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Having read Yossi Sheffi’s wonderful “The Resilient Enterprise” some years ago, I had high hopes for this book.  Sadly it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The book is organised in six sections and, for me, the most useful content is contained in the second (“Living with Uncertainty”) and fourth (“Supply Chains for the […]

Virgin Money was in the news again on Tuesday when its digital services were hit by technical problems.  It is reported that current account customers were unable to make transactions and access their accounts for much of Tuesday, with many expressing their frustration on social media.  The timing was particularly unfortunate, coming at the start […]

Only 48 hours after the dramatic launch of Alex Salmond’s Alba Party, the Herald on Sunday reported that the names of more than 4,000 people who had signed up to attend party events were inadvertently made public.  Amusingly (or not, depending on your viewpoint), the list apparently contained a number of high-profile SNP members.  The […]

“Managing Risk in Extreme Environments: Front-Line Business Lessons for Corporates and Financial Institutions” has been on the bookshelves in our office since it was published in 2008 but, for some reason, I have only just got around to looking through it.  Given that The book is 12 years old, and I have not read it […]

Yesterday morning, millions of websites were off-line as fire raged through a data centre in Strasbourg.  OVH is the fourth largest web-hosting provider in Europe (after AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud), and operates four data centres on the Strasbourg site.  One 500m2 data centre was destroyed and another was damaged in the blaze; the […]

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 […]