In late March, FEMA released the ‘Local Elected and Appointed Officials Guide’ for national engagement review and feedback. My first thought before even looking at the document is that there are already so many of these in existence. Not necessarily from FEMA (though they have released some, such as a NIMS guide for elected officials), but the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) has one (actually two), and most state emergency management offices have developed and published their own guides suitable for local emergency managers.

Each guide out there has pros and cons. The draft FEMA guide is very… FEMA. It has the same look and feel of every other FEMA publication out there, which is both good and bad. While it offers a lot of references, external links, and has placeholders for case studies, it’s in smaller print and still comes in at 62 pages including the cover. While it has good information, I feel this is way too long for most elected and appointed officials to spend time on – plus it’s still incomplete in many ways because these officials need to learn about their own state systems, standards, and laws.

The NEMA elected official’s guide is much shorter, at 6 pages cover to cover. While this is a good marketing piece championing emergency management, it doesn’t provide any resources or state-specific information. I do appreciate the marketing aspect of it, though, as in many cases what we often need most is for elected and appointed officials to know what emergency management is and does, along with who their emergency manager is (or encouraging them to hire one).

Tim Riecker is a founding member, partner and principal consultant with Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC, a private consulting firm serving government, businesses, and not for profit organizations in various aspects of emergency and disaster preparedness.

These days, protecting your organization from cybercrime is just as, and possibly even more important than securing your physical facility. Cybersecurity is always evolving and you need to keep up with best practices to help prevent data breaches that could compromise your company’s reputation.

With that said, it’s not possible to prevent every breach attempt. Regardless of your industry or the size of your organization, breaches can happen to every company (and probably will, at some point). Accepting that fact is the first step. Preparing for it is the second.

Having a solid crisis management plan for future cyber breaches can prevent a bad situation from turning into a nightmare. You can protect your assets and your trust with customers by responding appropriately if and when a breach occurs. Here are some tips for creating an effective breach response plan.

Obviously, it’s better to avoid data breaches whenever possible. But the ones that have already occurred can at least teach us something. It’s useful to study the aftermath of different data breaches within your own organization and in other companies to determine what works and what doesn’t.

If your organization hasn’t yet been the victim of a data breach, then you’re lucky! You can still learn from the most high-profile data breaches of the last few years, though, and learn what to do—and what not to do.

Erik Bernstein is President of Bernstein Crisis Management, a specialized firm dedicated to providing holistic strategies for managing crisis situations.