A traditional Business Continuity Plan is developed to serve as the foundation for recovering and managing business operations that may be affected by traditional, short-lived disasters caused by natural, human-caused or technological disasters. Organizations plan for these types of disasters to affect them for an average of 14-21 days.
Addressing the likely effects of a pandemic, however, becomes a complex subset of the Business Continuity Plan. A pandemic is often defined as an epidemic or outbreak in humans of infectious diseases that has the ability to proliferate rapidly throughout a widespread geographical area. Unlike natural, human-caused or technological disasters, which have limited life spans, pandemics are predicted to affect a significant geographical area in cycles for up to eighteen (18) months -- and affect the health of more than 40% of the area's population. A smart organization uses its existing Business Continuity Plan as the foundation for incorporating more complex measures that responding to a pandemic will likely require.
What organizations overlook most frequently are the non-traditional issues relating to resource allocation during a pandemic -- the necessary "people, places and things" that are identified during the risk assessment process. Unlike traditional disasters, which generally contain a predictable timetable of events and their responses, a pandemic often contains numerous variables that continue to change multiple times during the pandemic's cycle. The organization must maintain realistic and practical solutions to resolving the critical resource allocation issues that are likely to impact the institution, including:
People: Employees, insiders, affiliated parties (and their families), customers, vendors and third-party service providers;
Places: Facilities that the organization owns, manages, maintains, leases or controls; and
Things: Assets, equipment, supplies, records and documents.
This presentation focuses upon the core components of the FFIEC's Interagency Statement on Pandemic Planning and the lessons learned by more than 2700 organizations during the FBIIC/FSSCC's Pandemic Flu Exercise of 2007.
Those core components include:
Developing a program of prevention;
Documenting a strategy for responding to various stages of pandemic outbreak;
Constructing a comprehensive framework of facilities, systems and procedures to insure the continuing operation of critical functions;
Creating a testing program; and
Managing an oversight program to ensure that ongoing reviews and updates are in place.
You will learn pandemic prevention and business recovery strategies, planning techniques and action tactics that you can use yourself -- and that you can then teach to others within your organization. You will also learn how to identify the real sources of pandemic-related loss exposure; the obvious and not-so-obvious methods for using your resources effectively -- before and during any type of disaster; and the most successful methods for managing the maintenance and recovery effort until you can reinstall all of your organization's components.
Presenter seemed to have an excellent grasp on the topic!
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