Happy St. Tornado Preparedness Day!

Seriously, to those of you celebrating St. Patrick's Day:

"Sláinte chuig na fir, agus go mairfidh na mná go deo!"

or, "health to the men, and may the women live forever"

(I do have a dog named Guinness and there is a picture of me somewhere on the internet by now under the likely title of "Guinness Fairy", so I was obliged to get that out there.) Well, on to the original purpose here. It is American Red Cross month and today is Tornado Preparedness Day here in Virginia. Disaster Preparedness season never ends or takes a holiday. Take a moment to go through the checklists to make certain your family or business is prepared or you have prepared your family. Look at the Red Cross site and the FEMA sites as well. Find the resources beyond tornadoes for disasters that may suit the geographic region for the dangers you face. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fires (home and brush/forest), theft, crazy third-world dictatorships, you get my drift.

Do not forget for your home and business to make certain you have properly identified your critical assets, updated all critical disaster response processes and policies for data backup and restore. Perform a business impact analysis, defined business continuity and contingencies. For getting a risk assessment initiated at a business enterprise level, the Carnegie Mellon CERT's OCTAVE approach to Risk Assessment may assist you quite a bit. There are courses offered as well (I get no kick-back!. I have taken the course and find it very-worthwhile, so I am suggesting it as an option).

Again, the Red Cross has some links and documents that can help pull all this together as well.

We could go on about this stuff for weeks; but I have given you some important resources at least. You can always shoot me a comment to further discussion. I may get motivated and add a checklist of my own, or two! Send ideas. And least I forget, I know the good folks over at SANS have papers and checklists on the subject of DR/BIA/COOP on their sites as well, so check them out (Again, I get no kick-back; but they do have classes, and I have taken many of them that are absolutely first-class - excuse the pun!).


Sláinte!