By Christopher McCraley, PMP, CBCP
January 2, 2012
“Don’t consider your reputation and you can do anything you like” states a Chinese proverb, a most pertinent proverb to describe the multitude of issues facing all variety of businesses in the current business environment. The proverb points out both cause and effect of what’s happened to countless reputations throughout financial services. In essence, it describes reputation risk management: not considering the risk to one’s reputation risks the reputation of the business itself.
For financial service firms, any inattention to any type of …

By: Mickey McCarter
August 5, 2011
As emergency management chief for the state of Florida, Craig Fugate recalled getting private businesses involved in disaster planning early. He reached out to the state’s major retail association and engaged their input, placing their experts in the state’s emergency operations center and on its logistics team.
But when he arrived at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), legal advisers told him duplicating that model was a bad idea. Liability and privacy issues, among others, created barriers to tapping the …

By: Shehzad Merchant
August 4, 2011
Virtualization technology has truly transformed IT. However, despite its benefits, virtualization has also created strains on data center networks. Computational density and the number of virtual machines (VMs) per physical server are rapidly increasing. Traffic patterns within the Cloud are assuming an east-west characteristic, in addition to the traditional north-south, as VM-to-VM traffic increases. In response, high-traffic data centers need a robust, flexible, automated network to support virtualization, cloud computing, and a diverse end-point ecosystem. Additionally, storage and …

By: Mickey McCarter
May 10, 2011

Almost 200 years ago, an earthquake with a magnitude of more than 7.0 on the Richter scale hit the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which runs from Illinois through Missouri and into Arkansas, including part of Tennessee as well.
On Dec. 16, 1811, the first earthquake struck Memphis, Tenn., triggering a series of earthquakes that ended on Feb. 7, 1812. The earthquakes shifted landmasses, forming entirely new lakes and altering the topography of the area. The Mississippi River is said to …

By: Philip Leggiere
June 27, 2011
Texting, images and video can all be sent by handheld devices—perhaps the time has come to put them in the service of public safety.
When it comes to communication technology a lot has changed in America since 1968.
As a culture and economy we’ve moved from the rotary phone to the iPhone, from mainframes to laptops, from snail mail to e-mail, from telex machines to ubiquitous Internet connections.
Yet the 911 network, the nervous system of the nation’s emergency communications, has …