Safety Program Template
Revision History
Effective management of worker safety and health protection is a decisive factor in reducing the extent and the severity of work-related injuries and illnesses. Effective management addresses all work-related hazards, including the potential hazards that could result from a change in worksite conditions or practices. Additionally, it addresses hazards whether or not they are regulated by government standards.
Version 2.3 - January 2010
- Added Work at Alternative Location Safety Checklist (i.e. Work at Home)
- Updated Inspection Checklist
Version 2.2 - April 2009
- Updated to be compliant with mandated Federal, California, New York, Texas, and Illinois regulations
- Updated to use standard CSS WORD style sheet
- Saved in WORD 2007 format
Safety Program News
Disaster Plan - Yes or No
In many businesses, disaster recovery plans (DRPs) are often
inadequate or outdated and in small to mid-sized businesses the situation is
even worse: only a relatively small percentage have any form of plan. Why do so
many businesses have such a lackadaisical approach to disaster recovery
planning? Probably because it is a long and complicated process that ties up key
personnel, can be costly to produce, and will change over time so it has a
limited shelf life. And why spend time producing a document that may well never
be needed? But any business that does not create a DRP is gambling that
disasters will not strike and gambling with the livelihood of its employees and
with the investments of shareholders and stakeholders.
Gartner, a leading research and
advisory company, 40% of businesses that encounter a disaster close their doors
within the following five years. For the 60% that do survive, the expenses that
result from a loss of continuity can be significant.
According to Janco Associates, an International Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity consultancy the most common form of enterprise wide disaster is related to power outages. Janco has found that in disaster recovery and business continuity cases it has reviewed the following is true:
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Over one third companies take more than a day to recover from a major power outage caused by events like hurricanes and extensive disasters.
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Over eleven percent of companies take more than a week to recover from these events.
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The typical time to reconfigure a network that has not been planned for can take up to 72 hours - if the resources are available.
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Data that is lost (not backup up electronically) can take weeks to re-enter if there is paper trail and if there is none the data can be lost forever.
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Over 85 percent of companies that experience a computer disaster and do not have a Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity Plan go out of business within 18 months.
Scope of Disaster Planning is expanding as world events escalate
Disaster Planning scope continues to expand. The volcanic ash air travel crisis caught many by surprise but in hindsight it was a predictable outcome of an event which was almost inevitable. What other such outliers are there? Continuity Central believes that using the huge experience of our global readership of business continuity managers many of these can be identified in advance.
If you add terroist attacks at infrastructure that can cause widespread environmental damage like the oil rig explosion in the gulf, the events to be considered are almost infinate.
A Yellowstone eruption, which would be a super volcand, would make the ash problems from the Icelandic volcano look like a minor event. It would impact the entire US except Calfinoria. According to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory the last supervolcanic eruption occurred 74,000 years ago at the Toba Caldera in Sumatra, Indonesia. Other known supervolcanoes around the world, include Long Valley in eastern California, Toba in Indonesia, and Taupo in New Zealand. In addition other potential supervolcanoes include large caldera volcanoes of Japan, Indonesia, and South America.
- more infoTouch screens are a security risk according to U of Penn
A University of Pennsylvania researcher presented a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing "Smudge Attacks on Smartphone Touch Screens."
Based on his results, "the practice of entering sensitive information via touchscreens needs careful analysis," said the researchers. "The Android password pattern, in particular, should be strengthened." But they cautioned that any touchscreen device, including ATMs, voting machines, and PIN entry devices in retail stores, could be susceptible to smudge attacks.
Touchscreens, of course, are an increasingly common feature of mobile computing devices. According to one market research firm, 363 million touchscreen mobile devices will be sold in 2010, an increase of 97% over last year's sales. But are passwords entered via touchscreens secure?
- more infoThe key elements of business continuity management defined
Writing and testing a disaster recovery plan is one of the key elements of business continuity management. Traditionally business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) planning have always been separated between the business and the information technology department. It has long been recognised that this divide creates more problems than it solves, after all most businesses could not continue to operate successfully if their IT services were unavailable for a period of time, depending on the nature of your business this may well range from a few hours to several days. The recent launch of BS25999 has established a business continuity management (BCM) standard which intrinsically links BCM, incident management, and IT DR. Essentially the key message is to have true business continuity you must also have strong IT DR capability.
A disaster recovery plan should interface with the overall business continuity management plan, be clear and concise, focus on the key activities required to recover the critical IT services, be tested reviewed and updated on a regular basis, have an owner, and enable the recovery objectives to be met.
- more infoExternal Drives are a security risk
The Department of the Navy's CIO Privacy Office was notified on
July 27 that a Naval headquarters office had been burglarized, and that the
thieves had stolen at least 10 laptops 
and nine external hard drives. In the initial reporty by the
Privacy Office said that one laptop contained a file with passwords and user
names; personal financial data including bank accounts, investment accounts, and
credit card information; a personal contact list with cell phone numbers,
addresses, and birth dates; "government only" contract information;
discrimination and hostile work environment correspondence; and other sensitive
information.
Upon investigation, the Navy found that the laptop contained "high risk" personally identifiable information on only eight people. And the external hard drives were either still in their boxes or encrypted when taken.
The incident emphasizes the importance of security policies and continued vigilance over insider threats, according to Navy department of the CIO privacy team lead who disclosed the breach in a blog post on the Navy CIO's Web site.
"External hard drives are becoming as vulnerable as thumb drives," Muck wrote. "A best practice should be to physically secure them at the end of each work day."
The Navy Privacy Offices advised employees to never store personally identifiable information or unencrypted user names and passwords on government computers. And he reminded of the importance of inventory control policies.
- more infoWhat Does Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Mean
The IT
industry continues to add emphasis and focus to Disaster Recovery and Business
Continuity Planning. While the concept has been around for many years, Disaster
Recovery has a different connotation today. As business technology and software
applications have advanced, Disaster Recovery has come to mean more than simply
the ability to get your systems back online after a power outage. Companies are
now expected to recover from unforeseen disasters, and retrieve contracts,
memos, invoices, signatures and all other critical documents with minimal
interruption.
There is little doubt of the importance of an effective backup plan if a natural or man-made disaster destroys your business records. Many companies, however, still have yet to implement a Disaster Recovery plan, believing that the chance of it happening to them is too slim.
The reality is that an organization may declare a disaster for a number of reasons, including:
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Extreme weather conditions
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Prolonged power or communications failure
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Robbery or other criminal activity
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Civil unrest
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Terrorist acts
End of life for XP will increase security risk
Three out of four companies will soon face more security risks because they continue to run the soon-to-be-retired Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), a report published today claimed.
According to Toronto, Canada-based technology provider, 77 percent of the organizations it surveyed are running Windows XP SP2 on 10 percent or more of their PCs. Nearly 46 percent of the 280,000 business computers they analyzed rely on the aged operating system.
- more infoRemote Branch Offices are a Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Risk
Distributed data at remote and branch offices (ROBOs) continues to grow substantially year after year. Leaving this data unprotected or inadequately protected poses, serious business risks for organizations. Protection approaches require careful consideration as factors such as technical complexity, capital and operational costs, and expertise of personnel must be taken into account.
Local disk-based data protection strategies improve backup efficiency and reliability over tape-based ones. Consolidation of edge data to the core data center may introduce further efficiencies. Data de-duplication can drive both backup-to-disk and consolidation adoption.
- more info