ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Clark describes himself as a business continuity consultant, author, trainer and visiting university lecturer. During his career, he has been presented with three professional fellowships – Fellow of the Institute of Business Continuity Management (FIBCM), Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and a Fellow of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (F.ISRM). Buckinghamshire New University awarded him a Master of Science degree in Business Continuity, Security and Emergency Management in 2012.

Robert joined IBM (Big Blue) as a trainee computer operator in 1973. Big Blue was one of those forward-thinking organisations that practised business continuity management (BCM) long before the expression had even been coined. But back then, in the 1970s, with the exception of periodic fire evacuation drills, BCM was simply referred to as disaster recovery, and was entirely focused on protecting the IT environment, along with the associated electronic data.

It was less than 12 months into his 15-year IBM career that Robert first became exposed to BCM. Both local and overseas disaster fall-back trials were regular features in the IBM calendar, and often involved testing its recovery capability by transferring UK operations to Germany or the Netherlands. During his time with the corporation, the closest the operation came to a real disaster fall-back was in 1974, during the UK miners’ strike, when power interruptions became common place.

Robert’s 15 years with IBM were followed by a variety of positions, including 11 years with Fujitsu Services (formerly ICL), working with clients on BCM-related assignments. In 2005 he was tasked with validating Fujitsu’s own BCM state of readiness across Europe. He is now a freelance business continuity consultant and spends much of his time working with clients in Malta and the Middle East.

In 2014 Robert became a part-time associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he has been delivering BCM to both undergraduate and postgraduate students alongside his consultancy commitments. It was in the same year that his first publication In Hindsight – A compendium of Business Continuity case studies was published and reached the Number One spot in the Amazon bestseller’s lists.

Since that early success, Robert has published a further three books, including the bestselling prequel to this book – Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat – Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations.

For more information about the author, please refer to his website: www.bcm-consultancy.com.