Global outage – and the importance of contingency planning
Two weeks ago today, much of the digital world ground to a halt as Microsoft services were blocked due to a malfunctioning update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Whilst millions of connections were lost, the irony wasn’t.
The outage, which experts believe could be one of the largest IT failures in history, was a stark reminder that whilst our digital, cloud-based world offers enormous benefits in terms of immediacy and flexibility, robust business continuity plans are fundamental.
Learning the lessons from this global incident will take months, if not years. But in health and social care, we’re ahead of the game.
Business continuity plans have been part of routine work of registered managers for a long time. The plans are made to prepare for and handle challenging situations that might not occur but could greatly affect your organisation and your capacity to provide care if they did.
Business Continuity Management is about “Identifying those parts of your organisation that you can’t afford to lose – such as information, stock, premises, staff – and planning how to maintain these, if an incident occurs.” (Gov.uk: How prepared are you? BCM Toolkit) Your plan should help to ensure you can continue to deliver care by outlining actions you’d take to avoid, reduce or manage any possible disruption.
Care providers are more and more familiar with effective business continuity plans to sustain safe delivery of care in times of disruption such as adverse weather, fuel issues or illnesses such as flu. However, to ensure quality care delivery continues, no matter what is happening ‘up in the cloud,’ data security business continuity plans are becoming more important than ever.
The Better Security Better Care programme offers free, expert advice and support on data protection and cyber security for adult social care providers in England and includes useful templates and policies, including a business continuity plan for data and cyber security.
It was fantastic to discover earlier this month that 75% of care providers have not only created, but now published their Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DPST), smashing the 70% target for the end of June. That’s more than 20,000 care organisations with a robust toolkit in place and is up from just 15% less than three years ago.
If you haven’t yet completed yours or are still tackling gaps such as adding all sites and branches for your organisation, our colleagues at the Digital Care Hub are on hand to help. Visit the Data Security and Protection Toolkit page to find out more.