Larry Jaffee, SC Magazine, September 2015
The Sony Pictures hack should serve as a wakeup call for all organizations to consider the importance of business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) plans. However, an informal survey undertaken by SC Magazine of IT security professionals and crisis communications experts reveals that anyone could be caught with their pants down.
“A cyber breach can be an extinction-level event for an organization if it’s handled wrong or unfolds at breakneck speed unaddressed. That could destroy the organization,” says Davia Temin.
During a crisis, a company’s various stakeholders must be considered, she points out, posing basic questions: “If you’re a financial firm, how does trading continue? How do you communicate with your customers? How are your people using email? Do they have access to email?”
If a call center gets hit with a tornado or hurricane, a company obviously must have contingency plans to outsource to a third-party vendor and backup data off-site. “That’s the nitty-gritty, tactical operational stuff that makes businesses work,” Temin says. That kind of planning should be going on all the time. […read more]