Disaster Recovery Journal

By Andy Osborne, Consultancy Director, Acumen Author of Practical Business Continuity Management

I've just finished doing one of those straightforward "I'll knock that off in a day or two" type 

Monday 18th March saw the official launch of the Good Practice Guidelines (GPG) 2013, the independent body of knowledge for good Business Continuity (BC) practice worldwide.  

The launch of GPG 2013 signifies a memorable event for BC professionals all around the world and marks a key milestone for the Business Continuity Institute (BCI).  Its release has met with great enthusiasm and has been applauded around the globe as a key tool in achieving organizational resilience.

My  topic of choice for today’s webinar listen-into was the one on Cyber Threats and Cyber Security by Brendan Byrne from IBM in which Brendan shared both IBM’s and other organizations experiences from the dark world of cyber threat.

According to a recent IBM survey, the biggest threat perceived by Business Continuity professionals is cyber-security.  Some of the challenges faced include BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) which is on the increase; the widespread use of social media with its pros and cons; workforce mobility and the increasing use of cloud-based solutions.

The BCI has started its ‘award season’ with great élan and enthusiasm and has added to its growing repertoire of BCI Regional Awards taking the headcount to six this year.

Australasia and Europe have now joined their Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern and North American counterparts in the BCI Global Awards Programme, which puts the international spotlight on BC achievements and talented BC professionals around the world.

One of the goals we have set for this year's BCAW is to make Business Continuity a global trending topic through the initiation of a tweet-a-thon. ‘Tweet-off’ will be at 10:30 GMT on Monday, 18th March 2013, marking the beginning of Business Continuity Awareness Week 2013 (BCAW) and will run throughout the whole week, and beyond.

What is a trending topic?

This blog brings to an end my review of BCI predictions for 2013 – mainly because as we have now reached February, they are beginning to look more like news comment than forecasts.

Predictions 7 through 10 were about business failures, sustainability, increased outsourcing problems and social media respectively.

Today I will look at our predictions 5 and 6, which have some degree of overlap.

Firstly we predicted that “ISO 22301 will start to take off, with certificates issued in more than one country”. Hardly a difficult prediction I know, but still an opportunity to test the often argued premise that many companies had delayed certification to BS25999 because they were waiting for an ISO standard.

There has been some puzzled faces questioning our BC prediction number 4 – “Contingency Planning will become fashionable again as a part of a broader understanding of Business Continuity which includes Continuity Capability and Crisis Response”.

Without stealing the thunder of my colleague Lee Glendon who is researching this proposition and will issue a discussion paper on the topic later during BCAW 2013, I think it is becoming obvious that conventional BCM as defined by a management system does not cover the full range of BC thinking. British Standards are working on a Crisis Management Standard (BS11200) and an Organizational Resilience Standard (BS45000) so we can only assume that they agree with us.