Attainium Insights, short, practical observations and examples drawn from real-world tabletop exercises and business continuity planning.
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Ever since the shootings at Virginia Tech, mass notifications systems (MNS) have been evolving into tools that can help save lives and businesses. What is your method of communicating with your employees about a disaster or disruption? If you don’t have some kind of system, you should take a look at these articles that discuss these systems and how to choose them.
Even though it seems that hurricane season 2016 just ended, 2017's season started in the eastern Pacific a couple of days ago and the central Pacific and Atlantic seasons will begin June 1. While predictions indicate a less active hurricane season, we need to remember that only one storm can wipe out a business or a community. How are your preparations coming? These articles may help you solidify your plans.
You are no doubt familiar with many of the numerous laws and regulations for business continuity and disaster recovery planning. All of them, in some way, impact your BC and DR planning and may also result in liability to a company, not in compliance. In addition, now we need to consider ethical conduct and integrity planning to avoid additional liability. These articles may be able to guide you through some of the legal and ethical dangers.
This year Business Continuity Awareness Week occurs between March 15 and 19, and the theme is cyber resilience. The BCI's Cyber Resilience Report revealed that two-thirds of organizations had experienced at least one cybersecurity incident during the previous year, and 15% had experienced at least ten. So this week we'll focus on cyber resilience so you can think about what you will do to raise awareness of business continuity and the importance of cyber resilience? (Item #6 has a link to download posters to display throughout your workplace.)
How often do you exercise your business continuity plan? Have you ever done so? Most experts recommend testing and exercising (if you read Item #5 you'll see what the difference is) at least once per year for the entire plan. If you're not doing that, here's a question for you: What will you do if any part of the plan doesn't work as conceived? Will your people have the ability and confidence to go with the flow and work their way past the broken parts? The only way to know is to try out the plan and see what happens. You'll find help in this issue.
The buy-in and support of executive leadership are critical to the success of every effort. Whether you're just establishing a business continuity or disaster recovery plan or changing or adding to it, you know that you have to convince top management to support it. How do you do that? This issue discusses the many aspects of getting management buy-in.
Social media has been around for quite a while now, and its use continues to grow. How does your company handle social media? Is it an important part of your business continuity plan? Do you encourage employees to use it or worry about the risks? Since it's not going away anytime soon, the time is definitely here to determine where social media fits into your BC strategy and how you're going to use it to best advantage. And don't forget that there are benefits AND risks of using social media in your business.
The Oxford Dictionaries recently named "post-truth" as their international word of the year. What does this mean for communication, crisis communication, and reputation in this post-truth era? How has crisis communication changed and, interestingly, how has it not? While there are challenges, most experts agree that the basic principles of communicating in a crisis are still important. Read on and see what you think... have you changed the way you're handling crisis communication today?
