NEWS
2025
7th February
It's been a while since I have updated anything on here (and too late to say Happy New Year!).
Keeping busy with lots of exercises in the planning phase, and next week there's one in London on Tuesday and one in Aberdeen on Thursday - breaking up the train journey in Edinburgh!
Still working with LSE and Middlesex Universities and a few projects on the go too so plenty on at the moment.
2024
19th July
Today has been an interesting day with the Crowdstrike incident resulting in a worldwide IT outage. It's resulted in thousands of flights cancelled around the globe (3% or so last time I checked), and key elements of our critical infrastructure such as banking, healthcare and payment systems also affected. It even knocked some TV channels off air. This is going to take some time to fix with it looking likely that a manual reboot of each affected computer running on Microsoft Windows will be required.
Just this week I did an exercise with a team based on a slightly different scenario but which resulted in their key services (including Microsoft ones) being unavailable - the team had to think about all sorts of impacts which would result from such an outage, and I am sure are better prepared for something similar if it happened.
There will be a huge post-mortem I'm sure around today and a huge effort from Crowdstrike to manage the reputational impact (which has also impacted their share price) and reassure customers who rely on their services to protect their technical infrastructure.
14th July
Still waiting for the Summer to arrive as I look out the window on another grey and overcast day. We've just completed seven years of Ashton Resilience and are grateful to all those that we have worked with during that time - can't believe it has been that long!
Don't forget that if you have any business continuity planning activities that you might want some assistance with please feel free to get in touch - chris.lintern@ashtonresilience.com is the email and my number is 07462 448672.
3rd January
Happy New Year!
Keeping busy into 2024 here at Ashton Resilience and since the last update I have started working again with the London School of Economics and Political Science looking after business continuity matters on a part-time basis. It's good to be back having last been here pre-Covid! Plenty of project work with other organisations on business continuity planning too which will be keeping us busy in the next few months.
2023
9th June
I realised that it has been a while since there have been any updates in the 'News' section of the website so thought I would provide an update. We're still keeping busy here at Ashton Resilience and much of our work is still focused in the areas of Higher and Further Education. Of the current projects on the go, six are in that sector, and we're working with one financial services organisation and one academic awarding body. We also continue to support Middlesex University with all aspects of their Business Continuity Framework including Incident Management and IT Disaster Recovery.
In addition to day-to-day work matters, I'm just coming to the end of mentoring a second student from the University of Salford on their mentor programme. Having graduated from there all that time ago in 1997 it is good to be able to hopefully give something back. And I've also become the permanent Chair of the Board of Trustees at Advocacy Focus which is a wonderful charity based in Lancashire which does so much to support those who need it. Having been a Trustee for almost three years now I know what an amazing bunch of people they are there so please check out their website (advocacyfocus.org.uk) or follow them on LinkedIn.
2022
9th September
Well what a tumultuous 24 hours with the tragic announcement of the Queen's passing. Contingency plans already known put in place although interesting to see how many of those 'new in post' with the Government changes will be familiar with the protocols over the following ten days or so.
Business Continuity / Incident Response plans or teams to consider the impact over the mourning period and for the actual date of the funeral kicking in all over the UK...
2021
3rd January
So here we are in another year. In many ways good riddance to 2020 for so many who have been affected personally or professionally or in a number of cases both. Let's hope that 2021 brings some sort of normality, some consistency of decision-making and the development of further barriers both medical and social to stop the continued threat of Covid-19.
Reflecting on 2020 from a business perspective, we know that Ashton Resilience has been extremely lucky to have been able to continue doing what we do and the whole concept of Resilience itself has never been as important as it is now. From both a personal and a business perspective Resilience is vital in so many ways. Happy New Year to you all.
17th September
We've had confirmation again of our annual review of compliance with the FSQS scheme which is good news. This means that we're in a great position to continue to provide services to financial organisations who subscribe to this scheme.
2020
8th April
So we find ourselves in unprecedented times with the issues and challenges brought to us by Covid-19. Business continuity is now thrust into the limelight and we're facing a huge battle globally to keep things going as best we can. Plans that may have dealt with loss of premises, loss of staff and loss of systems as individual scenarios are in many instances having to be revisited to take into account all of these happening simultaneously. As you can imagine we have been helping our customers with their arrangements and reaching out to many former customers to see if there's anything that we can do whilst following Government guidelines to stay at home. Please reach out if you think we might be able to help you - and in the meantime we're registered as part of the enormous army of NHS volunteers.
9th July
We recently celebrated our 3rd anniversary as a business - so there's a big thank you to everybody that we've worked with over that time. Here's to the next three years and hopefully beyond when Resilience is going to continue being of great importance as we move into what everyone hopes will be a post-Covid environment.
2nd October
Just got confirmation of our annual review of compliance with the FSQS scheme - so we are able to demonstrate that we are in a position to provide our services to financial services organisations for another year! As more and more financial organisations in the UK sign up to the Hellios scheme we can demonstrate we're able to help them with their business continuity needs.
2019
30th June
Seems like it's been a while since there has been an update on here but that's not because Ashton Resilience has been laying dormant...in fact today marks our second anniversary as a business!
Keeping busy including helping out Yorkshire Building Society in relation to both business continuity and the new financial regulations around operational resilience, along with other financial services companies and plenty of further and higher education institutions.
Here's to the third year (and all of the year end requirements for the accounts...)
20th October
We've just had our confirmation through that Ashton Resilience have achieved re-certification with FSQS, showing again that we have passed all of the criteria to provide financial services customers with business continuity support.
2018
3rd March
Chris Lintern will be speaking at the 2018 HEBCoN Conference later this March in York. HEBCoN is the Higher Education Business Continuity Network, which is comprised of a number of HEIs who are committed to sharing and promoting good practice in Business Continuity Management, risk management and emergency planning. If you're going to be there please come and say hello!
17th April
Seems like a while ago now but it was really good to attend the HEBCoN Conference last month. I spoke about conducting a Business Impact Analysis within a Higher Education environment - if you're interested then let me know and I will send you the slides. It was great to see lots of familiar faces along with plenty of new ones too! The conference was really well attended with plenty of really interesting speakers.
30th June
So we reached the end of our first year in business today and it has absolutely flown by! There's been plenty to learn but it has been a lot of fun too and we feel really fortunate to have worked with some fantastic people in wonderful organisations - so thank you. Now it's time to find all those receipts that haven't found themselves into the right monthly expenses folders to get ready for the accountants!! Here's to the next year...
31st July
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting a great group of people at NFU Mutual in Kent - or more specifically the Ashford, Tenterden and Whitfield Agency. We are jointly running a business continuity planning workshop on 27th September, which should be a great event and something I am really looking forward to. If you want to know more about this please get in touch.
26th August
With something of a busy summer drawing to an end, it's time to start planning in earnest for the business continuity planning workshop next month with NFU Mutual. The event is being held at the Chilston Park Hotel in Lenham, near Maidstone, so let us know if you are interested in attending.
25th September
Ashton Resilience has just received confirmation that we have passed the qualification criteria to achieve certification within the Financial Services Qualification System (FSQS). This is the second year running which we have done this. The accreditation mark shows that we have demonstrated our credentials and commitment to the financial industry.