The majority of business continuity/disaster recovery articles written for trade journals are directed toward the technical audience. There is an abundance of information available on the steps necessary to implement a business impact analysis or build the disaster recovery plans necessary to restore critical systems. But there is very little information available as to what… Continue reading Getting Started

Corporate governance is the system by which companies are directed and controlled. It is the way in which the corporate boards and officers set the policies and handle the affairs of corporations. Initially, the focus of corporate governance was to protect shareholders of the corporation, but with increasing emphasis being placed upon corporate governance and… Continue reading Regulatory Compliance

You are the business continuity planner for a large financial services company having just completed an estimated three-year project to develop and implement a corporate-wide business continuity program. This program includes your corporate headquarters and non-corporate physical locations including subsidiaries. Life is grand! You completed your project a year early and under budget by one-third… Continue reading Business Continuity Planning in the Real World

With all the terms and abbreviations being used today regarding risk management – BCP, DR, EBR, RPO, RTO, SLA, etc. – a conversation about data protection and risk mitigation sounds like a bowl of acronym soup. And this stew of confusion is peppered with an urgent sense that such matters need to be addressed PDQ.… Continue reading Acronym Soup – BCP, DR, EBR… What Does It All Mean?

When we think of Niigata prefecture in Japan, we think of exceptionally delicious rice, or perhaps the exceptional sake produced from that delicious rice, but not critical business infrastructure. However, when a series of large earthquakes struck the Chuetsu area last October, the business impact rippled across Japan. The first earthquake struck the area, about… Continue reading Earthquakes Rattle Supply Chain

With all the miles I log driving the vast Texas highways, sooner or later I know the odds will catch up with me and my car will end up with a flat tire. It may be an inconvenience, but I don’t worry because I always have a spare that will adequately cover my needs until… Continue reading Top-5 Causes of Replication Failure

Taking Care of Human Emotions While Protecting Your Business’ Bottom Line Reasonable variations of human emotions are expected at the workplace. People have feelings. Emotions that accumulate, collect force, expand in volume and begin to spin are another matter entirely. Spinning emotions can become as unmanageable as a tornado and in the workplace they can… Continue reading Emotional Continuity Management

For most companies concerned with their ability to recover print-to-mail processes after a business interruption, three hurricanes in six weeks would be reason enough to question their recovery capabilities. However, for a Florida-based insurance company, the added challenge of converting their print and mail operation’s new applications during this past fall’s hurricane “trifecta” made an… Continue reading Insurance Company Looks For Silver Lining

How do you begin planning specific recovery strategies for a disaster event that hasn’t happened? Industry best practices and your own good sense suggest that you use the worst-case scenario to determine the necessary recovery strategy to be used. It follows that if you can account for all elements of a recovery from the worst-case… Continue reading Modeling Events To Affect a Recovery

A number of years ago when I became CIO of a large international company, my operations manager advised me that our disaster recovery hotsite contract was up for renewal and needed enhancement. We were a single IBM mainframe shop supporting a $7 billion business, and our configuration and telecommunications requirements had not been kept up… Continue reading What Every CIO Should Know About DR