Sadly, we are reminded that animals can experience serious danger and cause outages when they come in contact with power lines. Often, the culprit is a squirrel such was the case in Montana recently, affecting 7,600 customers. Rarely, a racoon is the issue, but it did happen in Kentucky, leaving 2,000 homes and businesses without power.
Sometimes there is an outage, but we aren’t told why – like the one that took place in New Jersey recently, affecting more than 9,000 customers.
In addition, The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority or FINRA is reminding broker-dealers of their obligations to have business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place in a just-released Regulatory Notice.
Reg Notice 19-15 consolidates FINRA’s designation criteria for BDs that must have such plans, as previously announced in Notices 15-43 and 18-09, without change. As required by SEC (News - Alert) Regulation Systems Compliance and Integrity, or Regulation SCI, FINRA in 2015 adopted Rule 4380 requiring BD participation in business continuity and disaster recovery testing. Reg SCI authorizes FINRA to designate firms that must participate in FINRA’s annual BC/DR test based on established standards, which FINRA first published in Regulatory Notice 15-43 and updated in Regulatory Notice 18-09.
Not all companies are regulated by FINRA, but this organization is on the forefront of cybersecurity and business continuity. Such messages are a great wake-up call for all businesses that a solid plan needs to be in place to ensure your business stays up and running in the event of a disaster. These events could involve weather, animals, or cyberattacks.
Thankfully, quite often, the solution to each of these challenges is similar or, in some cases, the same. The low-hanging fruit here is to ensure servers are backed up, all important user files are also backed up and ideally, a second location should be available if the first one is no longer operational.
Quite often, the cloud can be a great way to ensure a business stays running but even then, an SD-WAN or SD-Internet solution is a must to ensure an organization isn’t overly-reliant on a single provider.
Power protection solutions are also vital to business continuity. They ensure power into the systems that are critical to business operations is clean, eliminating risk of damage.
The time to think about these issues is before there is a problem – or basically immediately. Good luck to you; hopefully you will be able to weather your next “storm” without a hitch.
Edited by Erik Linask
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