This month, Extrapolating a risk evaluation to a logical, eventual conclusion, if a company doesn’t have a business continuity management (BCM) program, its credit rating could be lowered. The consequence? Borrowing money would cost more, and for the large companies that S&P reviews, that could be a material consequence.
The authors of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Framework for Voluntary Preparedness report of January 2008 refer to Singapore’s Technical Reference for Business Continuity Management (TR19 ) as an “authoritative source” for “best practices” (page 4). That’s pretty ironic, because here in Singapore, TR 19 has been mostly a source of derision since its release in 2005.
Singapore Exchange Ltd (SGX) has issued proposed business rules on business continuity for public comment. The rules are likely to take effect for member firms in 3Q 2008, and firms would have twelve (12) months to comply. Member firms were briefed on the new rules in April. SGX operates and regulates integrated securities and derivatives exchanges. Like many Asian exchanges, SGX is a publicly-traded (demutualized) entity; the shareholders, not the member firms, own it. These are SGX’ derivatives market members (32 trading or clearing firms) and these are the securities market members (27 firms).
Singapore’s financial sector industry-wide exercise (IWE) will run from Thursday, Aug 28 to Friday, Sep 11, 2008. There will be three sessions, presumably corresponding to escalating stages of epidemic development, in a highly-pathogenic influenza (HPI) scenario over the two-week period, plus a “practical drill” on Friday 29 August that will require participants to execute HPI response plans at their own facilities. These are the briefing slides used at ABS’ Apr. 3 announcement in Singapore, and these slides are for the first “communique” briefing on May 7. This slide lists the dates of future briefings and communique’s. The ABS has opened an IWE portal (exercise web site) specifically for the exercise.
There is no more important long-term challenge in protecting businesses, homes and lives than bridging the knowledge gaps between what I call the “resilience professions”: business continuity, disaster response, disaster recovery, emergency management, crisis management, risk management and security. Asia is about to host the first conference I’ve seen to take on that challenge explicitly. The 2008 International Disaster Management Conference on Public Private Partnership will bring together for the first time in Asia both public- and private-sector professionals in disaster, emergency and business continuity management as both presenters and attendees. The conference is on April 16 & 17 in Delhi, India and is endorsed by India’s National Disaster Management Authority.
Here in Asia, a lot of BCP practitioners want to earn certifications in business continuity and the related fields of emergency management, I.T. disaster recovery, crisis management and security. I’ve made a table of certifications in those fields and links to the organizations that offer them. I’ve included only certifications from independent, non-profit organizations or their education arms. All of the certifications listed are internationally-recognized, although all of them originate from North America or Europe. I have not included any from private companies that give out certificates (as opposed to certifications) on completion of their programs, although there are many of them and they may be worth your time and money.
Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) has new BCM guidelines that became effective in January.Banks in Download the guidelines here (Adobe® Acrobat® PDF file, 42 pages). The document number is BNM/RH/GL 013-3, but I cannot find it on the BNM web site. There are 17 principles in 5 categories that banks must follow: BCM framework (4 principles) and methodology (10 principles), communication with internal and external constituencies, internal audit review of a bank’s plan and responsibility for outsourced functions. There is also a glossary of terms and several appendices.
If you made up this scenario for a tabletop exercise, you’d be laughed out of the room: At 08:00 on Wednesday morning January 30, two ships 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) apart in the Mediterranean drop their anchors in stormy weather off Alexandria, Egypt and Marseilles, France at the same time. They both manage to drop their anchors directly onto two (2) separate undersea cables buried fifty (50) centimeters in the sand, each roughly the diameter of your wrist. The two cables carry seventy-five (75%) percent of network traffic in the Middle East and south
An epidemic of avian influenza in West Bengal, India has the Indian “government in panic mode”, according to the Times of India web site. And with good reason: 15 million of West Bengal’s 80 million people are crammed into its capital city, Kolkata (Calcutta), a petri dish of poverty, pollution, political intransigence and hopeless public health. It is the city where Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity order. If the infection reaches Kolkata’s poultry markets, there is a much greater risk of animal-to-human transmission than there has been in Indonesia or Vietnam, where infections of H5N1 influenza have already crossed species from animals to humans.
The online and in-house securities trading systems of Phillip Securities in Singapore crashed on Tuesday, Jan. 15. The online system used by customers is Phillip’s On-line Electronic Mart System (POEMS), the “Web site most-visited by Singapore users in [market research company Hitwise’s] Business and Finance Stocks and Shares category”, according to the company. Phillip Securities was an “eBroker of the Year” in 2000. The in-house system used by the firm’s traders also failed, so customers had no recourse to execute transactions from their Phillip Securities accounts while the systems were down. Need help? In Singapore, call: +65 6324-3091 Fax: +65 6324-3093 Email: info@calamity.com.sg
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