Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Big Data Changing BCM and the Cloud

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I attended a Business Continuity Management (BCM) conference yesterday. Their theme for this year is about how Big Data is changing BCM and Cloud. It’s a little puzzling eh, how Big Data can be related to BCM and Cloud. It seems like some random topics strewn together to have something of a unique theme to talk about.

The conference, unfortunately, failed to deliver a coherent message to tie Big Data, BCM and Cloud. We can all appreciate Big Data needing to exploit the Cloud, and how BCM could leverage on the Cloud. Then, how is Big Data related to BCM? Alright, maybe with a stretch of imagination, Big Data can be used to anticipate or forecast threats or events in order to better prepare for business continuity.

The conference presentations were interesting, and there were useful lessons to be learnt from the speakers. BCM is important, although often enough many companies don’t go through with actions to properly implement their Business Continuity Plans. One thing that was pointed out is that some companies think BCM is the job of “IT”. But no, really, BCM is a job for the C-levels.

Recent events in Singapore, the latest begin the fire at SingTel Exchange at Bukit Panjang, has started to raise many questions about our preparedness. IDA says our telecommunication infrastructure is resilient. I wonder.

A single fire had at a suburban exchange had caused some non-trivial disruption to commercial users, let alone quite prolonged outage for many residential users. Could our government be a little complacent? It’s one thing to have a policy at the high-level about infrastructure resiliency and another altogether whether that policy is carried down to the bottom layers.

I can only hope that our once-in-50-years flooding issues don’t spill over into our other infrastructural areas.

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