Today’s guest on the Continuity Forecast podcast is Franco Cordeiro who is the Director of Business and Technological Resiliency at KPMG. KPMG is a large consultancy practice which has thousands of employees with offices in nearly every major country in the world. He has been with the company for fifteen years and started as the Head of Resilience for their Australian branch, before moving to the US and spearheading those efforts.

He also adds that there is more of an enterprise view of how resilience works. 

This is often at the behest of government regulations or customer expectations 

7 Key Characteristics to Enterprise-Wide Frameworks in Leading Organizations

1. Top-Down
2. • Board is heavily invested
   • Customer Centricity 
3. End-to-End
   • Measure dollar spend and effects
4. Qualitative and Quantitative
   • Everyone understands it at the organization, not just a single team
5. Attributes around Resilience Culture
   • Not binary like in the past
6. Resilience is adopted
   • Testing things that work well and ruining them to see how you can recover
7. Crash-testing
   • Differentiate the organization from continuity approach
8. Embedding Communications and Testing Them

Based on the numerous clients that KPMG works with the concept of resilience is a key focus for boards and executive committees. The concept of resilience cuts through the potential misalignment of expectations and continuity. 

“Crisis management” “disaster recovery” “organizational resilience.” Are these all just big words? What do they actually mean for organizations? And, how can managers actually use these concepts to protect their businesses?

Great questions. Howard Mannella has answers on this episode.

Howard is the Managing Principal at  Alternative Resiliency Services, a next-gen business recovery and resiliency consultancy.

What we talked about:

• Business resiliency vs business recovery
• Clarity & definitions about business continuity
• What has (& has not) changed in modern business continuity
• What’s on the horizon for business continuity
• RACER:
• • R: rally
  • A: assess
  • C: communicate
  • E: execute
  • R: recover
• Business continuity
• Crisis management
• Disaster recovery

Business never stops.

To hear more from The Continuity Forecast, check us out on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website

You can't protect against every single threat, so you've really got to identify which things could impact your business from a physical standpoint or from a business interruption standpoint.

I recently got to interview Dutch Geisinger, Executive Director at Safeguard Iowa Partnership, a private nonprofit that focuses on building disaster resilience in Iowa:

What we talked about:

• Threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences
• 3 factors in risk assessment
• 3 steps to conducting a vulnerability assessment
• When to practice your disaster plans

Checkout these resources we mentioned during the podcast:

• Free resources at Safeguard Iowa Partnership

Business never stops.

To hear more from The Continuity Forecast, check us out on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

If BC is all about the "what-if" why should businesses spend time addressing what may never happen?

Michele Turner came on a recent episode of The Continuity Forecast to answer this question and share her top tips for creating a strong business continuity plan.

A subject matter expert, Michele has worked in the field of business continuity for over 20 years and is currently the head of Global Business Resiliency at Amazon.

Business continuity professionals: We often get left out when it comes to career advice! 

So, on this episode, Cheyene Marling delivered several tips to advance your career. 

Cheyene Marling is the Managing Director of BC Management — a talent, staffing, and data research provider that works exclusively within the BCM profession. She has an honorary MBCI and is also a lecturer at MIT. 

What we talked about:

• The 2 credentials companies look for in BCM employees: leadership + soft skills
• How to develop leadership & soft skills (for BCM pros)
• Offering to give a presentation at an industry event
• Publishing a paper
• Serving on a board
• Soft skill development
• The impact of certifications on the BCM profession
• Recognizing the BCM industry is expanding

Business never stops.

To hear more from The Continuity Forecast, check us out on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

If your businesses can’t resume operations within 10 days after a disaster, you’re not likely to survive. 

That’s according to FEMA.

You know you need to develop your BC plan before disaster strikes to be successful in the aftermath. But that’s not all you need to do.

On this episode of The Continuity Forecast, Tim Coumbe, VP - National Account Executive at Interstate Restoration, shared the 2 other things you need to do to prepare your company to survive disaster. 

What we talked about:

• How Interstate Restoration is helping clients with large loss mitigation
• Why it’s so crucial to run BC plan drills
• And why you should develop a relationship with your restoration company before disaster strikes

Resources we talked about:

• Tim’s LinkedIn
• Interstate Restoration

This blogpost was taken from The Continuity Forecast podcast. We know business never stops. Check us out, and leave us a review!

Why are we continually losing this battle in the cybersecurity war? 

Is there anything we, as businesses, can do about it?

On this episode of The Continuity Forecast, our guest, Brian Peters, answers those questions and more. Brian is Chief Information Security Officer at Blue Street Technologies, a cybersecurity firm with the mission of securing corporations of all sizes worldwide, one network at a time.

What we talked about:

• Why it takes companies so long to detect a breach
• Cybersecurity is not difficult
• Where your BC team, ideally, should be housed
• How you can protect yourself and your data

Resources we talked about:

• Blue Street Technologies
• Brian’s LinkedIn

Thousands of companies are under siege by cybercriminals. Why are these problems getting worse? Why aren't authorities catching these people? What can you do to protect your business from these attacks?

Brian Gill came on this episode of The Continuity Forecast to address these questions and more. He's a computer scientist and entrepreneur that has spent the last 16 years helping dig businesses out of data related disasters...and prevent them in the first place. Brian is the Chairman of Gillware, a firm that provides data recovery, incident response, and risk assessment services.

Electronic sensors that stop floods, fire retardant systems that put out fires before they spread, and haptic belts that teach workers how to do their jobs without getting hurt.

This isn’t science fiction.

This is the state of the insurance industry in 2019.

Ryan Deeds is the VP of Technology and Data at Assurex Global, a company that is the largest privately-held corporate insurance, risk management, and employee benefits brokerage group. 

Assurex is a conglomerate of insurance agents that are the best of the breed. When companies buy in, they become share owners to help direct where they are headed.

Ryan works with CEOs and CIOs to help them with strategy to collaborate more effectively to manage all of the quick moving parts of the emerging insurance industry.

Agencies are hyperniching out to find their customers better solutions. Technology has completely changed the way that insurance works. 

Using this technology is a great way to reduce the cost of your annual insurance premium. Typically, it can reduce your cost by 5-10%.

Final tips: If your agent isn’t bringing this stuff up, take a hard look at your insurance. 

Then, ask questions.

Can you think of a more stressful job than responding to terrorism or natural disasters at the drop of a hat? Coming up with a plan, leading a team, and serving people who are shaken with fear and grief are just a few of the job descriptions Suzanne Bernier has held.

As the President of SB Crisis Consulting and the author of Disaster Heroes: Invisible Champions of Help, Hope and Healing, today she’s training others to do the same. 

Suzanne started her company almost eight years ago to offer the kinds of services she felt businesses really needed. She wanted to make disaster preparedness more accessible for businesses that didn’t have the personnel with the right knowledge in-house. Today, her company provides everything from table-top exercises, workshops and trainings on things like active shooters, crisis communication, using social media in emergencies, etc. 

On today’s episode, we talk about things she’s learned from years in the trenches and how ordinary people can be heroes, too.