Written by Jeromie Jackson Published on Monday, 27 April 2009 21:32 Last updated on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 20:49
The news is going crazy with the recent outbreak of the Swine Flu virus. The threat level has been raised to a level 5 now, is your organization ready? Many organizations have worked pandemics into their Incident Response plans in preparation for outbreaks just like what may occur with this flu. Here are 5 steps to ensure your organization is taking to prepare.
1- Governance
When an incident occurs is not the time to be making decisions with regards to plans, escalations, roles, and responsibilities. Ensure that your governance clearly defines the participants necessary to manage the incident.
2- Ensure Bandwidth for Incident Response
If the plan includes employees remotely accessing the organization ensure adequate bandwidth is in place. As the types of traffic and network flows change ensure adequate bandwidth is in place.
3- Quickly Enabling Remote Access
Many organizations are hesitant to enable remote access for all employees. If a mass enabling is necessary make sure policies and procedures document how this can occur expediently.
4- Communication is Key
Ensure appropriate capabilities to communicate to employees, suppliers, and vendors are in place. To ensure minimal business impact plan for potential telephone circuits being overloaded, potential email outages, etc.. Having multiple communications channels that can broadcast to a large group is prudent.
5- Post Mortem
After any incident it is critical to discuss lessons-learned. The greatest plans often falter due to the lack of visibility into issues until they happen. Make sure you can "see the forest through the trees" by testing your Incident Response plans at least yearly.
