Business Continuity

Warehouse worker checking stock levels beside wrapped pallets, part of the UK's food supply chain, as storm clouds gather overhead

Stockpile the Tins. Audit the Supply Chain.

On Friday, the government told the country to start putting food aside. Environment Secretary Dame Angela Eagle said the UK is heading into what could be the largest El Niño event since records began in the nineteenth century, with sea temperatures in the Pacific running more than three degrees above average. The practical translation for

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Close-up of hands adjusting a small brass gear within a larger, intricate clockwork mechanism

A Forgotten Certificate Just Broke Email for Millions. That’s the Real Story.

On Monday evening, Outlook and Exchange Online stopped working. Not for one company, for a meaningful slice of the world. People couldn’t log in. Messages sat unsent. Search returned nothing. IT teams spent hours fielding calls from colleagues who couldn’t do their jobs, because the one tool most of us touch fifty times a day

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A darkened open-plan office at night, every desk empty and unlit except a single row still working under lamplight, city skyline visible through the windows.

Minimum Viable Company: What’s Actually New Here?

A term with real momentum, four different definitions, and a decade-old cousin nobody mentions. Ask four different advisers to define “Minimum Viable Company” and you’ll get four different answers, all wearing the same three letters. That’s usually the first sign a term hasn’t earned its place in the vocabulary yet — and it’s worth working

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A server room with glowing status lights in the foreground, viewed through a rain-streaked window at a lightning storm over a city skyline at night

The most predictable risk in resilience planning is also the most ignored one

Look at the last few days. Heathrow spent part of last week warning passengers off the roads after flooding closed access to two terminals. A flood warning is in force for Nelson in Lancashire, with alerts out across Merseyside and the North East, arriving straight after weeks dry enough to count as drought, and yellow

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An upward trending graph line behind the figure $4.99 million, representing the rising average cost of a data breach.

The Real Cost of a Breach Just Went Up Again — Here’s What the Number Doesn’t Tell You

IBM published its Cost of a Data Breach Report last month, and the headline figure is the one everyone will quote: the global average cost of a breach has hit a record $4.99 million, a 12% increase on last year. In the UK specifically, that average sits at around $4.27 million (£3.13 million). Numbers like

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Grey trackside cabinet with dozens of black signalling cables fanning out into cable troughs beside a curving railway junction on an overcast day

One Power Failure, Seven Train Operators Down: What That Tells Us About Dependency Mapping

This afternoon, a power failure at a communications centre brought major disruption to rail services across the Midlands and north-west England. Avanti West Coast, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, London Northwestern, Northern, TransPennine Express and Transport for Wales were all affected. Not one operator having a bad day. Seven, at once, because of a single point

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Yellow and black pipeline warning marker post in a grassy field with dry stone walls and Peak District hills behind, marking the route of the proposed Peak Cluster CO2 pipeline

Peak Cluster and the CO2 Pipeline: the business continuity conversation nobody’s having

There’s a proposal working its way through the planning system at the moment that deserves more attention from a business continuity perspective than it’s currently getting. Peak Cluster is a carbon capture and storage scheme that would take CO2 from cement and lime works in Derbyshire and Staffordshire and move it 120-odd miles by pipeline,

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A small business leadership team of four reviews a recovery plan together around a meeting table, discussing priorities calmly and analytically

What the NCSC’s new incident recovery guidance gets right, and where it falls short

On 29 July, the NCSC published What To Do When Cyber-Attacks Disrupt Your Organisation, a detailed framework covering the first hours of a disruptive attack through to the months of rebuild that follow. It’s well timed. Attack volumes are up, and the guidance is clear-eyed about something many boards still underestimate: recovery from a serious

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Covered walkway to the SEC, Hydro and Armadillo arenas in Glasgow, with green mould and slime staining the outer panels

What the Commonwealth Games Taught Me About Deploying Resource

I’ve been away for a week, which means the blog has been quiet and there is a genuinely biblical quantity of laundry currently taking over the house. The one thing keeping me cheerful through it has been the Commonwealth Games, which we went to see at Glasgow over the last six days. The Tollcross ticketing

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