Following recent negative headlines for social media, and Facebook in particular, Databarracks’ Peter Groucutt is warning organizations not to call time on their accounts. Social media is not just for promotion; during a crisis it is often your most effective communications medium.

“The best examples of crisis management comms on social media show that proactive engagement can generate goodwill and garner more patience from the public to rectify a situation. There are some simple steps an organization can take to prepare for social media communications during an incident. Read more

An interesting reflection on the experience gained from a large number of business continuity  projects. 

Martin Caddick, FBCI, recently retired from PwC, looks at what isn’t working, and what needs to change to improve business continuity. Read more

Cybercrime is a growing industry and the finance sector is regarded a key target. Despite the growing threat and inevitability of an attack, APRA says there are still financial institutions that have not tested how they would cope with a cyber attack. 

In response to the growing threat of a cyber attack, APRA on Wednesday released its first prudential standard on information security (still in draft format), which will set minimum standards for how the sector handles cyber risks.

Institutions will be required to undertake regular testing of their cyber defences, have robust systems in place to detect threats, and set out which senior staff are responsible for cyber security. The discussion paper can be found here.

"Implementing legally binding minimum standards on information security is aimed at increasing the safety of the data Australians entrust to their financial institutions and enhance overall system stability," Mr Summerhayes said.

New York stock exchange penalised for violating their disaster recovery and business continuity requirements ... 

A study by OneLogin has found that UK businesses who provide their employees with the benefit of remote working are struggling to find a balance between productivity and security. In fact, over half of remote workers spend up to one day per week connected to unsecured networks thereby leaving organizations open to greater risk of cyber attacks. Read more

Experts are reporting that thousands of Australian businesses aren't ready to comply with the data breach mandatory notification law that kicked in from February 22. Research by cyber security specialists CyberArk concluded that as many as 44 per cent of enterprises aren't up to speed, and other security professionals are queuing up to echo the sentiment.

The new law is simple enough in principle. It's compliance in practice that will cause headaches.

If your organisation is covered by the Privacy Act, and you have other people's personal information in your care, and it ends up somewhere or with someone it shouldn't, there's a clock ticking.

The WEF met at Davos this year and the Global Risks Report 2018 was published. Seven out of eight risks in the top right quadrant are climate change related (see below)! Is it time to start addressing these risks in our business continuity plans? The full report can be found here.

Every year, the BCI in association with BSI, produces the Horizon Scan Report to track near-term threats to organisations across industry sectors globally. The study measures concerns over specific threats as reported by business continuity and resilience professionals.

The report also considers disruption caused by these threats, offering a basis of comparison between the level of perceived concern and actual incidents. You can download the report here

COMSAT, the US-based satellite connectivity provider, demonstrated the power of business continuity planning after a company facility was threatened by the recent wildfires in California.

The Thomas Fire, reported to be the largest in California state history, presented a very real threat to the day-to-day operations of the Santa Paula multi-purpose teleport facility. Owing to the preparedness of COMSAT and its local team, an efficient, well-planned contingency strategy ensured that the teleport continued serving its global network without interruption, despite the proximity of intense flames. More

Disaster-recovery solutions require several complex, moving parts coordinated between your production site and the recovery site. Service-level agreements are ultimately the most accurate way to determine where responsibility is held for disaster-recovery process and execution. It’s important to have SLA documentation around these critical aspects of recovery so that customers have commitments from their vendor. I’s also important that a service provider’s agreements contain service-credit backed SLAs for additional accountability. Read more

With enterprises rapidly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure and migrating traditional workloads to the cloud, distributed architectures have become de-facto standard, but traditional backup and recovery strategies have not kept pace. A new cloud-first approach to data protection is required.   Read more

The Department of Social Services has written to 8,500 current and former employees warning them their personal data held by a contractor has been breached.

In letters sent in early November the department alerted the employees to “a data compromise relating to staff profiles within the department’s credit card management system prior to 2016”.

Compromised data includes credit card information, employees’ names, user names, work phone numbers, work emails, system passwords, Australian government services number, public service classification and organisation unit. Read more

With the Equifax data breach continuing to make headlines, we're seeing yet further proof that the way you communicate in the aftermath of an incident plays a significant role in determining its ultimate impact. Executives responsible for cybersecurity need to understand how a good cyber communications function works, and they need to make it a regular part of any conversation related to information security or risk management.  Read more

If adverse weather or system failures mean the workplace is no longer usable, where do employees go to continue working? Whether the incident only affects the organization's facilities or it’s area wide, there should be clear arrangements in place.

This report, in association with Regus, gathers responses from 914 respondents across 78 countries. It looks at how many organizations have workplace recovery arrangements in place, what those are, and how well informed the employees are on how it affects them.