incident that can potentially harm organizations and their customers, an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 3, 2012 | Hot News
Did you know every state has its own emergency management office? A lot of big cities do too. We got to check out the Washington, D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (D.C. HSEMA) and we learned a lot about the important work people do at these...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 2, 2012 | Hot News
Six major American banks were hit in a wave of computer attacks last week, by a group claiming Middle Eastern ties, that caused Internet blackouts and delays in online banking. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 2, 2012 | Hot News
Managers and internal auditors don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye when it comes to the results of an IT audit. And that could prove problematic for the enterprise.Carolyn Holcomb, who leads PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Risk Assurance Data Protection and Privacy...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 2, 2012 | Hot News
The saying goes that in every crisis, there is an opportunity. Compliance requirements, data and privacy demands, and the threat landscape are constantly evolving, forcing companies to realize the importance of security and invest accordingly. As security concerns...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 2, 2012 | Hot News
Nowadays, most CISOs readily acknowledge that it’s not a matter of “if” they’ll be breached, but “when” the breach will occur. In fact, the rapidly shifting threat landscape, fueled by a burgeoning cybercrime economy, has many organizations asking themselves,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 1, 2012 | Hot News
There is an old saying, which some attribute as an old Chinese proverb, that states “May you live in interesting times.” Some say that this is a blessing you may wish upon a friend, while others say it is actually a curse. Within the information security industry it...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 1, 2012 | Hot News
Flu Season is from November – April although as of today, we have cases already in many parts of the United States. If you would like to “follow along” with the season, I would recommend that you sign up for the weekly missive from the CDC entitled “Flu Weekly” and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 1, 2012 | Hot News
The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) by mandate has added Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) like financial reporting attestation compliance to the list of required activities for credit unions. Why has the NCUA put SOX, or financial...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 1, 2012 | Hot News
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Plans to use an array of powerful air cannons in an undersea seismic study near a Central California nuclear power plant have federal and state officials juggling concerns over marine life with public safety.Pacific Gas & Electric Co....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Oct 1, 2012 | Hot News
Businesses must make availability of IT services a boardroom issue because there is growing evidence of employee frustration and resentment when systems are unavailable, according to research from Imperial College.Many staff now expect systems to be accessible...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 28, 2012 | Hot News
When you think about emergency preparation, you probably think about having enough food and water on hand to last a few days. Many families who live in areas prone to power outages wisely keep generators to run appliances during emergencies. They also store extra...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 28, 2012 | Hot News
Skeptics still question cloud computing’s value, reliability and security, but users who have taken the cloud plunge say those on the sidelines are missing out. This long-running debate over cloud benefits and challenges shows no signs of stopping, even as cloud...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 28, 2012 | Hot News
The rapid adoption of mobile devices and cloud services together with a multitude of new partnerships and customer-facing applications has extended the identity boundary of today’s enterprise. For the extended enterprise, identity and access management (IAM) is more...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 28, 2012 | Hot News
The Cabinet Office, in partnership with the Business Continuity Institute, have launched a survival guide for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Today, the Cabinet Office has launched ‘Business Continuity for Dummies’, a survival guide for SMEs. The Cabinet Office,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 28, 2012 | Hot News
HR, Legal and Media Communications Disaster Recovery 10 Point Checklist A list of 10 questions to rank how comprehensive your organization’s processes are around disaster recovery and business continuity plans. HR, Legal and Media Communications Disaster Recovery 10...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 27, 2012 | Hot News
Executives know they face risks, but they often don’t know which risks are real, or what that exposure means to their business.The aim of security risk management is to remove the guesswork and help the business make smarter decisions.As Jay Jacobs, vice...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 27, 2012 | Hot News
ExaGrid Systems announced the results of a survey of 1,200 IT managers which shows widespread dissatisfaction with the capabilities of many existing backup systems to keep up with requirements for faster backups with permanently short backup windows as data grows,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 27, 2012 | Hot News
In the July/August issue of Emergency Management, Jim McKay’s article Who’s Prepared? Not Many highlighted some of the many reasons that members of the community at large, and even the emergency management community, have not created preparedness kits. No...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 27, 2012 | Hot News
Disaster recovery and the cloud should be a match made in heaven. Take a function that enterprises love to hate and address it with an outsourced, efficient cloud service that makes it easier and less expensive to reach recoverable nirvana, and presto – instant...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 27, 2012 | Hot News
Hit by Hurricane Isaac a few weeks ago, many business owners have reopened their doors and are getting back to business as normal. But with so many people still cleaning up their homes and neighborhoods, some employers are struggling with the question: How can I help...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 27, 2012 | Hot News
The popular yellow cover Dummies Guides from Wiley adds a new title to the series today focusing on Business Continuity. The Dummies Guide to Business Continuity has been published with support from the Cabinet Office especially to help support the 4.5 million...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 26, 2012 | Hot News
Thanks in part to a drastic increase in prescription narcotic abuse among the public, drug use on the job has also increased — and with alarming effects for employers. The following infographic, courtesy of Compliance and Safety, illustrates the magnitude of the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 26, 2012 | Hot News
Whoever first said that ignorance is no excuse when it comes to the law obviously never met the U.S. Code or the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, which together comprise hundreds of thousands of pages of text. For companies in the U.S., this maze of rules governing...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 26, 2012 | Hot News
Several years ago, the National Security Agency wasted millions on a circuit-switched approach to mobile security strategy. With help from the Department of Defense, the NSA is doing things differently now. Enterprise CIOs can learn a few things from the effort, too....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 26, 2012 | Hot News
It was a recent generator failure during a Sydney brownout that triggered disaster recovery procedures for foreign currency exchange OzForex. The global company relies on emails to conduct online business 24 hours a day, but thanks to planning it had already moved...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 26, 2012 | Hot News
The NFL robbed the Green Bay Packers of a win this week. They did it in the name of money.Commissioner Roger Goodell, acting on behalf of the owners of the 32 teams, allowed incompetent replacement referees to run the game, rather than paying a few dollars more to the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 26, 2012 | Hot News
Herndon, VA, September 26, 2012 | COOP Systems, the developer of the most advanced Business Continuity Management (BCM) software package in the world, now supports the full life cycle for the new ISO 22301:2012 BCMS standard.”We believe that most large...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 25, 2012 | Hot News
Data centers across the world use about 30 billion watts of electricity, about the same as the output of 30 nuclear power plants, with digital warehouses in the U.S. accounting for one-quarter to one-third of that load, The New York Times reports. To read the article,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 25, 2012 | Hot News
I’ve been engaging by some smaller companies recently and it has given me some insight into what the “best bang for buck” information security activities they should be doing. Here’s a list of some of the fundamental security controls they should...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 25, 2012 | Hot News
The electronic patient record is one of the most ambitious information technology projects of our time. Despite promises of better safety and care, its speedy introduction has been slowed down by concerns about data protection. To read this article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 24, 2012 | Hot News
If you’re CIO at a large enterprise — or a small one, for that matter — chances are good that you’re seeing a steady rise in the number of employees using smartphones and tablets at work. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 24, 2012 | Hot News
After years of preparation and much scepticism in some quarters, London 2012 is now over. Both the Olympic and Paralympic Games have been hailed globally as great achievements. Oddly, I have received congratulations from colleagues and friends in all...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 24, 2012 | Hot News
As a leader, you worry that your employees can respond to a disaster, especially a mass shooting. Active shooter responses such as, in priority order, RUN – HIDE – FIGHT can save lives. But you may overlook something terribly important when it comes to planning for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 24, 2012 | Hot News
RIM’s U.K. branch acknowledged the problem in a short message on Twitter early Friday morning. “Some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service,” the company wrote. “We are investigating and apologize for any...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 24, 2012 | Hot News
Digital disruption will cause a transition and upheaval of products in nearly every industry. Sourcing and vendor management professionals will be driven to become more involved with third-party product development services providers. It is important to have in place...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 21, 2012 | Hot News
This is the view of Clifford Ferguson, chairperson of the South African BCI Forum and Government Pensions Administration Agency (GPAA) BC Committee, who says that when business continuity is top of mind, companies can deal with any eventuality. To read the article,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 21, 2012 | Hot News
Data security consistently tops the laundry list of security priorities because it must. Organizations are collecting data, creating data, using data, and storing data in some way or another. Mishandle data or disregard privacy, and you’ve got a public relations...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 21, 2012 | Hot News
Although we’ve only been working at FEMA for a few months now, we have learned how important it is to be prepared, no matter where you are. And with the new school year underway, we’ve been learning some important things to help keep kids and parents safer. Things...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 21, 2012 | Hot News
To really know if your BC plan is complete it will do the job it’s intended to do, you’ve got to test it. It may help if you think of it as “exercising” the plan to make sure it’s up to the task if called upon. Testing should be done at least twice a year; the type of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 20, 2012 | Hot News
Enterprise governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) tools have become indispensable to organizations. Maybe you acquired your GRC tool for one initiative such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or International Standard for Organization (ISO) compliance management. To read the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 20, 2012 | Hot News
One of the strongest threads woven into the fabric of American culture is that of volunteer service. When someone is in need, we ask what can be done to help. This is never more evident than during a time of disaster. As we recognize September as National Preparedness...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 20, 2012 | Hot News
The continued news on the financial and employment losses of Hurricane Isaac is a poignant reminder of the threat natural disasters pose to business and economic growth. Last year alone, global economic losses from natural disasters totaled a remarkable $370 billion...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 19, 2012 | Hot News
In upcoming testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, I’ll be assessing the Department of Homeland Security, with particular focus on cybersecurity. Probably the most important point I’ll be making is a simple one: We will never defend our...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 19, 2012 | Hot News
Small businesses may not have the resources to prepare for disasters like larger firms, but that does not mean they cannot have systems in place to protect mission-critical data from such incidents. With remote backup solutions, for example, companies get an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 19, 2012 | Hot News
As the number of jurisdictions enacting antitrust laws surpasses 100, extraterritoriality (the ability of those outside a jurisdiction to be held liable within the jurisdiction) becomes a significant risk management issue for multi-national companies. To read the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 19, 2012 | Hot News
ioSafe, the storage company that has gained some Internet notoriety by challenging users to try to destroy its encased hard drives and arrays, today released a new disaster-proof cloud NAS appliance. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 18, 2012 | Hot News
You don’t have to look hard to find tales of technological disaster. The Gauss virus infiltrated thousands of Middle Eastern PCs, where it could intercept online banking credentials. Apple iPhones were revealed to be vulnerable to spoofed SMS messages. Floods all but...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 18, 2012 | Hot News
First of all, what is Dengue Fever? Dengue fever (DF) is a virus-caused disease that is spread by mosquitoes. DF is caused by one of four different but related viruses. Dengue fever is being seen more often in world travelers. It is spread by the bite of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 18, 2012 | Hot News
With the risk taking culture in financial services continuing to dominate the headlines, Jon Dymond, director at global management consultancy Hay Group, looks at how firms can keep employees’ enthusiasm for risk-taking in line with their organisations’ risk appetite....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 18, 2012 | Hot News
If you need any more proof that you should take the threat of disasters seriously, consider this: Companies lose as much as $90,000 for every hour of downtime due to systems disruptions, and the survival rate for companies without a disaster recovery plan is less than...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 17, 2012 | Hot News
Security is one of the things in most businesses minds; Cloud storage can now offer levels of security, business continuity and disaster recovery for all sizes of businesses through scalable solutions. Data backup In a straightforward data backup, the cloud acts as an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 17, 2012 | Hot News
Most insurers will automatically cut-off business income loss benefits after a business rebuilds or repairs the damaged premises and opens for business. However, this all-too-prevalent claim practice could be inadequate and harmful if the policy has an extended...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 17, 2012 | Hot News
Police in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Florida, used a first-of-its-kind LTE cellular network dedicated to law enforcement as part of security operations for the Republican National Convention in August. The network was a demonstration project for the proposed National...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 17, 2012 | Hot News
Hundreds of visitors flocked to the former Lehigh Valley Expo Center on Cetronia Road in South Whitehall Saturday to learn how police, ambulance and fire personnel respond when disasters strike — and how to prepare for the worst themselves. The Emergency...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 17, 2012 | Hot News
It was Pakistan’s worst industrial accident, officials said, and it came just hours after another fire, at a shoe factory in the eastern city of Lahore, had killed at least 25. Flames and smoke swept the cramped textile factory in Baldia Town, a northwestern...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 12, 2012 | Hot News
The Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia — which all adult Muslims who are physically and financially able to do so are obliged to make once in their lifetime — takes place on different dates each year; the 2012 Hajj is expected to take place...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 12, 2012 | Hot News
To some, an “SLA,” or service-level agreement, represents a formal contract between a customer and a supplier. to others, it signifies a guarantee that a service will always be available and operational. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 12, 2012 | Hot News
These days, vendors and analysts alike are telling us everything and anything can, or should, be moved into the cloud. Indeed, there are certain areas of the business that are ripe for cloud engagements. But there are other areas that are best left alone, at least for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 5, 2012 | Hot News
When cloud computing first made its appearance some years ago it was heralded as the start of a revolution within the IT industry.IT companies and resellers, eager to climb aboard the bandwagon, rushed to bring new ‘cloud-based’ services to market, and the concept...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 5, 2012 | Hot News
As businesses in the Gulf Coast are finding out again, having a disaster recovery plan is critical to a business’ survival. According to the “Gulf Coast Back to Business Act (2007),” 43 percent of businesses that close after a natural disaster never reopen, and an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 5, 2012 | Hot News
Too many organizations question the value of a business continuity plan, viewing it as costly and difficult to implement. Don’t be fooled: you need to understand how an unexpected disaster can harm your business and the steps you can take to function in almost any...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 4, 2012 | Hot News
Last summer an EF3 tornado ripped through my town, Monson, Massachusetts. There is a very particular feeling of vulnerability you experience in such a violent storm. You crouch in a dark basement, the windows explode inwards, and you have no idea if the groaning beams...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 4, 2012 | Hot News
Earlier this week as I began to put this blog together, Hurricane Isaac made landfall in southeastern Louisiana, with winds of 80 mph that spread out over an area 200 miles wide. It was a Category 1 hurricane as it came ashore, and the National Hurricane Center...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 4, 2012 | Hot News
Zoonotic infections…What are those you say?!?!? A zoonotic disease is an infection that is naturally transmitted from vertebrate animals to human beings. Pigs have been the source of significant zoonotic infections of humans, including like this one, a fatal...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 4, 2012 | Hot News
There is no arguing the fact that modern medicine is saving lives every day. Unfortunately, there is also a downside. By making the use of certain medications, specifically antibiotics, extremely prevalent, we are creating new and deadly “superbugs” that threaten to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Sep 4, 2012 | Hot News
Isaac, the storm drenching Arkansas after making landfall in Louisiana as a hurricane, may cost insurers as much as $2 billion in the U.S., risk-modeling firm AIR Worldwide said. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 31, 2012 | Hot News
Data Security is the practice of keeping data protected from unauthorized access and corruption.The focus behind data security is to provide privacy while protecting personal or corporate data.Data is the raw form of information stored in databases, network servers...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 31, 2012 | Hot News
The continually increasing pressure from line-of-business executives demanding IT’s consideration of cloud and SaaS solutions to realize the benefits of budgetary and operational flexibility has mostly forced technologists into two philosophical camps with...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 31, 2012 | Hot News
Last week, following on President Obama’s memorandum on managing government records, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued a records management (RM) directive. The directive affects all US...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 31, 2012 | Hot News
Projects to build advanced public safety networks in more than 20 state and local jurisdictions are on hold indefinitely while the federal government sorts out the details for creating a nationwide interoperable communications network for first responders. To read the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 31, 2012 | Hot News
Despite Isaac being downgraded to a tropical depression earlier today, the threat of heavy rains and flooding remains in many areas. At the direction of President Barack Obama we continue to coordinate the federal government’s response and recovery...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 30, 2012 | Hot News
The seemingly never-ending breaches of data over the years has prompted most states to enact data privacy breach notification laws. But some states are ahead of others in this initiative. The below map from Imation shows which states are laying down the law when it...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 30, 2012 | Hot News
What is a healthy culture and how do you change an unhealthy culture? I have always thought that baseball was a simple game: You throw the ball; you hit the ball; you catch the ball. I had also thought that you could measure whether a baseball team had a healthy...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 30, 2012 | Hot News
Over lunch, a CFO recently shared the difficulties C-level management face since the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) with Kathleen M. Marcus, Shareholder at Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth and Chair of its Compliance and Corporate Governance Practice Group. He...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 30, 2012 | Hot News
The requirement for appropriate enterprise risk management (ERM) techniques continues to grow. The recently passed Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act calls for a risk committee to be established by all public, nonbank financial companies, as...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 30, 2012 | Hot News
We continue to work closely with our federal, state, local and tribal partners as Isaac impacts portions of the Gulf Coast. As we mentioned in our blog post earlier today that included safety tips, flooding and power outages remain significant threats from tropical...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 30, 2012 | Hot News
As businesses rely more heavily on their data center services, the cost of downtime increases. And for these (and other) businesses, hurricane season is a strong reminder of the need to plan ahead for potential disasters. One disaster recovery option for companies is...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 30, 2012 | Hot News
When a parent drops off a child at a school or child-care facility, there’s a reasonable expectation that he or she will be safe and cared for, especially in times of emergency. But a new report by the international child-advocacy group Save the Children raises...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 29, 2012 | Hot News
NEW ORLEANS – Hurricane Isaac continued to pound Louisiana with heavy rains and damaging winds Wednesday as forecasters said the biggest threat is storm surge flooding from central Louisiana to the Panhandle of Florida. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 29, 2012 | Hot News
The rise of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs is the single most radical shift in the economics of client computing for business since PCs ‘invaded’ the workplace, according to Gartner. Every business needs a clearly articulated position on BYOD, even if it...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 29, 2012 | Hot News
Perhaps you’ve heard that the next new thing in IT is “big data” and concluded that the hype-cycle machine is turning out another attention-getter. I’m not big on predicting paradigm shifts, so I won’t in this case. But I will say that if...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 29, 2012 | Hot News
When you’re faced with another predictable work-week, it’s hard to think of what you (and your data center) would do if the unthinkable happened. Yet, over the past 12 months, a wide swath of U.S. businesses has had to do just that after being confronted...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 29, 2012 | Hot News
Business continuity planning in a federal government setting is a component of baseline security requirements and forms a process that aims to ensure that critical government services can be continually delivered in the event of a potential disaster, a security...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 29, 2012 | Hot News
In this interview, Herbert ‘Hugh’ Thompson, Program Committee Chair for RSA Conferences and Chief Security Strategist at People Security, talks about challenges faced by information security leaders, privacy issues, social networking, and RSA Conference...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 28, 2012 | Hot News
With the 2012 hurricane season intensifying, MIR3, Inc., the innovator of real-time Intelligent Notification and response technology, reminds employers to review current business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans to be prepared to protect employees and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 28, 2012 | Hot News
In-the-wild exploit targets unpatched Java 7 vulnerability affecting Windows, OS X, and Linux. Security experts advise disabling Java in browsers. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 28, 2012 | Hot News
When I was growing up in the south of England, we didn’t see a lot of snow, but after a big storm my father would always say, “There’s nothing like a good snowfall to get the neighbours talking to each other.”He was right. Our neighbours, who usually kept to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 28, 2012 | Hot News
The London 2012 Olympic Games were more successful than any of us dared hope, not only in terms of the UK’s medal haul but also in terms of safety. While the threat level was upgraded to “severe” during the competition period, meaning attack was highly likely, the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 27, 2012 | Hot News
From the earthquake induced tsunami resulting in fires in Japan, to the floods in Thailand and Australia – the list of natural catastrophes that hit several countries around the globe these past two years reads like a Steven King novel.Hard lessons in...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 27, 2012 | Hot News
This last week the CDC has some rather startling numbers to report about the encroachment of West Nile Virus (WNV) into our daily lives. So far in 2012, 47 states have reported West Nile virus infections in people, birds, or mosquitoes with a total of 1118 cases of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 27, 2012 | Hot News
I heard some interesting comments the other day while attending a project team meeting. It came from a business representative that was making all kinds of assumptions without really understanding what they were saying. I kept hearing things like;...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 27, 2012 | Hot News
Breaking into their school’s computer database isn’t usually a sign of a good student, but when senior Jacob Bigham used a teacher’s password to gain access to Troy High’s records, it wasn’t to change grades or cause mischief. Rather, Bigham was on the hunt for the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 24, 2012 | Hot News
It was an ordinary, cloudless morning in England on September 1, 1859. This was the heyday of the Victorian amateur scientist, before science became institutional. One such amateur astronomer, Richard Carrington, was doing what he often did, which was monitor the sun....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 24, 2012 | Hot News
Even a quick glance back at the enforcement landscape of recent years can send a proverbial chill down the spine of any compliance officer—the legislative aftermath of the financial crisis, corporate enforcement penalties routinely adding up to hundreds of millions of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 23, 2012 | Hot News
Wow…need some inspiration??? Start here! These sisters are incredible!!!! They tell the story of the Monson, Massachusetts tornado. A tornado in Massachusetts ?!?!? Right…they aren’t supposed to happen there! So imagine the surprise when...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 23, 2012 | Hot News
Recent Salesforce.com issues reported by Chris Kanaracus in PC World caused me to think about business continuity processes in a cloud deployment scenario.A single service outage does not change my opinion of the cloud. The cloud is good. It reduces the cost of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 23, 2012 | Hot News
1. Deploy assessment methodologies that are tailored to key compliance risk areas.Risk assessment is not alone about measuring corporate culture; an effective assessment process will also examine closely “substantive” areas of law/policy, and this, in turn,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 23, 2012 | Hot News
Crisis management you may ask, why do I need to worry about that? What does crisis management have to do with your company marketing your business? Lack of a crisis management plan could potentially cost your firm everything if you are not concerned with mitigating...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 23, 2012 | Hot News
With an estimated additional three million journeys being made daily during the London Olympics, we at Lasa wanted to find out how London charities coped with the disruption. Happily, our quick poll of 57 charity professionals found that almost all of them (96%) felt...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 22, 2012 | Hot News
Last week Harris County, Texas, stood up the first 14 sites of what could one day become a nationwide broadband wireless network for public safety. The launch was a major milestone in an effort stretching back to the late 1990s, when Congress ordered the FCC to set...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 22, 2012 | Hot News
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”When Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke those famous words in 1933, he was trying to rally a nation suffering through the Great Depression. If FDR were alive today and wearing my shoes as an industry analyst, he might use...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 22, 2012 | Hot News
An independent catastrophe risk management and modelling firm has issued a report looking at the cost in insured losses that would be incurred today from some of history’s largest and most severe hurricane events. Karen Clark & Company (KCC) has published a report...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 22, 2012 | Hot News
The number of West Nile virus cases in the U.S. has jumped dramatically in one week, increasing to 1,118, with 41 deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today.The report marks a substantial increase from last week’s report of 693 cases and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 22, 2012 | Hot News
Encryption in the Cloud is a Ponemon Institute report sponsored by Thales.The study considers how encryption is used to ensure sensitive or confidential data is kept safe and secure when transferred to external-based cloud service providers. 4,140 business and IT...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 21, 2012 | Hot News
The importance of business continuity planning is a no-brainer–if you’re a security leader who already thinks in terms of security and risk, that is. But convincing business executives, who typically think in dollars and cents, of such a plan’s...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 21, 2012 | Hot News
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last half-decade, you know that virtualization is changing the landscape of IT and data centers. In terms of financial impact, virtualization untethers applications from physical servers, creating valuable savings....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 21, 2012 | Hot News
Utilities traditionally have responded well to localized emergencies, such as power outages caused by storms. However, there is always the threat of a natural disaster, as demonstrated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the multi-region US 2011 summer...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 21, 2012 | Hot News
In 2011, the world experienced a half percent drop in global GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a direct result of the catastrophic Japanese earthquake and tsunami. This single event profoundly impacted business continuity, interrupted the supply chains of countless...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 20, 2012 | Hot News
An article by Aliya Sternstein titled Agencies don’t often share tips on potential terrorist activity on the Nextgov Web site (see http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2012/08/agencies-dont-often-share-tips-potential-terrorist-activity/57496/?oref=ng-channelriver) complains...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 20, 2012 | Hot News
A new mobile disaster preparedness app from the Insurance Information Institute (I.I.I.) delivers checklists, communication tools and vital safety tips to prepare users for hurricanes, wildfire, severe winter weather, earthquakes and other disasters. The...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 20, 2012 | Hot News
The 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew is next Friday, Aug. 24. As shared in last week’s column, I experienced firsthand the ravages of this category 5 hurricane. Today I describe how Andrew affected my business and what it took to recover from this powerful...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 20, 2012 | Hot News
When it comes to safeguarding your businesses information technology assets, most people think of backup. That’s true, to a point. But backup is just one leg of a three-legged stool that your business must sit on.As businesses of all types, large and small, have...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 20, 2012 | Hot News
A 2011 Burston-Marsteller study found that 59% of business leaders have experienced a crisis at their current or previous companies, 32% of those crises led to a drop in revenue, and 24% led to cutbacks or layoffs. You probably have a Business Continuity or crisis...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 20, 2012 | Hot News
Too many organizations are missing the point on what comprises a bona fide HIPAA Security Risk Analysis. Rachel V. Rose, JD, MBA wrote this article originally for Becker’s Hospital Review and has granted permission to republished the article here. Rachel...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 17, 2012 | Hot News
A fable that CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle heard from his grandmother many years ago still resonates today. The message is simple–if you pour salt into a pot of tea, pour it out and start over–and it applies to many an IT investment. To read the article,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 17, 2012 | Hot News
I recently went for coffee with a very interesting gentleman who had previously been responsible for threat and vulnerability management in a global bank – our conversation roamed far and wide but kept on circling back to one or two core messages – the real...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 17, 2012 | Hot News
First it was the massive fraud committed at MF Global, where company trading losses were conveniently covered with client money — $1.6 billion to be exact — that will likely never be repaid. Then it was the Peregrine Financial Group debacle, the Madoff-like scandal...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 17, 2012 | Hot News
A survey by EEF, the manufacturers’ organization, has found that many UK companies are looking to re-shore production in response to supply chain risks.Increasing numbers of manufacturers are bringing production back in-house and increasing their hunt for local supply...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 16, 2012 | Hot News
Last month, Ed and I spent a couple days in Paris with Orange’s management team for their annual analyst event. Overall I was impressed with Orange’s innovation in business service offerings as well as their extensive global reach. Many of the large telecoms...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 16, 2012 | Hot News
Failure # 1: Using SpreadsheetsNearly all spreadsheets contain errors, which is to be expected with information entered without effective controls. Whether it is because of incorrect background equipment data or a wrong formula, there’s little doubt...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 16, 2012 | Hot News
As The Data Center Journal noted last week, if you run a data center, you’re eventually going to face a downtime situation. Regardless of the “size” of the outage, if your business depends on your IT resources, you lose money each second your facility isn’t...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 16, 2012 | Hot News
Throw away food that may have come in contact with flood or storm water. Throw away canned foods that are bulging, opened, or damaged. Throw away food that has an unusual odor, color, or texture. Throw away perishable foods (including meat, poultry, fish, eggs and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 16, 2012 | Hot News
The London Olympics is now over and we are still coming to terms with its success. Those who had predicted chaos and possibly carnage have been proven wrong. Every few years an event or threat seems to emerge that gets everyone’s attention. Sometimes it is an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 14, 2012 | Hot News
Public-private partnerships are a hot topic these days, but it’s not a new idea for many representatives of the critical infrastructure sectors.InfraGard — an under-the-radar FBI-sponsored volunteer program — has been promoting this type of collaboration for the past...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 14, 2012 | Hot News
Richard Dolewski, a disaster recovery (DR) expert with Velocity Technology Services, has seen things in the DR world that will make you cringe, such as the Fortune 500 company without a DR plan or recoverable systems. With extreme weather events on the rise and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 14, 2012 | Hot News
When a community is truly resilient, it should be able to avoid the cascading system failures to help minimize any disaster’s disruptionBusiness Disaster and Business Continuity to everyday life and the local economy. A resilient community is not only prepared...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 14, 2012 | Hot News
The ISO’s recently announced business continuity standard (ISO 22301), developed to help businesses of all sizes, location or industry, will have wide ranging implications for organisations across the world. The standard, based on the British Standard BS 25999, aims...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 14, 2012 | Hot News
Only 46% of banks are confident that their company has adequate risk management tools and processes, and that management follows risk management recommendations, as found by a recent Tower Watson survey. This article shows how to refine risk management mechanism and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 14, 2012 | Hot News
Many large organizations are not confident in their ability to fight off the latest salvos of advanced persistent threats, and are relying on reactive approaches even as they talk about being more proactive, a new survey has found. To read the article, please click...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 14, 2012 | Hot News
As a career security practitioner and Chief Security Officer to several companies over the years, my significant responsibility to the organization I am responsible for is simply to reduce or eliminate threat exposures to its core business assets. Depending on the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 13, 2012 | Hot News
Anyone taking a look at the image in this link and those that follow, which appear at weather.com this week, should have a good idea what this post is about: It is time – perhaps past time – to get ready for the hurricane season. To read the article, please click...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 13, 2012 | Hot News
The old, sardonic phrase “no good deed goes unpunished” isn’t exactly true. Doing good for your stakeholders is a great way to sink roots into your community and grow your reputation. The lesson that Travelocity should learn from its latest social media misstep is...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 13, 2012 | Hot News
I overheard an interesting comment the other day between two senior project management representatives: ‘…just go straight to the impact analysis; we already know what are risks are.’ I’m paraphrasing a bit but what got me was that they were talking about not...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 13, 2012 | Hot News
The number of swine flu cases is continuing to expand in the United States and in the past week has jumped up by another 16. From July 12 through August 9, 2012, a total of 153 infections with influenza A (H3N2) variant (H3N2v) viruses have been reported in four...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 13, 2012 | Hot News
Risk management is not overly complicated and all organisations have been doing this in one form or another for as long as they have existed. Sadly too many rules and regulations forced the focus of risk management to centralised controls and an over-emphasis on...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 9, 2012 | Hot News
Achieving resilience in the supply chain is something all organizations aspire to. We still have a long way to go, and it may be that increasing or improving resilience in the supply chain is a more realistic goal than achieving resilience. To read the article, please...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 9, 2012 | Hot News
By now, most executives probably realize that cybercrime and cyber-espionage are very real threats to their organization. But do they realize the extent of financial devastation that can be caused by a data breach?U.S. companies lose about $250 billion every year due...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 9, 2012 | Hot News
“Here comes the story of the hurricane.” This famous Bob Dylan song lyric opens our tale of a company that was doing quite well for itself. It was profitable, expanding and experiencing increasing demand from customers and prospects alike. All was sunny on the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 9, 2012 | Hot News
Before an emergency or disaster strikes is the optimum time for emergency managers to engage their community in public education, community preparedness activities, training, exercises and advocacy. Traditionally these components are handled in very resource-heavy...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 9, 2012 | Hot News
Achieving resilience in the supply chain is something all organizations aspire to. We still have a long way to go, and it may be that increasing or improving resilience in the supply chain is a more realistic goal than achieving resilience. To read the article, please...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 9, 2012 | Hot News
A new study reveals that 90 percent of IT decision-makers believe their data is vulnerable in a disaster, and 27 percent experienced some type of data security incident during the last year. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 9, 2012 | Hot News
The new international business continuity standard, ISO22301 , was launched in May 2012 and BSI Spain have already issued its first ISO 22301 certificate to Bankinter, a global financial services company.Bankinter is the first organization to be issued an ISO 22301...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 8, 2012 | Hot News
Anyone who has actually managed a business’ recovery from a disaster knows that the most critical factor when it comes to business and operation continuity is having a plan in place before the disaster strikes. While disaster recovery will always involve some...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 8, 2012 | Hot News
IT Governance Ltd, the global leader in business continuity management expertise, has today launched one of the first ISO22301 training programmes in the UK to provide delegates with essential foundation and implementation knowledge on the new international business...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 8, 2012 | Hot News
Statistically, more reports about fraud and potential compliance & ethics deviations are made through the management chain of command than through a “hotline.” While chain-of-command reporting is, in my opinion, the better path, it could also remove a significant...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 8, 2012 | Hot News
To successfully protect their organizations in an increasingly risky and litigious world, it’s imperative that risk managers and in-house counsel partner closely with each other. NU spoke with several members of our Risk Managers Advisory Board to hear about the most...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 6, 2012 | Hot News
This morning I was sipping tea and doing a little research for a client exercise. The narrative? Workplace violence. This is a topic we are unfortunately very comfortable with…we have done at least a 100 workplace violence exercises in the past 15...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 6, 2012 | Hot News
When hepatitis A was discovered in a worker at Sydney fresh salad bar SumoSalad, the company initially did some things well, but they also made some crucial errors in crisis communication.It was a nightmare scenario for any food company, and even more so for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 6, 2012 | Hot News
Businesses today, no matter their size, depend upon information technology to deliver their products and services to market.IT is fundamental to business operations; its sudden failure can wreak havoc on the organization’s supply chain, financial systems, internal and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 6, 2012 | Hot News
One in four Asia Pacific enterprises suffered a security breach in the last year – slightly ahead of the international rate of 22 per cent. In the next 12 months 22 per cent of Apac organisations expect data leakage to be the single most significant security challenge...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 3, 2012 | Hot News
Emergency responders in East Lyme, Old Lyme, and Lyme performed well in the statewide emergency drill this week but town leaders still worry about getting the word out if a hurricane actually happened. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 3, 2012 | Hot News
Zero-day attacks, which strike software vulnerabilities that are unknown and thus unpatched, are inherently difficult to prepare for. Your security team probably has some strategies and protective technologies in place, but few BC/DR experts have factored these...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 3, 2012 | Hot News
In my first post in the Test-Driven Business (TDB) series, I took the liberty of being a little provocative, placing Planning after Ideation and Implementation as one possible way in which the three phases could be sequenced. This arrangement is illustrated in Figure...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 3, 2012 | Hot News
Risk management policies should be more “strategic and proactive”, instead of “tactical and fear-driven”, according to security watchers, who note despite the growing awareness over the importance of IT security, its approach can still be...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 2, 2012 | Hot News
They began to bend in the roaring wind, then their steel girders snapped like twigs, the towers toppled and the lights went out.Minutes before the windstorm arrived to pummel the Washington area on June 29, it swept east through West Virginia, crushing three...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 2, 2012 | Hot News
ASIS International is a professional society focused on security matters and based out of Alexandria, VA. They have formed a technical committee to write a new US (ANSI) standard on supply chain risk management. I am a member of that committee, representing ASQ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 2, 2012 | Hot News
Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are the first line of defense in the aftermath of a disruptive event. After an unexpected catastrophe, these plans — especially ones that are properly documented and regularly exercised — help organizations...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 2, 2012 | Hot News
“The growing move to cloud computing has the potential to change not only the way that companies implement business continuity and disaster recovery, but also the way they see it,” says Chantel Lindeman, Frost & Sullivan’s Business Unit Leader for ICT...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 2, 2012 | Hot News
A headline in the San Jose Mercury News reads:California prepares for harsh realities of changing climatehttp://tinyurl.com/d64gegcThe next-to-leed cq paragraph reads:A series of state-sponsored scientific studies released Tuesday warns that California can expect more...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 1, 2012 | Hot News
Research commissioned by SunGard Availability Services,has revealed that only 40 percent of UK organizations think an inability to deliver availability will result in them losing customers. This comes despite widely-publicised customer discontent following recent...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 1, 2012 | Hot News
The shooting rampage at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Colorado early Friday left theater owners and police scrambling to figure out how to beef up security for patrons as the movie opened in more than 4,000 theaters nationwide. To read the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 1, 2012 | Hot News
This massive blackout has crippled roughly half of India for a second consecutive day with officials scrambling for an explanation. The power failure spread across 22 of the country’s 28 states, an area whose population is nearly 700 million!It is hard to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Aug 1, 2012 | Hot News
In his book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan paints a bleak and frightening picture of corporations’ impact on and exploitation of our world. He notes that by their nature corporations are amoral institutions that have “an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 31, 2012 | Hot News
Business Continuity is supposed to safeguard organizations from revenue loss, opportunity loss, adverse impacts to a firms reputation, and/or ensure compliance with contractual Service Level Agreements (SLA). To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 31, 2012 | Hot News
While I was in Colorado Springs for the Building Resilience through Public-Private Partnerships conference last week, I also had the honor of meeting with some of the impressive first responders from the state and local level who fought the Waldo Canyon Fire. To read...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 31, 2012 | Hot News
Can you imagine a power outage affecting 370 million people, more than the population of the United States and Canada combined??!?!? Power outages are business as usual in this fast growing nation. The impact of any outage is somewhat softened by Indians’...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 31, 2012 | Hot News
Hi, this is Bill Claycomb, lead research scientist for the CERT Insider Threat Center and Alex Nicoll, technical team lead for Insider Threat Technical Solutions and Standards. Over the next few months, we will discuss, in a series of blog posts, problems related to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 31, 2012 | Hot News
A survey of 255 high-level IT managers and storage admins found that they have no plans to use big data analytics and showed that Fibre Channel drives no longer make up the bulk of purchases for enterprise storage capacity. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 30, 2012 | Hot News
Keeping critical workloads operational and preventing data corruption are a data center’s top priorities during power outages and it is an inconvenient reality that, sometimes, shutting down servers is the only way to meet those goals. To do this, data centers have...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 30, 2012 | Hot News
Methods for the government to alert citizens in case of emergency once consisted of warning sirens and messages broadcast over the radio and TV. But the emergence of mobile technology brought with it the promise of delivering more information to targeted audiences. To...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 30, 2012 | Hot News
Yesterday, a meeting of minds discussed the state of the insurance market and the RIMS Benchmark Survey in a webinar that was broadcast live from the RIMS offices in Manhattan. The panel of experts included: To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 30, 2012 | Hot News
This week, U.S. Northern Command hosted the Building Resilience through Public Private Partnerships Conference. We held our latest FEMA Think Tank call on the second day of the conference and had a great conversation on how the emergency management community can...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 25, 2012 | Hot News
My kinda research report…I just arrived in Honolulu tonight to work for the next four days and I get an email from a friend who sends me the link to this story…I love it!Apparently MIT researchers have analyzed which airport hubs would be key to spreading a virulent...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 25, 2012 | Hot News
The argument that IT no longer matters has resurfaced. In this age of consumerization, BYOD and the cloud, IT departments are, in fact, vital to any business, able to create value and sort the wheat from the chaff as stakeholders eye new investments or money-saving...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 25, 2012 | Hot News
In King County, Wash., a network of health-care organizations and providers works to strengthen the area’s emergency preparedness. Administered by the county’s Public Health department, the Healthcare Coalition creates relationships before an emergency strikes to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 25, 2012 | Hot News
Organizations worldwide are taking stock of their IT risk management plans. At one time, audits were the driving force behind companies examining their IT risk factors to ensure they were in compliance with industry mandates. Now, however, we are seeing a shift away...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 25, 2012 | Hot News
At the weekend, civil servants in Whitehall began a programme of flexible working that could last for up to seven weeks in order to avoid travel disruption and crowds during the Olympic and Paralympic Games.However, it seems this trend has not spread to the private...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 25, 2012 | Hot News
It’s common knowledge that the security landscape has shifted over the past few years and the once-strong perimeters that CISOs relied upon have become stretched, fragmented, and overrun by increasingly mature attackers. There are many reasons for this change — from...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 24, 2012 | Hot News
Focus on operations – people and process that drive the enterprise are the primary issues that DRP and BCP are controllable. Implementing a planning and recovery environment is an ideal time to define an approach based on ITIL best practices that will address...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 24, 2012 | Hot News
With the London 2012 Olympic Games approaching the starting line, many of the city’s investment managers are readying contingency plans to handle the expected diversions along the way. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 24, 2012 | Hot News
Management involvement and support is vital to the growth and ongoing success of an organization’s business continuity program. Management buy-in ensures alignment with the organization’s overall strategic direction and business objectives, and allows the program to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 24, 2012 | Hot News
As the dust settles and the facts begin to emerge regarding the circumstances surrounding the deadly attack on July 20 during the premiere of the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, in Aurora, Colo. — which claimed at least 12 lives and wounded scores of others —...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 24, 2012 | Hot News
I see many organizations that believe they’re well-insulated from major disasters–a sentiment that often grows into a sense of complacency, which eventually breeds a mindset that business continuity and disaster recovery planning and testing are basically...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 24, 2012 | Hot News
The finance sector is repeatedly said to be behind the curve in Cloud adoption, so it’s interesting to note an initiative in the US by the Federal Financial Institution Examination Council (FFIEC). The Technology Subcommittee of the Council – which is responsible for...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 24, 2012 | Hot News
In simple terms, the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum tolerable period in which data may be lost from an IT service/system outage or disruption, as caused by a disaster or other incident. For example, if you take overnight backups, the recovery...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 23, 2012 | Hot News
Now that a little time has passed since Louis Freeh issued his report on the Penn State debacle, I’ve been reflecting on both the Penn State and U.Va. affairs. Reading the coverage, it seemed as though journalists and bloggers were observing a seesaw whose riders...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 23, 2012 | Hot News
I have found myself over the past 24 hours thinking about this event off and on…the horror of it, the senseless killings, the lives forever changed….we suddenly are a nation of people all shoulder to shoulder, touched by these killings, and trying to make sense of...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 23, 2012 | Hot News
Most data breaches could be prevented, if organizations did more to keep an eye on their databases, says Chris Novak, a member of Verizon’s investigative response team. To read the article, please click hehre:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 20, 2012 | Hot News
When a hacker infiltrates your personal checking account to pilfer money, your bank, in most cases, will assume liability and resolve the matter of missing money. When a business account is hacked, however, the business owner is held liable. The reasoning? Banks feel...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 20, 2012 | Hot News
Zoho has integrated its cloud-hosted office productivity applications with the Google Drive online storage service, Zoho said in a blog post. To read the article, please click here: http://www.cio.com/article/711511/Zoho_Links_its_Office_Suite_with_Google_Drive
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 20, 2012 | Hot News
As we’ve seen in recent years, natural disasters can lead to long-term downtime for organizations. Because earthquakes, hurricanes, snow storms or other events can put data centers and other corporate facilities out of commission for a while, it’s vital...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 20, 2012 | Hot News
ASIS, the International group for Security Professionals, founded in 1955 and based in Virginia in the US, has started work on a new Guidance Standard for Supply Chain Risk Management with the first Technical Committee meeting held this week with Russell Price is...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 20, 2012 | Hot News
Nature has already made the summer of 2012 historic in several ways: extreme heat and drought continues in many parts of the country. Severe storms and record wildfires have left many residents vulnerable to flooding. The recent wildfires have sadly impacted many...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 19, 2012 | Hot News
To win in the marketplace, organizations must out-innovate and out-execute, and that means moving faster, entering new markets, being more accessible to clients, launching new products and pricing more effectively. But as businesses innovate and compete, by default...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 19, 2012 | Hot News
A typical cloud contract contains uptime clauses and credits for missed service levels, but it often fails to adequately protect the enterprise customer. Here are 10 questions the intelligent cloud customer can ask to make sure they are sheltered from potential...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 19, 2012 | Hot News
When an article in a terrorist propaganda magazine outlined a method for starting forest fires with an “ember bomb,” officials from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection decided to test the method. But the bomb is “highly impractical,” according to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 19, 2012 | Hot News
The residents of Colorado have had a rough 2012. In April it was announced that 98% of the state was facing drought conditions, which raised crop prices and, even worse, set the stage for what would become one of the worst wildfires in Colorado history. To read the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 19, 2012 | Hot News
Check Point Software Technologies plans to introduce document security software that encrypts and controls access to files across an organization’s various departments and also meets the growing need for corporate users to access company information on mobile...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 18, 2012 | Hot News
It seems almost certain that the dire weather-related headlines this summer are out of the ordinary. Massive wildfires have impacted much of the Midwest, while a serious drought covers much of the country. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 18, 2012 | Hot News
Sure London is a pretty safe city as major cities go…there are no unusual vaccinations required or weird health ailments to read up on. And you can drink the water! So what is there to think about?!?! Here are a few tips to ensure that your travel...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 18, 2012 | Hot News
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been around since the late1970s, but it has not garnered much public awareness until the 9/11 attacks and even more so since Hurricane Katrina. After these events, crisis management became a focal point for many...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 17, 2012 | Hot News
Data security breaches and information security issues are in the news all the time and CISOs across the globe are working tirelessly to tighten up corporate security. The recent photos of personal debit cards on Twitter, however, shine the spotlight once again on an...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 17, 2012 | Hot News
As the CEO of a company you hire a CIO and then hope that Business Continuity (BC) just happens. Let’s take another look. BC is the ability of an organization to perform critical business processes, protect critical assets, provide service and support for its...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 17, 2012 | Hot News
The countdown to the London 2012 Olympic Games is entering its final phase. While everyone is looking forward to the spectacle of world class sporting events, many business leaders are putting the final touches to plans to cope with potential travel disruption...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 17, 2012 | Hot News
In Osceola County, Fla., Special Operations Lt. Amaury Murgado is admittedly an old-school guy. Although Murgado said he has come around to the idea of all the technology on the job, he bristles when it’s not used properly as one deputy found out the hard way. ...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 17, 2012 | Hot News
One of the key elements of ISO 27001 certification involves doing a comprehensive risk assessment. In order to combat the risks to your organization’s assets, you need to identify the assets, consider the threats that could compromise those assets, and estimate the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 16, 2012 | Hot News
The use of tape as the primary backup medium for disaster recovery purposes long ago gave way to disk-based data protection platforms. This approach enables large organizations with massive volumes of data to minimize storage costs, reduce risk of data loss and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 16, 2012 | Hot News
Those of you who have followed this blog over the past several years know that I have a strong interest in supply chain risk management. I’ve posted articles talking about everything from Chaos monkeys to Irradiated materials to pirates and zombies. Recently I’ve had...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 16, 2012 | Hot News
Increasing numbers of weather-related disasters — violent storms, wildfires that have ravaged more than 2 million acres in the Rocky Mountains and drought conditions affecting some two-thirds of the United States — should have IT executives scurrying to...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 16, 2012 | Hot News
The Virginia Tech shooting was the significant event that pushed not only schools and universities to get phone notification systems, but energized the entire industry. At one point there were over 87 companies offering phone notification systems of one type or...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 12, 2012 | Hot News
People are the No. 1 reason why private clouds fail. The traditional IT management team is composed of tactically oriented, powerless leaders who aren’t familiar with their core business and aren’t equipped to handle dynamic IT business challenges...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 12, 2012 | Hot News
Historically, disaster recovery required a significant investment in physical infrastructure. Organizations had to balance the risk of not being prepared for a disaster with the cost and level of recovery they could afford. As a result, many executives perceive...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 12, 2012 | Hot News
The recent Colorado wildfires, which erupted on Saturday, June 23, 2012, have been called the worst wildfire on record in Colorado’s history. The cause of the fires remains unknown, but they have so far forced the evacuation of 32,000 residents, and have...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 12, 2012 | Hot News
Talking about the future of cloud technology, Abhijit Varma, Director, Management Consulting, KPMG said that he expects hybrid cloud to be the route that most companies will take in the medium term, during an interview at the recently held Computerworld India IT...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 12, 2012 | Hot News
I am working in SE Asia for the next ten days conducting pandemic flu exercises with the culprit being H5N1. Currently I am in Thailand. It has been most interesting and a bit disturbing to read of the deaths of young children in Cambodia and the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 12, 2012 | Hot News
As London tackles the daunting task of planning to keep participants and spectators safe, law enforcement is also working with government officials, insurers and brokers to mitigate the immense financial exposure presented by the inevitable civil disturbances. To read...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 11, 2012 | Hot News
As big banks face the fallout from a global investigation into interest rate manipulation, American and British lawmakers are scrutinizing regulators who failed to take action that might have prevented years of illegal activity. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 11, 2012 | Hot News
Risk management is not a separate module or product – Instead, it is an approach that adds value to both top-down and bottom up activities within the organization. Risk management is in everyone’s job description and ERM is all about how to identify the...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 11, 2012 | Hot News
The availability of services and applications to employees and customers is more critical than ever before, but many organizations still focus their data protection objectives on data and servers rather than applications. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 11, 2012 | Hot News
On Tuesday, April 24, 2012, a fire erupted in an office building in Madison. The blaze caused an estimated $2 million in damage, destroying a large portion of the building. To read the article, please click here:...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 10, 2012 | Hot News
It is difficult to get buy-in at the very top in organizations because BCM is wrongly seen as an operational matter. In a booming economy it is easy to think that sufficient resources are available to deal with any adverse incident that might occur. However, in these...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 10, 2012 | Hot News
You would think that any corporate IT department worth its salt will have already taken care of any possible fallout from the “Internet Doomsday Virus” problem that is resurfacing today. But according to Kenneth Wisnefski, an online security expert and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 10, 2012 | Hot News
Even if you have a well-designed triage response plan for social and traditional media, a crisis may demand extra personnel. How should you prepare to meet those extra demands for eyes, ears, and hands during the initial stages of a crisis? Is outsourcing your only...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 10, 2012 | Hot News
Network and endpoint security may not strike you as the first place to scratch an experimental itch. After all, protecting the company’s systems and data should call into question any action that may introduce risk. But IT security threats constantly evolve, and...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 9, 2012 | Hot News
Business income coverage is supposed to protect a business’ net income and operating expenses while its operations are suspended as a result of loss or damage caused by a covered peril. An unexpected interruption of productivity for a period time can be devastating...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 9, 2012 | Hot News
One of my favorite emergency blogs entitled idisaster2.0 recently asked the question, “are you cell phone ready for an emergency?” What a great question! They gave a list of great suggestions that they pulled from the Fairfax Virginia county EOC after the recent...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 9, 2012 | Hot News
While we all know how important it is to have a good disaster recovery (DR) plan in place, many of us still need to get our heads around this. Traditional disaster recovery planning can generally be expensive to implement and this has been a key inhibitor to many CIOs...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 9, 2012 | Hot News
It is difficult to get buy-in at the very top in organizations because business continuity management is wrongly seen as an operational issue.In a booming economy, it is relatively easier to get sufficient resources to deal with any adverse incident that may occur....
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 9, 2012 | Hot News
Why is that some hospitals have far higher death rates for the same operations than others? Atul Gawande reports on research at the University of Michigan in his recent commencement address at Williams College, which sheds light on the issue. To read the article,...
by Mike McClain, Senior Web Designer & Site Manager | Jul 5, 2012 | Hot News
A one-stop information and resource center to help residents and businesses affected by the Waldo Canyon fire has opened on the west edge of downtown Colorado Springs.The El Paso County Disaster Recovery Center is designed as a central location to answer questions and...
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