When you meet Vicky McKim you start to second-guess your preparedness. She's the director of risk management and business resilience at Aureon. For many years, she's seen firsthand the wild, unthinkable happen to companies who'd thought they had their continuity plan under control (even her own).

That's why she's an advocate for environmental risk assessments. It's more than just insurance, she says. Having insurance is one small component of it. While most businesses will take care to look at their financial and market risk, very few will consider operational risk. In other words, events that can put them temporarily, or permanently, out of business.