The Continuity Forecast: Because Business Never Stops

On this episode of The Continuity Forecast podcast, we hear from disaster preparedness expert Jeff Larson. Jeff is the Partnership Manager for the North Florida PGA, a role that sees him planning dozens of outdoor tournaments every year, in weather that is unpredictable at best. Jeff shared with us how he keeps partners, sponsors, players, and staff safe when disaster strikes.

"I did an analysis of a petrochemical company's emergency plan and contacts. Several people were no longer employed, and two of them had actually died."

So many companies are grossly under-prepared for a crisis. But the majority of companies will go through crises of some kind or another. It's not a matter of if, but when.

Dr. Steve Goldman the Founder of Steve Goldman Associates, a business dedicated to providing expert consulting in crisis management and business continuity. He is also a Senior Lecturer at MIT and Harvard.

On this episode of The Continuity Forecast, he breaks down the 4 different kinds of crises and what business need to focus on to plan for them.

You can expect a crisis to happen.

Because it's not "if" a crisis happens...it's "when".

So, you need to be prepared to overcome a crisis.

And being prepared is about more than just business continuity — it's about each discipline working together to drive your organization toward resilience

On a recent episode of The Continuity Forecast, I talked with Alice Kaltenmark about organization resilience — why it takes more than business continuity to overcome a crisis and how you can build resilience in your own organization.

Alice is President of BCI USA Chapter, the premier global business continuity membership forum.

Over the last five years, 40% of businesses have experienced some sort of business interruption, costing on average, even for a small company, upward of $8,000 per hour of downtime.

You need to have a plan because it's not a question of whether a disaster will happen or not. It's a question of when.

The most crucial components to getting back up and running can include:

• New office space - Where is it, how you set it up and do so cost effectively?
• Restore lost power - A company like Agility can, within 12 to 24 hours, deploy enough power to run your building or your campus of buildings.
• Restore communications - You'll need to connect with satellite or local LTE communications to reestablish voice and internet connectivity.
• Accessing your data in the cloud - You'll need a computer to access that data, power to plug in that computer, and the internet for that computer to access to cloud.

On today's episode of The Continuity Forecast, we're talking about some of the common disruptions that business face.

Our guest on the show is Frank Russo, Founder and Executive Vice President of Procor Solutions and Consulting. Procor is the premier provider of complex property damage and business interruption claims consulting services. They have served clients on 6 different continents and in 49 different states.

Frank gave insight into some of disruptions companies can face, the impacts companies can expect from these disasters, and some practical steps companies can take when walking through loss.

Here's what he had to say.

Are your teams collaborating with one another? More importantly, are your Business Continuity teams and your ERM teams collaborating?

What happens when they don't? What happens when they do?

Bill Hord dropped by the podcast recently and had a ton of great content to share, starting with the challenges that exist when these two crucial teams aren't in sync.

You know that trying to maintain business continuity can be very stressful.

Karina de Allicon, the manager of business continuity and enterprise risk at Edwards Lifesciences, the global leader in patient focused medical innovations, is an expert in bringing mindfulness to the workplace and calming the lizard brain inside all of us.

Mindfulness is simply paying attention to the here and now, being aware of whether there are thoughts or emotions or sensations in our bodies and trying to be curious about them and accept whatever the moment brings.

You've heard all the promise about cloud computing, but is it right for your company? Are there some business that shouldn't do it?

We answered your cloud computing questions in my conversation with Cary Jasgur, CBCP, MBCI, PMP who is the Consulting Manager for Organizational Resilience at Mazars USA. He helps organizations of all sizes migrate to the cloud.

Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan till they get hit in the face.

What's true in boxing is true in business continuity:

You never quite know what it'll be like.

If you have the right people in place, you can get through it effectively. However, strategic planning is very important.

Greg Holdburg is the Manager of Disaster Recovery Services at S1 Corporation. His role is to help businesses develop their continuity plans, or help companies create them from scratch.

Greg joined me on The Continuity Forecast podcast to talk about how companies should proceed when they experience a crisis, how to notify employees, how to deal with one of the worst kinds of crises, a hurricane, and how to avoid a double disaster.

Think of everything that your company does on any given day. From finance to legal, from sales to HR, everything you do is done on computers.

So what happens if there's an outage of the computers that are used to run your business? Not just in your office, but at your data centers or server farms? Can you get your data back? Find out as we chat with John Jackson Executive Advisor and Co-Founder at Fusion Risk Management.