2021

Unsurprisingly, the Business Continuity Institute’s latest annual supply chain resilience report is dominated by issues arising from Covid-19.  After years where supply chain disruption was dominated by IT and information security incidents; neither of these even feature in the top 5 causes of disruption in 2020, which were: Human illness Loss of talent/skills (#4 in […]

The GDPR Enforcement Tracker website shows a dramatic increase in the number of fines being issued for data breaches in recent months.  Across Europe only 75 fines were levied in the first two years after GDPR came into force, or about 3 fines per month.  However, in the last 9 months a further 72 fines […]

At approximately 7pm on Friday 9th February 1996, a truck-bomb exploded close to South Quay DLR station, killing two people and injuring over 100 others.  At the commemoration yesterday to mark the 25th anniversary, survivors commented on how they feel forgotten.  Certainly the incident seems to have faded in the public consciousness faster than the […]

Nearly a week on from Sky News breaking the story that Serco had been the victim of a ransomware attack, details of the incident are still very sketchy.  From a UK perspective, we are being reassured that the attack has only affected systems on mainland Europe; so that the NHS Test and Trace programme is […]

We first blogged about Covid-19 a year ago.  That blog post recalled the lack of reliable information upon which to make decisions during the ‘flu pandemic of 2009; and predicted that, once again, this pandemic would be characterised by deep uncertainty.  I never suspected when I wrote it that, one year on, we would still […]

I have read many books about decision-making over the years, mostly from a perspective of psychology/behavioural economics.  Some have focused on the particular challenges of decision-making in a crisis; whilst others are more general in their outlook, but still generally contain useful nuggets for crisis management.  I have to say that this book by Roger […]

More details have emerged in the last couple of weeks of the significant impact of the ransomware attack on the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) that began on Xmas Eve.  Nearly 4 weeks on, it has emerged that the email system is still down and that emails submitted since the attack began cannot be accessed.  […]

Many of us woke up in the UK this morning to the story that, unbelievably, 150 000 records had been erroneously deleted from the Police National Computer.  The data loss, which occurred during a regular weekly purge of data, has been attributed to a coding error which has now been rectified.  Reassuring as this may […]

Sadly, there has been no shortage of stories of businesses struggling with Covid-19 in the last year.  However, I was intrigued by the story this week about Frontier Development experiencing delays in the release of their much-anticipated Elite Dangerous Odyssey.  One would have imagined that developing video games would be one of the industries that […]