It Ain’t Swine Flu
Boy the media likes being wrong. It’s H1N1 not swine, pork, pig or ham flu. The FUD frenzy caused Egyptians to kill off enough pork to infect all of Afghanistan’s poppy fields for a year. But never mind…
They think the swine… oops… H1N1 might come back in a few months or next season with a potential vengeance, mutated, resistant and the FUD also says that more than a billion people could be caught up in the pandemic.
If this was a computer virus/worm like the Conficker or other hostile code that we know about in advance, we’d start reverse engineering the code and tell folks to behave themselves more than ever.
But H1N1 presents another security issue. Let’s hypothesize that this is all real and that masses of people are going to get sick-sicker-sickest.
How do you, the corporate exec, security guy, or whatever plan for 15-30% of your staff being out with the flu? Some companies use temporal dispersion to avoid having all execs and mission critical folks sitting in one physical location every day.
But will the same rules apply with a pandemic?
I don’t begin to have an answer other than this: every company that has global presence with volumes of on-line people integral to their business continuity had better get a game plan started.
I’ve always called it Graceful Degradation. Technically this means, “how can I conduct business with certain key portions of my infrastructure broken.”
When it comes to H1N1, Graceful Degradation needs to apply to the human Domain of the Integrated Security Triad.
Think about. Or better yet… assign it to HR and make them come up with a plan!