For most organisations, business continuity issues have more to do with breakdowns in everyday processes than with incidents in a nuclear reactor. However, events like the most recent catastrophe in Japan have catalysed discussions on the potential for using robots for recovery and continuity – discussions that could progressively include even ‘run of the mill’…
Sometimes we get so wrapped up in business continuity management that deals with natural disasters or accidental breakage that it’s all too easy to forget about another dimension: deliberate acts that damage the worth of an organisation. Even if terrorism and activism get publicity, theft and fraud often remain in the background. And yet there’s…
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…
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…
Once a file is gone, it’s gone, right? Well, it all depends. In many cases files are not physically removed from hard disks, but simply hidden from users by the operating system, and left available to be overwritten by new files. That means that some degree of disaster recovery may still be possible if a…