Business Continuity in a COVID-19 world – Ep 122 – Steve Lambert

The world finds itself in uncharted territory, gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic putting unprecedented pressure on public health and the global economy. For enterprises of all types, the challenges of trying to continue business as normal are going significant. How do we go about it? What is our business continuance strategy? What are some of the key things we should be considering and the challenges we need to overcome?

I’ve been wondering over the last few days how I could help, one idea is to try to share good practice and advice from those in the IT and business continuity industries on dealing with the current crisis and giving your enterprises the very best chance of successfully finding a path through these challenging times. What better way to do that than through the Tech Interviews podcast, so over the coming weeks I’ll be trying to put out useful content and advice to help deal with the many challenges that are presented to us currently, alongside the usual Tech Interviews show, I hope you enjoy this extra content and most importantly find it useful.

In this first Tech Interviews special, I speak with business continuity specialist and returning guest, Steve Lambert of Biscon, a UK based risk and business continuity consultancy to share with us their experience and tips on how delivering an effective plan for dealing with this current global crisis. Biscon have been offering advice and guidance to their wide range of customers since 2001 and have a broad experience of helping business to prepare for incidents of all kinds including pandemics. Steve was good enough to join me at short notice, in what is a very busy time, to share some of that experience.

We discuss.

• The main areas of consideration
• Why crisis communication is crucial
• The challenge of dealing with IT that has never been tested like this before
• Thinking about your staff – can they really work remotely?
• Keeping in contact
• Not all communication is technology!
• Be flexible
• Supplying and suppliers
• What things may catch you out?
• Keeping informed
• The advice is fluid, your continuity plan needs to be too.
• Prioritize what’s important today
• Make sure you learn your lessons

These are certainly unprecedented challenges we are dealing with and to a degree we are all learning as we go but having a plan is hugely valuable and Steve shared some great tips, experience and advice. To find out more about what Biscon do you can visit their website www.biscon.co.uk and for advice, you can email them at info@biscon.co.uk as well as find them on twitter @bisconplanning and they will be more than happy to chat and see how they can help.

If you have questions about the topics covered or other areas you’d like us to cover on the podcast, then of course, you can email me at podcast@techstringy.com and normally I don’t share my company details but in these unusual times, if you’d like a wider IT discussion or some advice on challenges you are seeing please feel free to email me at pauls@gardnersystems.co.uk

I’ll have some more special shows coming soon alongside the more usual content, but for the time been, stay healthy and thanks for listening.