Information Security Group

A. Contagious Illness

A contagious illness is a situation related with health and safety through a communicable disease that can spread rapidly from person to person through direct contact (touching a person who has the infection), indirect contact (touching a contaminated object), or droplet contact (inhaling droplets made when a person who has the infection coughs, sneezes, or talks). To put the same in context, below are a few examples.

Before the 20th century many deaths in England, and most likely a majority, were caused by infectious diseases. The focus here is on the biggest killers, plague, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, dysentery, childhood infections, pneumonia, and influenza.
Many other infectious diseases including puerperal fever, relapsing fever, malaria, syphilis, meningitis, tetanus and gangrene caused thousands of deaths. This review of preventive measures, public health interventions and changes in behavior that reduced the risk of severe infections puts the response to recent epidemic challenges in historical perspective.
Two new respiratory viruses have recently caused pandemics: an H1N1 influenza virus genetically related to pig viruses, and a bat-derived coronavirus causing COVID-19.
Variants of COVID-19 have been experienced since 2019 onwards. This has changed the model of operations with organizations adopting HYBRID as a popular one.

Work from home (Remote working) is the recovery strategy enabling business and services to continue, deliver minimum operating levels and meet service continuity requirements across global entities. As much as there are hazards and risks through this recovery strategy the process to maintain continuous resilience for business operations is a progressive action organization are monitoring, identifying and enabling disaster risk reduction.

A-1 Global business continuity practices followed across the organization for contagious illness are governed through continuity frameworks knitting Health & Safety, People care, Facilities upkeep and business continuity plans.

B. What is the impact of Contagious Illness?

Contagious illness results in the following impacts and hence results in a situation which demands continuity of business plans to consider this as a focused hazard.

Loss of People
Mass Absenteeism

People’s safety is 1st in any crisis event. In a Contagious Illness event the priority to safeguard human life as well as wellness is an additional aspect in consideration and hence People Safety, Wellness and Availability are 1st in priority.

In both these impacts from a business operations standpoint the minimum operating levels as well as the Recovery time objective (RTO) may not be accomplished as per contractual agreements.

Reduced resource impact assessment consideration is essential to set RTO for continuity during the transition of the contagious illness. Interaction with customers is important by business leaders.

C. What are the operating models post impacts with respect to Covid-19 Contagious Illness?

Continuity of business and operations have chosen a combination of working models and adopted the same. This is the transformation in the resilience journey across organizations to sustain contagious illness impacts.

The models available to adopt are provided in an exhibit below.

D. Business Continuity Plan documentation and testing flow?

The below pictorial representation provides an insight enabling us to understand the flow to document continuity plans and test.

E. ICT/DR Preparedness

The below flow indicates the documentation requirements to integrate the ICT/DR, service requirements from an IT Needs perspective. This knits the downward dependencies for ICT requirements prior, during and after disruptive events.

E. Project Roll Up Plan

Lighthouse is an in-house application which is utilized to document continuity plans. An exhibit providing a view of the plan contents is below.

F. Managing Business Resilience

The below slide show will present various aspects of consideration and opportunities for business units, functions to engage and sponsor initiatives beyond work from home and business recovery exercising as a step-up activity.

G. Continuity – Awareness & Score Cards

Various initiatives to embed awareness, exercising and score cards are exhibited below in the slide show.

H. What were the initiatives as Covid-19 transitioned?

The multiple initiatives across the organization taken are viewed in the slide show below as an example of actions for People Care, Asset Protection, Environment Safety and Continuity of Business.

I. Crisis Communication – The Constitution

Mass communication during contagious illness as well as other events is constitutionalized following conventional email as well as an in-house mechanized method to reach out. The exhibits rolled across give an insight of the capabilities embedded for crisis communication in the crisis management framework.

J. Crisis Communication – Opportunities

Crisis communication is a continual improvement vital aspect in crisis management and handling.

As much as conventional, people manager to associate, mechanized call tree through ENS (Employee Notification System) , mass communication through POSTMAN (In-house toolkit) are deployed, limitations and improvements are progressive.

A quick view enables us to identify opportunities and innovate viable, collaborative and effective crisis communication frameworks to rise higher and embed a culture of responsive resilience.