Library

DRI welcomes Dr. Gianluca Pescaroli for an in-depth tour of his research on building and improving the continuity of operations during disruptive events, minimizing their impacts, and increasing resilience of the public and private sectors. This includes managing complex challenges such as cascading risks, critical infrastructure failures, systemic and compound dynamics. His work is impact -oriented, aiming to bridge academia and practice. In 2016, he co-founded the Research Group on Cascading Disasters at UCL. Since then, he contributed to strategic documents such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Guidelines on National Risk Assessment, and edited reports such as the Guidelines on Cascading Effects of Wide-Area Power Failures in collaboration with London Resilience.

Part of the 2018 Global Risk and Resilience Trends Report, a worldwide survey of business continuity professionals revealed the following top 10 risks depicted in this infographic.

Ramon Zulueta, CBCP, Risk Manager, Corporate Business Continuity Office (CBCO), presents on communications during disasters.

This three-hour, hands-on workshop is a practical exercise design course during which you will be actively engaged. If you want to learn how to build (or better!) your exercises, this is the workshop for you. Exercising can mean the difference between surviving a crisis and not. We practice to ensure all participants understand their roles and responsibilities during crisis. An exercise is NOT a test, but rather to practice skills learned through training. Equally as important, is to set your exercise up right from the beginning. Designing an exercise takes time, patience, and support. An exercise should produce measurable, useful, timely and relevant results. Designing exercises is not a one size fits all, however many of the foundations are the same. This course will take you through the steps to design a creative, effective and fun exercise.

The 2017 hurricane season hit healthcare organizations hard. Hear from your peers at healthcare institutions as they relate their experiences before, during, and after the storms with a focus on lessons learned. While our panelists are from the healthcare sector, the information they will share is informative and applicable to all.

We test our backups and recovery processes occasionally and pass our audits, isn’t that enough? Only if your BCP goals are just that. Those are certainly important objectives. But, those types of exercises are not enough if the ultimate goal of your BC/DR Program is for your business to survive an actual disaster and the ensuing chaos. Reality-based, scenario driven exercises pull everything together by encouraging a holistic view of impacts and consolidated recovery considerations/efforts not discoverable in more narrowly focused exercises. This workshop will build on previous topics from the same presenter and take things further into the practical realm of disaster exercises. Come and participate in this workshop as we look at and talk about the benefits of robust disaster exercises; quickly review definitions and disaster scenario creation process (previous topics); exercise ingredients, methods, and script techniques; potential outcomes. The presenter brings deep experience with both actual disaster situations and reality-based disaster exercises, which will add a real-life perspective to our discussions.

When six inches of rain got dumped on Ellicott City, MD, in under two hours, something perhaps even more rare than the resulting 1,000-year flood happened – a partnership between county emergency management and economic development officials rose to the top and really worked! Everyone talks about public private partnerships. Attend this session to hear about one that resulted in more than 95% of businesses surviving. Ryan Miller, Director of Emergency Management for Howard County, MD, and Lary Twele, CEO of the Howard County Economic Development Authority will give an overview of the plans in place before the flood, including how they incorporated economic development into the emergency operations plan and the community disaster recovery plan. They’ll take attendees through the response – a response was so large and complex that resources from as far away as Colorado were called in – to the devastating flood that gave almost no warning. They’ll cover short, medium and long term recovery. But most importantly, they’ll teach you how to apply their model in order to get your local emergency managers and economic development officials working together!

Do you remember back in school when your teacher taught what you needed to pass the exam versus how that knowledge could be applied in real life to solve real problems? As business continuity professionals, we know there’s a big difference between a being regulatory compliant and the business’ preparedness and readiness to actually survive a real disaster situation. There are outages, emergencies, and disasters. Surviving the consequences of an actual disaster requires full-fledged disaster preparedness and readiness. Preparedness includes creating and executing exercises with realistically complex disaster scenarios focused on recovery ability and testing the readiness of capabilities. Creating that kind of an exercise scenario script is not intuitively obvious. In this hands-on collaborative session, we will look at a conceptual roadmap of what it takes to create realistically complex exercise scenarios intended to better prepare your organization to survive and mitigate an actual disaster. Come learn from a speaker with a rich background and experience in disasters. Everyone is encouraged to contribute their experience and imagination as together we walk through the creative process of identifying disaster scope and scale, ripple and cascading effects, players and their responsibilities/effects, and creating credible disaster recovery timelines during this session.

Do you remember back in school when your teacher taught what you needed to pass the exam versus how that knowledge could be applied in real life to solve real problems? As business continuity professionals, we know there’s a big difference between a being regulatory compliant and the business’ preparedness and readiness to actually survive a real disaster situation. There are outages, emergencies, and disasters. Surviving the consequences of an actual disaster requires full-fledged disaster preparedness and readiness. Preparedness includes creating and executing exercises with realistically complex disaster scenarios focused on recovery ability and testing the readiness of capabilities. Creating that kind of an exercise scenario script is not intuitively obvious. In this hands-on collaborative session, we will look at a conceptual roadmap of what it takes to create realistically complex exercise scenarios intended to better prepare your organization to survive and mitigate an actual disaster. Come learn from a speaker with a rich background and experience in disasters. Everyone is encouraged to contribute their experience and imagination as together we walk through the creative process of identifying disaster scope and scale, ripple and cascading effects, players and their responsibilities/effects, and creating credible disaster recovery timelines during this session.

Do you remember back in school when your teacher taught what you needed to pass the exam versus how that knowledge could be applied in real life to solve real problems? As business continuity professionals, we know there’s a big difference between a being regulatory compliant and the business’ preparedness and readiness to actually survive a real disaster situation. There are outages, emergencies, and disasters. Surviving the consequences of an actual disaster requires full-fledged disaster preparedness and readiness. Preparedness includes creating and executing exercises with realistically complex disaster scenarios focused on recovery ability and testing the readiness of capabilities. Creating that kind of an exercise scenario script is not intuitively obvious. In this hands-on collaborative session, we will look at a conceptual roadmap of what it takes to create realistically complex exercise scenarios intended to better prepare your organization to survive and mitigate an actual disaster. Come learn from a speaker with a rich background and experience in disasters. Everyone is encouraged to contribute their experience and imagination as together we walk through the creative process of identifying disaster scope and scale, ripple and cascading effects, players and their responsibilities/effects, and creating credible disaster recovery timelines during this session.