Swan Island Networks

Corporate Security Predictions and Trends

Pete O'Dell — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 20:19:34 +0000

Corporate Security Predictions and Trends

2021 is approaching rapidly, though 2020 seems to be lasting an eternity. Most organizations are planning for whatever new normal will emerge in the coming months and thinking about longer-term trends that will impact our people, markets, operations, and economy for decades. Many are struggling, making hard choices to ensure day-to-day and month-to-month survival.

Multinational companies must juggle thousands of different situations and regulations across their various sub-jurisdictions around the planet, multiplying the complexity of their operations. Many more companies may operate in a limited area, but are dependent on supply chains that span the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic is a stubborn foe and has defied (so far) any kind of “silver bullet” such as the vaccine which finally brought polio under control in the 50s. It’s a challenging time for all of us.

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Corporate Security Predictions & Trends 2021 [PDF]

"It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."

Charles Darwin*

*(The University of Cambridge’s Darwin Correspondence Project tells us Darwin didn’t say this, but he should have!)

The team at Swan Island Networks has built a collection of corporate security predictions and trends that we think will impact your security world and overall organization in the next 18 months, directly and indirectly. Our company lives in this rapidly changing security ecosystem and we interact with a broad range of customers, partners, “coopetitors” and competitors, so our forecast includes many of these collaborations and discussions.

Our predictions are also informed by the conversations that occurred in a virtual executive roundtable I hosted for ten consecutive weeks as the COVID-19 virus spiked. Attendees highlighted significant problems that weren’t always obvious, such as elevator choke points for high rise, multi-tenant buildings. Everyone shared real-time insights, including input from one participant living through the stages of the virus – symptoms, testing, contact tracing challenges, and recovery.

Change continues to be a constant, and new developments are happening at a stunning pace, so I’m sure we’ll find we missed the mark on some predictions and were eerily right on others.

1. Uncertainty and speed of change

The world has been accelerating in many areas for decades, and we know this rapid pace is going to continue. Our prediction centers around how organizations will reframe how they manage change. We anticipate most companies will spend more resources monitoring emerging events in order to prevent or mitigate damages—examining secondary and tertiary areas of impact due to the rising complexity they are encountering.

The pandemic has sharpened everyone’s sense of awareness, and most companies have experienced events that might have been foreseen, prevented, or at least mitigated if someone had been paying closer attention. Never have the phrases “pay me now or pay me later” and “if you snooze, you lose” had as much impact. The roller coaster is going faster. Buckle up.

We anticipate most companies will spend more resources monitoring emerging events in order to prevent or mitigate damages—examining secondary and tertiary areas of impact due to the rising complexity they are encountering.

2. Uneven pandemic and economic recovery

The economic recovery is seesawing almost everywhere, forcing many organizations and communities to open, close, move a phase back, open schools, and in some cases immediately reclose them. Spain has reverted to a severe infection state, so worldwide diligence clearly must be a sustained 24×7 effort until vaccines show up and impact the majority of global populations. This uncertainty will ripple through companies and impact their staffing and security postures. It’s hard to define a trend here, but we have seen flexibility, innovation and rapid adoption of new methods by the firms handling this the most effectively. We predict the sense of urgency gained will continue and be a benefit to future days.

3. Civil unrest and crime

Worldwide, the number of unemployed people has skyrocketed. The pandemic is ac-celerating income inequality issues as people with few resources to begin with have to spend what little they have on keeping the lights on, food on the table or look to stressed community programs for help. Rising levels of desperation, frustration and anger drive antisocial behaviors and domestic violence. Legitimate protests against racial injustice are increasingly being marred by opportunistic violence and looting. We’ve al-ready seen spikes of shootings and murders in several major US cities. We’re predicting an unpredictable global situation where careful monitoring and early reactions will help mitigate damages for organizations and communities.

4. Threat awareness

Companies that were prepared and ready for the pandemic should take a bow (with their mask on), because most organizations got a big collection of surprises and negative impacts. We work with several companies who were aware of the virus early on, modified an already existing pandemic plan, augmented PPE on hand, and reaped the benefits. Our prediction is that many more companies will adopt 24×7 all-hazards threat monitoring as a “must have” corporate security function, and devote more dollars to contingency planning and capability. We also predict, as with cyber-security, the board and C-Suite will take a more engaged role in managing and directing this effort.

5. Outbreaks - virus recurrence

Security personnel are essential personnel, and vulnerable to exposure despite good training and guidance by the security firms. We predict a major trend will be workforce uncertainty and contingency planning for personnel and systems impacted by a sudden recurrence of the virus. We also predict that testing and screening will become more precise and have nearly instant results, allowing companies to pinpoint problems earlier and adjust responses closer to real time.

6. Commercial real estate in flux

Few prognosticators are willing to predict the state of commercial real estate for the next five years. One can make the case that people will continue to work from home, or that emerging satellite-based high-speed Internet connections will allow a permanent exodus from major metropolitan areas – if you can connect, can you really work anywhere? None of this is proven or certain; the outcomes will have impacts that could affect every aspect of future security efforts.

I predict a mixed environment going forward because critical talent will be able to dictate their preferences in many cases, making a uniform or dictatorial approach by management difficult. The digital collaboration environment is here to stay. Companies should prepare to incorporate home addresses into threat monitoring to manage the distributed cybersecurity danger.

The digital collaboration environment is here to say.

7. Silo merging - budgets

For some companies, 2021 will demand some very harsh changes in personnel and spending to support the survival of the organization. For essential services like security, the answer will be doing more with less, driving our prediction that companies will assess the cost/value relationship of the tools they are using, evaluating competitive solutions that either cost less, offer more value, or provide more flexibility.

8. Silo merging - effectiveness

We’ve seen a trend toward merging enterprise resource management (ERM), business continuity, and physical and cyber security into a unified risk/security structure that gains some economies of scale and centralizes responsibility for the C-suite and board of directors. Too many companies have been disappointed or blindsided by the lack of cohesiveness between the strategic, operational and tactical functions responsible for protecting the corporation.

9. Cybersecurity

Cyber is going to continue as a top threat for corporations, complicated by work-at-home flexibility. We’re predicting a couple of major breaches where CISOs didn’t segregate work computing from family computing, and home users’ access from the corporate crown jewels. Hackers will either lock down sites (ransomware) or steal very valuable intellectual property.

10. LEO satellite-enabled security

Getting the bandwidth for monitoring far-flung pipelines, property, and assets has been a challenge – even many in the US and other developed countries are bandwidth-chal-lenged in rural areas. The LEO satellite constellations by SpaceX and Amazon’s Kupier project promise to deliver 4G+ speed bandwidth to every inch of the planet. Besides enabling very remote work from home locations, we predict a surge in security sensors of great variety that can relay geospatial-enabled alerts to government and industry very quickly, broadening the proactive lens aperture. We also predict continued poorly coordinated sharing of this information, blunting its effectiveness (as with the 6,000+ different jurisdictions for 911 alerts).

11. Automation and systems investment

New technologies are continuing to emerge, and we predict a major funding uptick by the investment community (venture capital, private equity) in preventive and response capability solutions. You saw the almost-immediate repurposing of infrared sensing technologies to monitor for temperature screening and similar reapplications with video recognition systems. One robot technology could flash a warning to non-masked entrants using object recognition capabilities. Technology continues its relentless decrease in price and increase in capabilities!

12. Artificial intelligence

If you look at the literature and ads, you’d think everything in the security world is AI-powered; that machine learning is the norm for all corporations; and predictive intelligence is already globally deployed. While the trends are definitely heading these directions, we predict that it will take time before these are all standard issue. We also predict that long-term solutions will be built on AI Service Stacks from the major cloud providers, like Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS) and Google (Cloud), much as high-level language compilers enabled a huge increase in software application development.

13. Intelligent video

Cameras and video management are great, but require a human actively watching (one of the most boring jobs on Planet Earth), or they’re relegated to a forensic tool after incidents happen through a query of the Video Management System. A rapidly emerging set of intelligent video solutions will change the face of video surveillance (pun intended) by recognizing license plates, people, weapons, threatening interactions and much more. These systems can trigger structured alerts to a central situational awareness capability, allowing immediate and more proactive response by the security function.

Next-gen capabilities

You are seconds away from monitoring breaking alerts and updates from around the globe.

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14. Drones and robots

We predict another watershed moment in security alerting as drones and robots de-crease in price, increase in capability, and combine with other emerging technologies such as connectivity, sensors and intelligent video. There may well be new collaborations between government, organizations, and watchdog organizations to enable privacy protection where possible. Note: Those drones and robots could become very invasive, especially as they shrink in size.

15. Supply chain

Many organizations were caught short when the worldwide lockdowns went into effect, losing vital suppliers and experiencing major delays on essential products like masks and disinfectant wipes. We’re predicting enhanced monitoring and situational awareness of vital supply chain elements, including the financial health of suppliers, and parallel disruptions such as extreme weather incidents. We also see multi-continent sourcing redundancy, as the worldwide recession drags on toward a recovery.

16. 24x7 Operation Center creation and expansion

We’re seeing many more companies create a 24×7 monitoring and command center environment, and predict this will continue, particularly where a company’s assets and key relationships span the globe. The role of several of the security departments we work with has been broadening to incorporate additional 24×7 services; brand monitoring on social media is one example. The Security Operations Center could become the Services Operations Center as the need for rapid reaction and continual response increases.

17. Security vendors consolidation

We’ve seen multiple acquisitions (WorldAware, Stabilitas, Phoenix Systems) in just the last six months. It’s easy to predict that this will accelerate as more companies move to-ward broader, more integrated security solutions. Everbridge, the market leader, has an impressive market capitalization that has increased sharply, but that’s also made them a target to established competitors and disruptive startups.

18. Integrated security providers

Companies like Allied Universal have greatly augmented their manned security business with technology and high value risk/consulting services. This trend is likely to increase in the coming years as the complexity of blending many different vendors and contracts intensifies; we’ve had multiple companies express a desire for a single point of accountability who can manage and optimize the increasing number of equipment, data feeds, and integration efforts.

The security function we see today will look quite different in five years. Make it happen, watch it happen, or end up wondering “what just happened?”

19. Innovation

We’re predicting more—an easy extrapolation based on the last 25 years and Moore’s law. It’s more exciting (and harder) to predict the combinent solutions that meld multiple emerging technologies and disrupt an industry with a new integrated solution. Uber is a great example. Building an efficient ride-sharing system pre-smartphone, pre-mobile payments and other technologies would have been very difficult 15 years ago. Iridium (satellite communications) and WebVan (online grocery) are examples of good ideas that launched too early, before the needed supportive technological infrastructure had been developed.

We predict that intelligent video, AI, sensors, and mobility (drones and robots) will be combined into multiple disruptive capabilities in the next 36 months. Several futurists are on record saying we’ll have more change in the next 20 years than we’ve had in the last 100 years. The security function we see today will look quite different in five years. Make it happen, watch it happen, or end up wondering “what just happened?”

20. Interoperable data

Proprietary lock-in by vendors will be eroded by customers insisting on plug-and-play interfaces between systems. Google enabled great GIS interoperability with its global donation of KML. The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was developed by a consortium of emergency managers, guided by OASIS (itself a nonprofit consortium), to work across disparate systems and is freely available for use. We predict a greater use of interoperable data for device-enabled alerts and an increasing awareness by security strategists of the power of interoperability.

21. Surge services

Keeping extra headcount around for a high-impact, low-probability incident response team is going to be a tough sell to the C-suite, especially as budgets tighten. We see a continued trend toward contingency services – GSOC as a Service (GaaS), Analysts as a Service (AaaS), Intelligence as a Service (IaaS) as a means to ramp efforts in an emergency but keep fixed spending at a known level.

22. Information sharing

Due to the pandemic limiting water-cooler interaction and ad hoc meetings, companies have had to share more information electronically, and have reaped the benefits of digital, time-shifted communication. Cross-organizational information sharing has increased and we predict that the speed and cost burdens of staying current on a solo basis will encourage more information sharing alliances for non-proprietary data.

We hope you found these predictions insightful, and we welcome your feedback. Send us comments, augmentations, praise, quibbles, and pans. We’ve found non-proprietary information sharing to be a force multiplier, harnessing the wisdom of the crowds and saving immense amounts of time for all involved. Please contact us or tweet us at @SwanIslandNet.

This article was first published on the Disaster Recovery Journal website.

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10 Reasons You Need A Situational Awareness Program Now

Pete O'Dell — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 08:08:00 +0000

10 Reasons You Need A Situational Awareness Program Now

1. Gain time for prevention and mitigation

Seconds and minutes can count in emergency situations. Active monitoring and a consolidated situational capability can give you a jump start on saving lives, property, and reputation. Prevention is always more cost-effective than recovery. And those critical seconds or minutes can mean all the difference.

2. Protect lives and property

Monitoring your organization 24×7 can give you additional information to prevent, mitigate, and recover from breaking situations.

3. Monitor your brand reputation

Become aware of what just happened on YouTube or Twitter concerning your primary product, or a disgruntled customer. Monitor your brand’s presence on a large global set of information services—news, social, and more.

4. Monitor your key competitors and suppliers

Did you know a competitor just acquired your critical supplier? Or that the latest typhoon in the Pacific is going to delay critical shipments from another key supplier?

5. Communication paths

Continual monitoring will identify the right people to be notified under many different circumstances—internal, partners, customers, regulators, and others.

6. Increase organizational continuity

When your security or response team can monitor and respond to emerging threat situations with practiced expertise, the bulk of your organization can remain on target, versus dealing with distractions and disruptions.

7. Consolidate internal, redundant, fragmented efforts

The reality is, people throughout your organization searching every day for different threat and news items that concern them, but not sharing effectively. This results in huge hidden costs that could be better spent elsewhere.

8. Continual practice

Monitoring 24×7 helps you and your people remain familiar with your tools and sets up a warm start on an incident. You can build exercises into your daily process so when the real emergencies happen, your team responds like a well-oiled machine.

9. Leverage new information sources

There are new and emerging information sources that could give you increased situational awareness—not just news, but sensor alerts, intelligent video alerts, and much more.

10. Black Swans

If a major incident strikes, the same tools you used for proactive situation awareness can be redirected to the immediate, no-notice situation: gathering information from multiple sources, enhancing organizational communications, and sharing with other involved parties.

11. Surge partners (bonus)

For most of us, staffing 24×7 for any emergency that might happen is not cost effective. Having a strong monitoring program can give you the time to get secondary players and outside partners involved and underway, helping you resolve critical issues.

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Enterprise Risk Management: 3 Keys to Success

Pete O'Dell — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 10:33:00 +0000

Enterprise Risk Management: 3 Keys to Success

Pete O'Dell
September 8, 2020

If you don't have an umbrella, why check the weather?

Enterprise Risk Management can be very complicated. If you are a multi-national with global supply chains and a threat matrix that includes physical, cyber, competitive, brand, disruption, and high-impact, low-probability events (like COVID19), then you have a lot to think about. Add in the risk elements of the global economic recovery, and it’s easy to become swamped.

Complexity is the Enemy of Enterprise Risk Management

Complexity and overload are the enemies of Enterprise Risk Management. Simple things can make a big difference during a crisis. Being ready is a combination of situational awareness and resources. The right resources help you prevent situations that put your organization at risk.

Consider this: 100 years ago, getting proactive information was fraught with problems. For example, Galveston was virtually destroyed by a hurricane they didn’t see coming. Today, we’re swimming in information. It can overwhelm us and cause us to miss things in the river of news, alerts, warnings, emails, texts, sensors and more.

3 Keys to Enterprise Risk Management

Enterprise Risk Management can be complicated. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are 3 keys to success.

Key #1: Set Risk Level

Does your company have a well-developed, tactical risk identification and response capability? If not, there are many services and tools available to help you once you understand what you need. Key to assembling the right arsenal of capabilities is the Board and C-Suite setting the overall risk appetite, approving the threat matrix, and allocating the resources needed to monitor and respond when called upon.

Key #2: Acquire Contingency Resources

Another key is finding contingency resources that can be mobilized to augment your dedicated personnel. These can be a combination of internal and external personnel and flexible services that can be scaled when needed.

Key #3: Be Flexible

Key to your technology selection is flexibility. Are you going to face a 3-year unbreakable contract? Or a flexible capability that can react to your budget? Do you use the tool continuously, so an emergency is just a bump? Or is it a scramble to remember the passwords and how to use the product? (In other words, “break glass in case of emergency.”) Can you interact with outside stakeholders? For example, customers, suppliers, and regional and industry sharing partners?

The threat picture is getting more complex by the day! When you see it’s going to rain, make sure your umbrella is close at hand.

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5 Ways to Improve Your Economic Recovery Results Quickly

Pete O'Dell — Fri, 01 May 2020 00:01:24 +0000

5 Ways to Improve Your Economic Recovery Results Quickly

Pete O'Dell
May 1, 2020

As the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 (coronavirus) becomes more controllable, we face a unique problem.

How to start the discretionary economy back up?

Economic recovery is complex

Restarting the economy entails consumer activities like church, sporting events, and trips to the beach. We expect to see all these things this summer and fall.

For industries that rely on social interaction, the business implications are serious. Tourism, retail, and entertainment are a few of the industries most affected by the lockdown. International business travel has all but stopped. Global consulting firms are confronting an industry-wide contraction even while they adapt to meet shifting client needs. That is to say, the number of different factors involved in the economic recovery will be large.

So, here are five ways you can prepare your teams for the economic recovery. Realize there may be external factors that suddenly cause you to retreat (recurrence), rethink (new legal liabilities), or reorganize (someone’s found a better way).

1. Organize a corporate nerve center

Put together the corporate never center described in the recent McKenzie article Decision Making in Uncertain Times. Unify your efforts. Have a 24/7 schedule with rotating resources. Get strategic direction from the C-Suite and set up a recurring briefing with the board of director. Share all relevant issues and information with the cross-company effort.

2. Monitor trusted sources for situational intelligence

A unified monitoring effort will save you time. And it’s more effective than random browsing. So, stay aware of best practices. Know the laws and regulations. Follow changes to industry policies. Track virus recurrences and changes to your supply chain. Follow external sources that impact your organization, like open-source intelligence (OSINT), social media, and government alerts. The rate of change to your business will be very high. And missing key elements may slow your entire recovery effort.

3. Share and collaborate

Sharing best practices with your peer group will serve you well long after the recovery. Realize that companies like yours are dealing with almost identical issues. Similarly, companies in your geographic region are also dealing with parallel problems. Don’t worry, there are many ways to share without revealing proprietary information.

4. Everyone, keep watch

Establish a “see something/say something” process. Empower your teams to report issues via phone, text, and email. Whatever it takes. Have a rapid response capability set up to take advantage of the information bullets you receive.

5. Get real-time feedback

Contingency planning will be key to getting knocked down, getting up, and trying another way to get on track. Expect there to be confusion and failures along the way, and instill a sense of urgency to solve the issues.

Follow these steps and you will be more able to craft an effective response plan and execute it quickly. It’s important to your organization and very important to the world at large.

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Interoperability Lessons For Right Now

Pete O'Dell — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 12:13:00 +0000

Interoperability Lessons For Right Now

Remember when your new phone had a unique charger that wouldn’t work with other phones, and leaving it behind caused a major nightmare? Sanity prevailed, and except for Apple, the whole world now uses USB to plug virtually everything in. Our WWW and Internet came about because of a few standards that took hold internationally and took root before different groups could craft their own conflicting way of doing things.

There is a lesson here for the pandemic and especially for the recovery efforts that are going to take place – a uniform way, wherever possible, will allow for a much more rapid path back to whatever new normal emerges.

There are only 50 states, so why worry? Because according to Wikipedia, as of 2016, there were 3,007 counties, 64 parishes, 19 organized boroughs, 10 census areas, 41 independent cities, and the District of Columbia for a total of 3,142 counties and county-equivalents in the 50 states and District of Columbia. And there is the rest of the world beyond our shores.

Imagine everyone going their own way on the 1,000 different issues we’re going to confront soon (when rational decisions are made to restart) – opening schools, testing food workers, getting on an international flight, going to your own sport’s 50,000 plus stadium for a game (that seems so 6 months ago!).

How do you get beyond this problem? Information sharing, planning and coordination can go a long way. Communications need to gross all the FSLTIPP boundaries (a long forgetting post 9/11 acronym – Federal, State, Local, Tribal, International, public, and private).

Get started now on the recovery and post-recovery and we’ll reap some huge gains. Saving one month of the world economy translates to at least a bundle of billions.

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Why timely information sharing can help your recovery now!

Pete O'Dell — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 02:00:32 +0000

Why timely information sharing can help your recovery now!

Pete O'Dell
April 5, 2020

Restarting the world economy after the COVID-19 crisis is going to be hard. We’ve never turned the world off like this before. (And kudos to every worker in health care, power, public safety, security, trucking, and everyone else who can’t work from home. We’re all relying on you!)

Connect The Dots With Information Sharing

An almost-forgotten lesson from 9/11 is the need to share information (connect the dots). And the world is still bad at it. It seems we can’t define what a COVID-19 death is. So, even the numbers we’re likely all watching are in question. If everyone goes a different way during the economic restart, two things will happen. First, we will add months to the timeline. And second, we will collectively waste billions of pick-your-favorite-currency. A little sharing and coordination up front might help everyone.

"The key to a successful restart is communicating and sharing all the best ideas and information ahead of time."

Pete Odell Tweet

Example: The Food Industry

We’re all going to face challenges getting back to the ‘normal’ we took for granted a couple of months ago. One example shared with me was whether food workers should be required to test virus-free before returning to work. Sounds relatively benign until you think about the number of government and private sector decision makers who would have to deal with this.

For example, if you have 2,000 restaurants in 17 countries, it’s likely going to be a very complicated period. Repeat that scenario with 10,000 other problems, and you start to get a sense of the complexity. Disclaimer: I know nothing about the restaurant industry except for two very impactful years working for McDonald’s in the ‘70s. But I’m not going back into anyone’s restaurant as a consumer until this gets figured out.

Example: NYC Metropolitan Resilience Network

The NYC Metropolitan Resilience Network (MRN) started with information sharing in mind. One of its action items after Superstorm Sandy was to easily share situational awareness information across the network. Today, over 400 organizations in the MRN use the automated situational awareness dashboards. Analysts can augment the dashboards in the event of a crisis.

Start Collaborating Now

Information sharing on a broad scale now can help sort out some of these issues later. Industries can collaborate with each other. Governments at the local, regional, and national levels can coordinate. There can be communication between all parties. Information sharing can prevent random decisions that result from a lack of planning.

You don’t have to do all the work. There are many people out there that will have kick-ass solutions to many of the problems we’re going to face. The key is communicating and sharing all the best ideas and information ahead of time. You don’t have to share your proprietary data. You can track other’s efforts, and gain some time while saving some money. It could mean a lot to the world at large.

This is something you can do from the couch, home office, or wherever you are sheltering in place. Imagine if everyone helped solve one small issue. We could impact the economic restart the way Wikipedia has impacted historical knowledge.

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How To Prepare For A Strong Recovery From COVID-19

Pete O'Dell — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:29:39 +0000

How To Prepare For A Strong Recovery From COVID-19

Pete O'Dell
March 29, 2020

The world is in free fall and people are confused.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many to speculate when the infection will peak. And when the world can begin to recover from this major event.

Early predictions of a pandemic were ignored, but things will recover, and you need to be ready.

How To Prepare For A Strong Recovery From COVID-19

Start preparing now for a strong recovery from COVID-19 while the majority of your critical assets (your people) are at home. Likely you were caught short on the pandemic. Don’t make the same mistake on the recovery. Your business depends on it.

The recovery is going to affect every business differently. A small-town bed and breakfast will re-enter the commercial economy much differently than a multi-national financial institution. But, many of the underlying thought processes are the same.

Here’s how to prepare for a strong recovery from COVID-19.

Intelligence Filtering

The news has great insights. But, you need to filter the information. Find the areas that are relevant to your specific issues and problems. Then, analyze them. After that, share selectively and on a targeted basis across your organization.

Situational Awareness

You need to maintain full situational awareness. It’s likely to be a rapidly-changing landscape. For example, you may plan to reopen a factory in Washington State as cases ebb only to have a flareup in a nearby town.

Information Sharing

You can’t do it all alone, and you shouldn’t want to. You need to work with customers and suppliers in a tightly coordinated fashion. But, regional organizations, critical infrastructure providers, and government agencies are also critical.

Systematic Response

Take a disciplined approach toward preparedness. You likely have the time now to do a great planning job. Get the tools and processes you need set up and integrated into your organization while its still raining outside.

Preparedness always takes a back seat to other activities except in the most thoughtful of organizations. While there is little to no activity, it’s a great time to get organized for the recovery cycle. I hope these fundamentals help you prepare for a strong recovery from COVID-19 and also lay the groundwork for responding to your next emergency situation. (You know its coming!)

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When the Ship Goes Down, You Need a Lifeboat

Pete O'Dell — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 20:24:00 +0000

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.

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The Cajun Navy: Real-Time Resilience

Pete O'Dell — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 23:56:00 +0000

The Cajun Navy: Real-Time Resilience

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The floods in Louisiana have been devastating for the last week, with at least 11 people killed. Great story about volunteers with boats stepping up to save people, pets and property.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/16/us/louisiana-flooding/index.html

While this kind of same day miracle is amazing and heartfelt thanks should go to all participants, you have to ask the question why flood prone areas aren’t proactive in terms of training and coordinating volunteers ahead of time and doing some of the up front work so that even better response can be accomplished. All the local fishing guides have to have licenses, know first aid, and certainly aren’t going to be fishing if the river is 20 feet above flood stage. Does your community know who they all are? Does your corporate business continuity plan think outside the box for overflow capabilities?

On 9/11, the Coast Guard put out a radio call for all boats that could help to show up at the tip of Manhattan to help evacuate people. If you search for NY boat lift and Tom Hanks, you’ll find an incredible story of response from that fateful day.

Communities need to take those miracles and institutionalize them for the next time things go south. We have citizens with incredible capabilities that can assist ever more stretched city, state and federal groups. Today it might be the boat owners, tomorrow it might be another group, but in both cases, thinking ahead about who could be mobilized will pay dividends all around.

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Interoperability Needed: 911 Overflow

Pete O'Dell — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 23:05:00 +0000

Interoperability Needed: 911 Overflow

Here we are again, another disaster an another overloaded 911 system in Houston. The people doing this work are true heroes, but the technology is letting them down. Corporations know how to distribute traffic among multiple call centers based on traffic and demand, but the sprawling bureaucracy of locally commissioned and managed 911 centers (over 6700 of them in the US), are still struggling to determine cell phone location adequately, let alone move in the future where you could text 911, or overflow calls could be moved to the thousands of people staying up in parallel with no to few calls.

Is this hard? Does it have to tested? Yes, but not 10+ years hard; there has been a next generation effort for many years with no tangible results on the average PSAP (Public Service Answering Point). Lots of meetings, and a raft of people getting paid to squabble about it, but few results.

Other countries have s single 911 system that can be scaled, reconfigured, and respond well to these types of emergencies. Do a bunch of people have to die for forward movement?

Another huge opportunity for 911 is to send real time alerts to corporations and other organizations affected by a call. This gives them more time to prepare versus keeping them out of the loop. Imagine you are on floor 5 of a high-rise, and there is an active shooter on floor 8. If 911 knows, shouldn’t you? Portland, Oregon had a warning system like this in 1996 called Connect and Protect, and was featured in a WIRED story. It died from political infighting and bureaucracy.

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