Author: Jim Mitchell

A frequent speaker at Business Continuity conferences, many of Jim Mitchell’s blogs can be found elsewhere on eBRP’s website and has published articles in DRJ, Continuity Insights and Continuity Central. Jim has more than 20 years of experience in Business Continuity; if you don’t agree with his opinions – he won’t be surprised.

4 Ps of the Incident Management Framework

Plans should not be the only goal of Business Continuity Management (BCM) programs.  The true end-state of BCM should be to assure that your organization can successfully manage its response to any disruption, the goal of Incident Management. An Incident Management focus has 4 components: Planning – More than just…

Plans are only as Good as the Confidence they Deliver

2017: The airline industry has gotten publicity lately – for reasons they’d rather have avoided: United Airlines forcibly removed a passenger due to overbooking. The resulting furor saw their stock plunge more than 4%. Delta’s 5-hour outage resulted in the 300 cancelled flights and cost of $150 million. British Airways’…

DR Program: 5 Stakeholders

Participating as an observer in an annual DR Exercise, we learned quite a few things that are never the subject of discussions at any industry conferences.  The objective of the DR exercise included restoring Tier 0 & Tier 1 applications (60 Applications) involving 300+ Servers including Unix, Linux, Wintel, Mainframe,…

Data Breach: Initial Incident Response

Industry research shows that 70% of respondents believe Cyber threats are most likely to disrupt businesses.  Whether it is data breach, denial of service or ransomware, these attacks are on the rise. Ransomware in 2016 has cost the industry more than $350 million. Unlike other business disruptions, cyber threats are…

A Game Changer in Disaster Recovery

Ever since IT organizations—both large and small—started injecting ‘agility’ into their already complex technology-driven environment, business risks began to rise gradually. While IT disasters were not uncommon, some were so severe that it crippled an organization’s entire workflow. Meanwhile, emerging as a ray of hope amid these circumstances, eBRP Solutions…

Incident Response – Simplified

Enterprise Contingency Planning has evolved beyond traditional Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery, and is today demanding the creation of a resilient, always-on business operations 24 x 7. Is this deliverable? The Risk Management fraternity believes that through the process of risk mitigation & controls, enterprises can be risk free! (Neither…

Communications in BCM

Effective Incident Management requires communication plans to address – Who needs to know? When should they be updated? What do they need to know? (a) By leveraging communication, BCM programs can be more efficiently managed (b) Different modes of communication – SMS for immediate action; Emails for more detailed responses.…

BIA – Back to Basics

For most traditional BCM programs, conducting a BIA is the de facto starting point. BIA enables planners to rank & stack business processes by their relative restoration priority, whether it be measured by RTO or Restoration Tier. In most instances the RTO, Recovery Tier & RPO are a result of…

A Bird’s-eye View: Planning & Plan Development

Planning, Plan Development & Validation are 3 essential phases of building a BCM program. The Planning phase includes Risk Assessment, BIAs and resumption Strategies. Plan Development turns resumption Strategies into actionable Plans.  Validation of Plans through Testing and Exercises builds confidence in the program’s effectiveness. Using different tools from different…

Resolutions for a More Productive 2018

January is almost over.  If you haven’t made your Business Continuity New Year Resolutions this is your last chance.  If you made them and broke them, here’s a chance at a fresh start!  Don’t focus on metrics (more plans, more tests, etc.); those are the equivalent of ‘exercise more, eat…