When the Ship Goes Down, You Need a Lifeboat

You’ve undoubtedly read about or experienced the Delta outage this week; you might be sitting in an airport reading this right now!

Corporations are not putting the kind of thought, effort and money into backup systems to help when these kind of events transpire. Black swans do land in everyone’s lake at some point.

Having a cloud based system that is completely disconnected from your legacy systems is one small thing you can do. Communications, information sharing, data collection, and situational awareness updates can all be accomplished for with systems like TX360 from Swan Island Networks. There are many other easy to implement tools that can help your organization cope; having critical people create a non-company email account is another simple example, and having a paper based list of critical phone numbers in the event you actually have to dial the phone.

It starts with the commitment to resilience – how am I going to keep my organization through the shocks that can show up from Mother Nature as well as manmade events? The CEO and Board have to lead, and have to fund real versus BS efforts. The company has to exercise, including with vital partners, ahead of time to insure everyone knows the drill, and how to take the place of someone not around.

You should also be insistent with your critical suppliers that the same approach is followed. We all have to consider the consequences.