Security & Business Resilience

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According to a joint survey from the British Insurance Brokers’ Association (Biba) and the Cabinet Office in 2012, 83 percent of insurers would give a discount or improve terms to a business interruption policy if a business continuity plan were in place.

Probably the most important first step an organization should take in developing their BCP/COP program is to conduct an inventory of all of the enterprise’s processes, assets and resources (PAR). No one has the time or resources to boil the ocean, so once the inventory has been completed, the next step involves prioritizing the PAR list from the most critical to the least important.

That’s where mass notification systems come into play, as well, as is the case with MillerCoors’ Fort Worth, Texas, brewery, which is located in Tornado Alley and sees about 25 tornadoes each year. The brewery employs 105 employees spread across 150 acres, and it brews 9 million barrels a year. It houses an on-site refrigeration system with 150,000 pounds of ammonia to assist with the brewing process.

Nearly half (45%) of the executives surveyed noted that overseas risks pose a greater threat to their company than domestic ones, while one-third (33%) reported that overseas risks are an equal threat. In addition, nearly half (48%) of the companies had experienced at least one loss related to conducting business overseas over the last three years.

The number of electrical outages affecting 50,000 or more people for at least an hour doubled during the decade up to 2012.  Most of the blackouts were caused by damage to large transmission lines and substations during extreme weather events, a new analysis from nonprofit Climate Central says. Michigan has the most outages, followed by Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti wants buildings across Los Angeles to be graded for their seismic safety.

A NIST report about its investigation into the 2011 Joplin tornado calls for nationally accepted standards for building design and construction, and public shelters and emergency communications to reduce deaths caused by tornadoes.

According to power management company Eaton, for the fifth year running, California topped the list of states with the most power outages, followed by Texas and Michigan.

Three-quarters of business continuity managers fear the possibility of an unplanned IT and telecoms outage, and 73 percent worry about the possibility of a cyber attack or data breach, according to the annual Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Horizon Scan.

Counterterrorist operatives perform drills on securing and neutralizing threats at major target areas. Although this is an extremely important concept to master, often ignored is one of the most important components in community disaster preparedness: the local area hospital.