More news about IT disasters (and disaster recovery) last week, this time concerning a French state financial system. Service was interrupted for four days in a configuration used to pay suppliers, and running SAP software and operated by the national French IT company, Bull. France still has a national computer company, providing mainframes and servers,…
A recent article on the website ZDNet.com describes how a health provider in Indiana, US, put in place IT virtualisation to manage a number of challenges, including disaster recovery planning. One of the big changes was moving from a situation where a breakdown in a physical server threatened the welfare of hundreds of individuals, to…
While cloud services have promised advantages of redundancy and resilience from the start, there is still the spectre of failure. Even the largest operators can be affected. Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) suffered breakdowns in 2011 because of a wrongly applied change of configuration, and again in 2012 owing to ‘historic’ thunderstorms in the neighbourhood…
Customers are influenced by what they experience, but also by hearing about the experiences of others. In crowded, competitive markets, maintaining positive ‘brand capital’ with customers is an important part of business continuity. Although social networks often have a gradual effect on a company’s activities rather than an immediate one, crisis management is an exception.…
Remember the TV series with Lee Majors playing the role of astronaut Steve Austin? It’s OK, you can admit it without overly dating yourself – there have been reruns since the series was originally launched in 1973! In essence, Austin is ‘rebuilt’ after an accident using bionic body parts to make him stronger and better…
As part of the business continuity insights from Hurricane Sandy, the American National Hurricane Centre is reviewing the way that it makes warnings about storm surges (abnormal rises of sea water). The problem was not in the accuracy of the predictions but in the perception of the information by the public. There was a disconnect…