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Swine Flu: A Wake-up Call for Emergency Planners

Think Swine Flu is an overblown health threat with negligible security consequences? Think again

By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor

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On the IT security side, organizations need to be thinking about how to stay on top of things like log monitoring and patch management in the event of sickness among the IT security staff.

Kevin Coleman, a strategic management consultant at Technolytics, says companies should also plan for limitations on business travel and even bringing in extra cleaning crews and keeping employees at home if they complain of so much as a sniffle.

"Encourage anyone who feels the least bit sick to stay home," Coleman says. "If an employee can do all the work from home on company laptops and VPNs that they do in the office, there's no reason to have them come in. If you can limit exposure from the get-go, why wouldn't you?"

Meantime, Coleman said, companies should ramp up the cleaning crew activity that's already going on, mostly after office hours. Bringing in extra cleaning crews to wipe down heavily-touched surfaces like doors, walls, phones and keyboards is money well spent, he said.

"Employees can also do their part to limit the spread of flu by carrying around antibacterial hand wipes," he said, noting that some of his clients have already pulled back on the amount of business travel employees can do.

It's far from certain that we're in for a deadly 1918-style pandemic. Either way, security experts say going over the scenarios and building a game plan is time well spent.