The Amazon EC2 "failure" has probably caused their customers to take a hard look at their business continuity plans and Amazon working hard to improve their own resilience so that they can recover the confidence of their customers and maintain a dominant market position.
For some time the potential offered by the cloud has been the topic of discussion between BC and IT Security Professionals. Some are positive and see the potential for economies and resilience to be improved, others see the risks of creating a critical and possibly difficult to address dependency. Both are right and the example set by Amazons embarrassing failure is in many ways potentially fortuitous to the industry as a whole as it highlights the basic issue involved. Stuff will fail and you have to plan thoroughly for it!
As I write this, it is exactly one year since the first reported case of H1N1 (swine flu) arising from last year’s pandemic. It seems natural therefore to take a moment and consider what happened, how we responded, what was learned and perhaps even suggest a way forward.
The Continuity Forum has been actively researching and assessing the potential for major disruption from a pandemic type event for many years; our interest started on reviewing what happened around the SARS outbreak which impacted in the Far East and Canada.
The Continuity Forum asks "Will the election impact on Business Continuity?"
As we enter the final few days of the various political parties campaigning we asked the question are there any implications to the business continuity profession. Over the past 13 years we have seen our profession transform from a relatively small niche specialisation to a far more widely understood professional discipline. Much of this has been achieved with the support of central government, through the Cabinet office and its civil contingencies Secretariat a huge amounts of development and promotion has been undertaken. This has transformed the landscape for those businesses working within the field and certainly helped those working to promote business continuity significantly.
For some time the potential offered by the cloud has been the topic of discussion between BC and IT Security Professionals. Some are positive and see the potential for economies and resilience to be improved, others see the risks of creating a critical and possibly difficult to address dependency. Both are right and the example set by Amazons embarrassing failure is in many ways potentially fortuitous to the industry as a whole as it highlights the basic issue involved. Stuff will fail and you have to plan thoroughly for it!
