The 2017 FM Global Resilience Index has been published. The annual index, which is online and interactive, ranks 130 countries and territories by their enterprise resilience to disruptive events. Now in its fourth year, the index provides a unique resource to help business executives site facilities, select suppliers, evaluate established supply chains and identify customers who may be vulnerable.

Users of the index can now investigate 12 quantified resilience drivers related to each country’s economic strength, risk quality and supply chain condition. The index also ranks countries for overall enterprise resilience.

Switzerland occupies the number-one ranking, reflecting high scores for its infrastructure, local supplier quality, political stability, control of corruption and economic productivity. Haiti ranks at the bottom of the index due in part to its high natural hazard exposure and poor economic conditions.

Feel lost and/or confused about your business continuity planning? Want to maximize resilience in your organization, but not sure about what steps to take? The BCI How to Guides are here to help and give you the necessary guidance through the various phases of the Business Continuity Management (BCM) Lifecycle. 

The following How to Guides are available from the BCI website.

• Policy & Programme Management
• Embedding Business Continuity
• Analysis of the BCM Life cycle
• Design of the BCM Life cycle
• Implementation of the BCM Life cycle

On Feb 28th 2017 a four-hour outage impacted one of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) largest cloud regions, US-EAST-1 in North America. Since many enterprises rely on AWS this outage, many times longer than the expected annual downtime for the S3 cloud storage system where the issue occurred, is highly concerning and requires a rapid review by business continuity managers.

The outage, caused by high error rates affecting the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), commenced at 12:35 pm ET and was fully restored by 4:49 pm ET, according to AWS. Amazon S3 is ‘object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web’ says AWS. It is marketed as being ‘designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability’; a claim which is now clearly questionable!

The lessons from this incident need to be learned; and Continuity Central would like to invite the views of business continuity professionals. To do this they have set up a quick Survey Monkey survey: please take part here, it will only take a few minutes.

SmartData Collective | June 10

Your disaster recovery strategy needs to be pretty comprehensive. It’s not just about making sure that your backup is viable. There’s an entire strategy that needs to be put in place and that means identifying the roles of your employees and establishing an action plan. But how do you know what to do unless you have some idea of how the business will be impacted?

TechTarget | June 9

Before the cloud era, only a few organizations -- generally the biggest and best-funded -- could afford to have a second data center for business continuity or disaster recovery. The costs of hardware, space and personnel were too prohibitive for others.

With the cloud, however, adding capacity is relatively easy and dramatically less expensive. With multiple cloud locations and AWS availability zones, enterprises have the ability to build applications that can be more scalable and available than tradition on-premises apps. However, turning AWS redundancy into a fully functioning secondary off-site data center is not necessarily easy.

Canadian Underwriter | June 9

Everyone needs to be trained in business continuity management, and the importance of managing expectations is one lesson learned during the major floods in 2013 in southern Alberta, speakers suggested Tuesday at the World Conference on Disaster Management.

Australian businesses have been warned they need to spread the risk in their cloud computing operations across different regions after the Sydney storms on Sunday knocked out the operations of numerous Amazon Web Services customers.
 

Tech Republic | June 6

High availability events are more likely to be triggered than disaster recovery events, but often aren't tested for as much. Here's what tech leaders can take away from Netflix's approach to the problem.

Researchers have just unveiled a new robotic “insect” that can not only fly, but perch on a variety of surfaces, including ceilings. Using switchable electrostatic adhesion, the bio-inspired device can land on everything from glass to wood to a leaf while searching for hazardous chemicals, which is its purpose if not what’s most notable about it.

BCI, Jim Preen | May 18

Why do businesses avoid crucial planning? The reasons aren’t hard to find. Apart from total disaster junkies no one particularly likes to think about crises and for most SMEs just surviving is a daily struggle. Keeping all the plates spinning in the air requires 100% attention, who is going to slice out even 1% just to consider a bunch of scary ‘what if’ scenarios? 

Acronis | May 13

This white paper discusses the importance of a disaster recovery (DR) solution using an ROI analysis as an argument for the investment. Read on to learn how your enterprise can choose a DR and business continuity strategy that will match your needs and how to calculate ROI for your DR solutions.

Financial Times | March 16

Fake emails apparently sent by chief executives to senior employees asking for money transfers are estimated to have cost businesses as much as $2bn in the past two years, the FBI has said. There have been more than 12,000 corporate victims worldwide. Are you sure your business will not be the next to fall for the scam?

GCN | February 10

According to a recent study by Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data centre outage rose to $740,357 in 2015 -- an increase of 38 percent since 2010. The increase in the maximum downtime cost ($2,409,991) was even greater, climbing 81 percent over that same time period.

AFR | February 2

Complacency and secrecy in Australian businesses are masking the true extent of increasing cyber security threats, a new study by one of the country's largest corporate law firms has found.