http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=693
Interview with George Hender
Head of Financial Services Exercise
February 11, 2008
By Linda McGlasson
Managing Editor
BankInfoSecurity.com
The word of the year so far is "pandemic."
Just last week, Information Security Media Group released the results of
its inaugural State of Information Security survey [1], which in part
found that, of all prospective disasters, U.S. financial institutions
are least prepared for a pandemic emergency.
And then just days later, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination
Council (FFIEC) issued an interagency statement on pandemic planning for
financial institutions.
In light of all the attention being paid to pandemic preparation, we
caught up with George Hender, chair of the Financial Services Sector
Coordinating Council (FSSCC), which last fall teamed up with the US
Department of the Treasury and the Financial Banking Information
Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC) to complete the largest-ever pandemic
exercise for the U.S. financial services industry. Following are
excerpts of our conversation with Hender, who was attending a recent
symposium on pandemic planning in Washington, D.C., where the results
and model of the FSSCC/FBIIC/Treasury [2] exercise was on display for
other interested governments to review.
Q: First, what was the focus of this pandemic symposium, and what was
presented?
Hender: At the symposium we released information to a dozen nations
around the globe, The symposium attendees include government and
industry representatives from Europe and Asia. Singapore plans to do
their own pandemic exercise later this year. The information they're
getting at the symposium will prove invaluable to them in structuring
the exercise, but also why it's important to do an exercise like we did
here in the United States. (See related story on Pandemic National
Exercise)
Q: What are some of the future considerations for the industry and
institutions coming out of this exercise?
Hender: One of the big questions coming out of this exercise was what do
we do next? We have a group called the pandemic forum, which FSSCC
formed, and had members from FSSCC and also from the public sector
including critical interdependency areas, such as health care,
telecommunications transportation systems,
A number of things came out of the national exercise that we feel need
further attention. We've taken several of these points back to the
Pandemic Forum to say these are some of the things that seemed to work
well, and these are the areas that need more work to improve. The forum
will be charged with that responsibility in finding solutions and will
move forward to find them. The areas that need more work include the
whole area of interdependencies, particularly in the area of
telecommuting. How will this work? It still needs further investigation
and more work.
[1] http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/survey.php
[2] http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles/pdf/Pandemic_Flu_AAR.pdf
[...]
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