Mitigating Business Outage With Pandemic Planning

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported over 182,166 laboratory-confirmed cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza virus with 1,799 deaths. In June, 2009 the WHO raised the pandemic alert level to six, signaling a pandemic of this influenza is underway. If the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, is in full pandemic force during the fall and winter months of the flu season then an estimated 40-to-50 percent of the workforce could be affected. To assist business and IT leaders develop strategies to mitigate the impact of pandemics and other natural or man made disasters I asked Samantha Ma Security Solutions Manager at Cisco Systems to be my guest as she’s an expert in business continuity preparation.