About the Business Continuity Podcast

Business Continuity has a bad reputation for being complex and difficult. Actually, the best practitioners make it simple.

On The BCPcast, we speak to Business Continuity Managers from some of the largest organisations in the world. Amidst the stories about disasters and recoveries, they share their tips and recommendations for what really makes you resilient.

The Business Continuity Podcast is funded, promoted and made by Databarracks.

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud and Stitcher.

Ever wondered how suet pudding could bring one of the UK’s busiest trading floors to a grinding halt? Or why there used to be a caterpillar in the London Risk Register?

Databarracks' Business Continuity Podcast is a straightforward, jargon-free discussion with people who deal with disasters for a living.

Real life
continuity stories

Season 4

Episode 7

Crisis communications & cyber

Crisis Comms isn’t just for cyber and cyber is much bigger than comms. But in the Venn diagram of Business Continuity topics, there’s a lot of overlap on these two.

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Episode 6

Trust the process: planning & exercising

Where should we focus our efforts for the best return? We’re looking at the nuts and bolts of Business Continuity: plans, planning, testing and exercising.

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Episode 5

Working in Business Continuity

How to break into the industry, Business Continuity degrees, the best industries to work in and how to improve welfare for BC professionals.

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Episode 4

How to lead the crisis

In the second episode on Managing the crisis we’re talking about Crisis leadership. What makes a good leader, how to run the crisis and how to get better at it.

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Episode 3

Managing the crisis – who’s in charge?

Over the next two episodes, we’re looking at Managing the crisis. Who is the right person to lead your crisis response? The BC Manager or the CEO?

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Episode 2

Business Continuity or Resilience?

There’s been a shift in recent years away from “Business Continuity” to the more holistic “Resilience”. Is it just renaming and rebranding the same job or something more significant?

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Episode 1

Out of the Shadows

Cyber attacks, extreme weather, increased regulation, political uncertainty and COVID-19. 2020 is the year that Business Continuity came out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

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The BCPcast Live

The BCPcast Live

COVID-19 Response

COVID-19 is the biggest continuity incident of our time. So we gathered together some of our favourite Business Continuity Podcast guests to review and unpack the business response to Coronavirus.

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Season 3

Episode 6

How to have a successful Business Continuity career

How do you start? What skills do you need to develop? What can you do to make yourself stand out? And what makes the job worthwhile?

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Episode 5

Why good supply chain management is in short supply

It’s pretty frightening to think a separate business could bring about the end of your own. So does supply chain management get enough attention? If not, why? And how can we get better at it?

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Episode 4

How to protect your reputation

It takes years to build a reputation and seconds to ruin it. How can a company keep its reputation intact when things start to unravel, especially when the public is watching?

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Episode 3

What does good plan preparation and execution look like?

Without due diligence and testing and iterating, a plan that looks pretty on paper can have ugly consequences in the real world. What are the best examples of plan preparation and execution?

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Episode 2

How to tackle diversity in Business Continuity

How do we hire the best people, who may not fit the traditional types usually associated with Business Continuity?

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Episode 1

How to make people care about Business Continuity

How do you engage people in Business Continuity? A good or bad BC plan can make or break a company when things go wrong. How do you get people to think outside of their role and care about their employer’s resilience?

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Season 2

Episode 8

Tuba Gursoy

Inspired by the stories we heard from Katherine Corbishley earlier in the season, we spoke to hospitality veteran Tuba Gursoy to find out what we can learn from someone working at the coal-face, in an industry where dealing with incidents and difficult situations is an everyday occurrence.

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Episode 7

John Robinson

Another returning favourite, John Robinson is a Business Continuity consultant and the Managing Director of Inoni. In this episode we look at the importance of the information flows in a crisis to determine escalation and guide decision making.

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Episode 6

Katherine Corbishley

Katherine Corbishley is Business Continuity Supervisor at a large, global corporate law firm. We discuss her experience of dealing with power outages around the world and how prior experience in the hospitality industry has helped her as a continuity professional.

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Episode 5

Richard Bale

Richard Bale has had a storied career working for London Buses and major American banks in the city – as well as working for recovery providers on the supplier side. We talk about generator failures, terrorist incidents, hurricanes and what really constitutes a ‘crisis’.

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Episode 4

Mel Gosling

Mel Gosling of Merrycon was another of our interviewees from season one. We invited him back to share recovery stories from his time as an IT Manager and the lessons he’s learned from running crisis exercises as a consultant.

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Episode 3

Fiona Davidge

Fiona Davidge is the Enterprise Risk Manager at the Wellcome Trust and this episode is a little different. We’re examining disruption and crisis management from another angle – the relationship between risk and business continuity functions.

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Episode 2

Vicki Gavin

Vicki Gavin is Head of Business Continuity for The Economist and is a returning contributor from season one. In this episode we discuss some of the major incidents she has handled and how to deal with the natural, human fight-or-flight response called ‘panic’.

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Episode 1

Alastair Lee

For the first episode of the second season of The Business Continuity Podcast our guest is Alastair Lee. Alastair is one of the few people we spoke to who took an academic route to business continuity, and he’s had a varied career to date as a result, moving between continuity roles at Essex County Council, The Guardian and Virgin Media.

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Season 1

Episode 6

Box-tickers

In the final episode of series one, we take a closer look at one of the areas that often represents the more off-putting and complex aspects of continuity: compliance. We examine how good BC and DR practices are connected to regulatory compliance, and consider the merits of different approaches and attitudes towards certification.

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Episode 5

Total Meltdowns And The Emergency Planner's Paradox

Episode 5 of the BCPcast investigates what happens when carefully laid, and well-rehearsed plans collide with reality. This one is about big disasters, their effects, and the positives, if any, that can come out of them.

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Episode 4

Plans Are Useless, Planning Is Everything

In the fourth episode, we’re going to look at the point at which business continuity and disaster recovery stop existing as ideas and start to take shape as actions, as we examine the practical process of planning for the worst, and the testing that ensures those plans work.

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Episode 3

We're All Human, We're All Vulnerable

In the third episode of the BCPcast, we take a look at a comparatively new source of risk that has landed in the lap of many already-overworked continuity professionals: cyber.

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Episode 2

Terrorists And Supermodels

In the second episode of the BCPcast we turn the tables, and examine why BC and DR have a reputation for being difficult and expensive among so many organisations.

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Episode 1

An Aptitude For Disaster

In the first episode of the BCPcast, we meet the people who keep some of the largest organisations in the UK running throughout disruption, and ask: what makes someone good in a disaster? And why are certain people attracted to situations where everything goes wrong?

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