Australian Business Continuity Management Standard AS/NZS 5050:2010 – A Risk Perspective

Global surveys of small to medium sized enterprises (SME) over the past few years candidly point to the fact the vast majority of SMEs are not prepared for a business disruption-related risk event.  Over 50% do not have a Business Continuity Management (BCM) plan in place and of those that do have a BMC plan only about ¼ have actually been tested. This is a major concern given that the median cost of downtime for an SME in Asia Pacific is $14,500 per day and whilst 65% of businesses believe it would take them between 1 week and 1 month to recover from a major disruption, a return to normal trading can often take 12 months or more. Simply put, without the preplanning involved in the BCM process, most organisations will not survive a major business disruption event.

Our colleagues at CompliSpace specialise in compliance in this and many other areas of continuity management. Read more here.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

What is it with these law firm software packages?

We have been providing support to many law firms in the past few years and the one common problem we need to address is their main application software – the thing that is supposed to be driving the firm.

There are numerous systems out there that offer the promise of matter management, precedent searches, document control and time billing – but they rarely work well technically – and therefore cause downtime, equating to frustration and general disasatisfaction with “the system”.

This then translates into frustration with our services – even though we offer the right advice as to what is needed to fix the problem. Things such as better resources, dedicated servers or upgraded workstations. We just want to be able to offer our customers a stable working platform – at a sustainable price.

Is the answer possibly in the clouds? Cloud computing is here now and being taken up at a rapid pace by large and small companies. The large companies are doing it because they recognise that they make significant savings on their infrastructure costs.

The small ones are doing it for the same reason – however a high infrastructure cost was a barrier to entry, rather than a headache to solve. Small firms now have access to enterprise grade systems and no longer have to “make do”.

Our job becomes simpler too. We simply supply you with a working network and a rock solid browser installation. That does not cost you much to have us do and maintainting it means much lower costs to you.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

TrialPad – Nice app, but is it relevant to Australian lawyers?

It would be good to get some feedback I suppose, so here’s a shout out to the law fraternity – is it?

TrialPad look like it would be very relevant to people that wanted to quickly and easily access and search trial documents and precendents. When you combine it with DropBox (brilliant file sharing), the resulting tool would be a must have I suppose? What do you think. Full article is here.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.